Summer swelters cause mental slowdowns.
Students living in buildings without air-conditioning in the midst of a brutal Boston heatwave were 13 percent slower on mental tests their air-conditioned peers, a group of researchers at Harvard’s T.C. Chan School of Public Health have found.
The small study published this week tracked 44 students – 20 who baked in brick buildings and 24 with air conditioning — over the course of two weeks during July 2016 as high temperatures routinely pushed into the 90s, regularly administering them memory and math tests.
It found that students who lived without air conditioning answered questions 13 percent more slowly than those were able to escape the heat.
“Most of the research on the health effects of heat has been done in vulnerable populations, such as the elderly, creating the perception that the general population is not at risk from heat waves,” said Jose Guillermo Cedeño-Laurent, research fellow at Harvard Chan School and lead author of the study.
“To address this blind spot, we studied healthy students living in dorms as a natural intervention during a heat wave in Boston.”