The familiar labels “night owl” and “early bird,” long used in sleep research, don’t fully capture the diversity of human internal clocks, a new study has found.

The McGill University-led study published in Nature Communications found the two sleep-wake patterns, called chronotypes, contain a total of five distinct biological subtypes, each associated with different patterns of behaviour and health.

Classified as: Le Zhou, Danilo Bzdok, sleep, Department of Biomedical Engineering
Published on: 2 Feb 2026
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