“Dim lights are producing dimwits,” remarks one researcher studying the connection between light and mental acuity.
Working in an office with a lot of natural light doesn’t just make you more productive on the job and help you sleep better at night–it may also be vital to your intelligence. A new study from Michigan State University has found that spending too much time in dim areas, like poorly lit offices, could actually change the structure of rats’ brains, impacting the way they remember information and learn new things. It suggests that the quality of light in our physical environments may deeply affect us.
MSU neuroscientists studied the brains of Nile grass rats, which are comparable to humans in that they are awake during the day and asleep at night, and discovered that after exposing them to dim light over a period of four weeks, the rats lost 30% of the capacity of their hippocampuses (the region of the brain responsible for learning and memory). The dim light also impacted the rats’ performance on a spatial task....MORE
