A study says I am intelligent since only smart guys stay up late every night like I do, but my wife does not think so. Sometimes she scares me silly, making me jump right out of my skin during those times she creeps up on me as I am watching a late-night movie or stalking someone on Facebook, before quietly telling me to go to bed.

Sleeping late has become a matter of habit, a bad one that I cannot seem to break.

However, experts have now vindicated my tardiness saying that only the boring lot sleep early. But it seems I am not the only brainy guy in Dubai, with a sizeable section of the population in the Gulf states rated as intelligent. When I worked in Al Khobar (in Eastern Saudi Arabia), the only people who slept early were westerners.

Hours would tick by and children could be seen playing on the swings as the Asian and Arab parents would have dinner around midnight. You could never be fashionably late to an eastern party as the food would never get to the table till everyone’s sugar levels were high enough after quaffing sweetened soda drinks in preparation of a long night.

The next morning the kids would be half-asleep and looking like the cat dragged them out of bed as they wait for the school bus.

The study says the reason why late sleepers are intelligent is because these people do not go with the flow.

Most of us are attuned to going to bed when the sun goes down and getting up when it rises, says one psychologist and that pattern has been adopted over the ages. The more intelligent ones, the more inquisitive, defied that pattern, he says.

Mum on effects of a lack of sleep

While you may be intelligent, the study does not say anything about how lack of sleep can stress you out, how it raises your blood pressure and makes you sleep in your car in the parking lot with the air-conditioner turned on after your long commute to Dubai from Sharjah.

Another study shows that all-nighters might do lousily in their studies as compared to the early risers, but the former do well later in their lives even though they have heavy bags under their eyes.

It notes that those who burn the midnight oil are in the good company of similar intelligent people such as US President Barak Obama, Sir Winston Churchill (Britain’s wartime prime minister) and Marcel Proust (the French guy who wrote, In Search of Lost Time).

Besides looking a wreck because you cannot sleep at night, the other signs of intelligence, according to the study, are terrible handwriting and a desk that’s a mess. I may be dumb because I cannot write like a doctor.

“So, what did the doctor prescribe”? asked my wife over the phone after I spent hours at the clinic, looking at a TV screen that had a doctor explaining what to do if you get a heart attack. (The only thing I could remember of that was to immediately call 999 or was it 911 in Dubai. Whatever, and never to drive myself to hospital, clutching my heart).

“I don’t know what it says,” I told my wife, looking at the scribble on the prescription sheet. (Writing by hand with a pen or a pencil will soon be a thing of the past, so the psychologists will have to find something else that can denote a person’s intelligence).

“Don’t let the maid touch my desk. This mess as you call it has a pattern that only intelligent people can understand,” I told my wife after reading the study.

I also have deleted all those apps from my smartphone that supposedly help me sleep and wake up early.

Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ mahmood_saberi.