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.
On the flip side, rats that were exposed to bright light improved on their performance of the spatial task; and when rats that had been exposed to dim light were given doses of bright light for a month, they fully recovered the mental capacity that had been lost.
For the scientists behind the study, “dim light” means your average gray Midwestern winters’ day or normal indoor lighting. No wonder we tend to feel more mentally sluggish during the winter months.