As a recently graduated college student, I’ve thought a lot about my sleep schedule over the summer. For most of the year, I was student teaching in public schools around the Austin area. Naturally, as teachers do, I got used to getting up around 6 a.m. and going to bed around 10 p.m. on most days of the week. Since graduating however, I’ve slipped back to a solid wake up at 9-10 a.m. range while falling asleep at midnight, and it’s been great. It’s interesting to think about when our bodies naturally want to be awake and working, and when we’ve had enough. Here, we have a rather attractive infographic showing when some of our world’s greatest minds slept.
Now I am a fan of the ‘nap,’ and it seems that Balzac and Darwin were as well. When looking at the infographic to see when exactly they slept however, Balzac’s a bit strange! Balzac slept from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. with a cat nap from 8:30-9:30 a.m., while Darwin had a somewhat tamer 12 -7 a.m. with an hour nap at 3 p.m. Regardless of when you get your sleep, it’s also pretty interesting to see how long these people slept. Mozart seems to have gotten around five hours of sleep, while Beethoven got a solid eight hours every day.
This begs the question though, how important is sleep in relation to creative output? Even though these particular people are all of different art forms, it would be fascinating to see that correlation. Geniuses have to sleep too! Find out how some of histories most famous smart people napped and slept.