Thinking ability may suffer on hot days

London: Heat waves can sap productivity by slowing down thinking, even in the young and healthy, a small study suggests. Harvard researchers found that during a summer heat wave, students living in dorms without air conditioning consistently scored lower on daily cognitive tests over the course of nearly a week than students in buildings with AC. “For the first time, we've been able to find a detrimental effect of heat waves in young healthy adults,” said lead author Jose Guillermo Cedeno Laurent, a research fellow and associate director of the Healthy Buildings Program at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. “Among that group ( who had no AC) there were longer reaction times and lower accuracy compared to an identical group of students who lived with air conditioning,” he told Reuters Health in an email. The researchers followed 44 undergraduate and graduate students in their late teens and early 20s for 12 consecutive days during July of 2016. Twenty- four of the students resided in buildings constructed in the 1990s that were equipped with central air conditioning, while 20 lived in NeoGeorgian- style low- rise brick buildings built between 1930 and 1950 with no cooling system. The researchers designed their experiment so that the 12 days included a five- day heat wave. Temperatures inside the building without air conditioning averaged 26.3 degrees Celsius ( 79.3 degrees F) and ranged as high as 30.4 degrees C ( 86.7 F).