I’ve been suffering from some mild jet lag. Yesterday morning I could feel every tired muscle in my body calling out for sleep and last night I woke up refreshed and ready for my day to begin at around 4AM.
In addition to making you groggy and dazed, jet lag may make you stupid. A study presented November 15 at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting finds that hamsters suffering extreme, chronic jet lag had about half the normal rate of new neuron birth in a part of the brain. What’s more, these animals showed deficits in learning and memory.
Jet lag decreases the numbers of new neurons being born in the hippocampus by about 50 percent, the team found. Mental function suffered, too: The jet-lagged hamsters were worse at learning which of two chambers contained a desirable running wheel. Even after 28 days of a back-to-normal schedule, the formerly jet-lagged hamsters still showed learning and memory problems. The mismatch between the internal body clock and the external environment “is having a long-term effect on learning and memory,” Gibson said.
Granted I don’t fly often enough to have this apply to me and luckily I’m not a hamster. But, you know, it’s topical.
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