Is Jet Lag Making Me Stupid?By: Michael Franco
Editor: Sandra C. Fowler  When you think about it, time travel really does exist. Board a flight at 12:15 p.m. in Singapore and, after flying 18 hours and 40 minutes, you'll arrive at Newark airport at 5:55 p.m. the same day. Reverse the trip, and the same flight takes two days of "clock time." All this brutish bashing through time zones has its price -- jet lag -- a process by which our finely tuned internal timekeeping systems, known as circadian rhythms, go completely out of whack. For the occasional traveler, jet lag is relatively benign, causing daytime fatigue, muscle aches and insomnia. We can also experience gastrointestinal difficulties because our digestive systems gear up to process food according to our normal schedules -- not at the strange times we eat while traveling. An article by Laura Sanders in ScienceNews gives details about recent research from the University of California, Berkeley, that tells how jet lag can lead to more serious conditions like an increase in diabetes and cancer, as well as reduced fertility, in people who regularly leap time zones (such as flight attendants). This research indicates there's another symptom to add to the list: Jet lag can make us dumb. In the study, university psychologists altered the sleep cycles of hamsters for a month, in effect giving them the jet lag equivalent of having travelled from New York to Paris every three days. After one month of this rough schedule, the rodents showed impaired memory function and learning ability, and they weren't able to choose between two compartments containing something most hamsters would jump at: a running wheel. Perhaps the most concerning part of the study is that researchers proved that this impaired function stemmed from an actual physical change. The jet-lagged hamsters had only about half the normal number of ever-growing neurons developing in the hippocampus region of their brains. This area is closely tied to memory. |
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