Feeling like a dim bulb? You might want to swap out the dim bulbs in your bedroom.
A new study shows that rats who were exposed to brighter room lighting performed much better on various cognitive tasks than did their dim-roomed counterparts.
What's more, the rats who didn't have the benefit of good lighting lost an average of 30% of the capacity of their hippocampuses, a portion of the brain dealing with learning and memory, according to the neuroscientists at Michigan State University.
"When we exposed the rats to dim light, mimicking the cloudy days of Midwestern winters or typical indoor lighting, the animals showed impairments in spatial learning," explains Antonio "Tony" Nunez, a co-investigator on the study.
"This is similar to when people can't find their way back to their cars in a busy parking lot after spending a few hours in a shopping mall or movie theater."