Summer daze
From the Herald:
“Our brains are sharper in summer than in winter, a study has found,”
The tests were done during various weeks over the course of a year. The subjects performed better during the summer”
It takes some effort to find which study, because neither the journal nor any of the researchers are named. It turns out to be this research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The press release says
Performance on both tasks remained constant, but the brain resources used to complete each task changed with the seasons.
If you look in more detail (behind a paywall, sadly), the researchers found the same performance on the tests but with higher brain activity in summer than in winter for one tasks, and higher activity in autumn than spring for the other. I’d tend to interpret that as our brains being in lower gear in summer — higher revs for the same actual speed — but the research paper didn’t come down one way or the other on this issue.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »