(ANI News) — WASHINGTON: Did you know dim light could make you dumber?
According to a new study, spending too much time in dimly lit rooms and offices may actually change the brain’s structure and hurt one’s ability to remember and learn.
The Michigan State University researchers studied the brains of Nile grass rats (which, like humans, are diurnal and sleep at night) after exposing them to dim and bright light for four weeks.
The rodents exposed to dim light lost about 30 percent of capacity in the hippocampus, a critical brain region for learning and memory, and performed poorly on a spatial task they had trained on previously.
The rats exposed to bright light, on the other hand, showed significant improvement on the spatial task. Further, when the rodents that had been exposed to dim light were then exposed to bright light for four weeks (after a month-long break), their brain capacity — and performance on the task — recovered fully. (…)