美国国家公共电台 NPR Heat Making You Lethargic? Research Shows It Can Slow Your Brain, Too

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

For now, we’re going to turn to a story about a heat wave that is affecting much of the country this summer. NPR’s Allison Aubrey reports that all of this warmth can slow us down in ways we might not even realize.

ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE¹: Angela Montes (ph) is in her mid-30s and very fit. Right now, she's training for Ragnar, a long-distance relay² race. So when she went on a training run one afternoon last week in Oakland, Calif., where she lives, she never guessed that the unusually hot day would give her any trouble.

ANGELA MONTES: Two and a half miles in, I just started feeling really dizzy and nauseous. More than anything, I was just really, really nauseous, and then I just started vomiting³.

AUBREY: After a few hours of rest in a cool place, she felt OK. But she says she was taken aback by the experience.

MONTES: When I imagine a heatstroke or heat-related illness, I actually imagine workers that are out working on the roads or farmers that are outside for hours a day.

AUBREY: Outdoor workers are at risk, but they can be more acclimated⁴ to the heat and may take precautions, such as staying hydrated. Jack⁵ Der-Sarkissian is a family doctor with Kaiser Permanente in Los Angeles. He's seen a lot of cases of heat-related illness similar to Angela Montes, people who work and live in air-conditioned spaces and are caught off guard when they exercise during a heat wave.

JACK DER-SARKISSIAN: Under normal conditions, they would feel fine, but under the heat, humidity⁶, felt really ill. So that kind of came unexpectedly, and they think something else is going on.

AUBREY: It's not just our bodies that can feel lethargic⁷ during a heat wave. A new study from the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard finds high temperatures can muddle⁸ our thinking, too. Here's Joseph Allen, the co-director of the center. He says research on heat-related health effects tend to focus on the elderly, but this study is different.

JOSEPH ALLEN: Here, what we were interested in doing was trying to look at, what's the impact on a young, healthy, resilient population?

AUBREY: They studied students living in college dorms during a summer heat wave in Boston. Half of them lived in buildings that had central AC. The other half lived in dorms that did not.

ALLEN: So during the entire study, in the morning when they woke up, we pushed cognitive⁹ function tests out to their cellphones, and we have them take these standardized¹⁰ cognitive performance tests.

AUBREY: One was basic arithmetic. Another is designed to measure attention and cognitive speed.

ALLEN: And we found that the students who were in the non-air-conditioned buildings actually had slower reaction times - 13 percent longer reaction times, 13 percent lower performance on basic arithmetic tests and nearly 10 percent reduction in the number of correct responses per minute.

AUBREY: Now, the temperature difference was not huge - about 80 degrees in the un-air-conditioned dorms compared to 71 degrees in the modern dorms. But the surprise is that this difference in temperature can have a significant effect. Allen says people don't sense that their thinking has slowed down. It's subtle¹¹.

ALLEN: I think it's a little bit akin¹² to the frog in boiling water - this slow, steady, largely imperceptible rise in temperature, and you don't realize it's having an impact on you.

AUBREY: There's a growing body of evidence that documents the impact of heat on performance both in schools and workplaces. For instance, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that when office temperatures rise above the mid-70s, workers' performance begins to drop off a bit. And Allen and his colleagues have documented similar results.

ALLEN: When indoor temperature conditions are not in typically comfortable range, we perform 5 percent worse on cognitive function tests. So that's an impact you see just in a regular office building without even extreme temperature ranges.

AUBREY: Now, slowing down a bit is part of the fun of summer, so on weekends and vacations when we want to relax, we benefit from that, but at school and work, maybe not so much. So as our climate changes, Allen says, we need to be more aware of all the ways heat can influence our health and well-being¹³. Allison Aubrey, NPR News.