Midnight snacks impair memory
New research on mice shows that eating at a time that you should be sleeping may impair learning and memory. Disrupting the body’s schedule affects the hippocampus, a brain region responsible for short and long term memory.
The study was done by researchers from Semel Institute in the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and published in the journal eLife.
“We have provided the first evidence that taking regular meals at the wrong time of day has far-reaching effects for learning and memory,” says first author Dawn Loh from the UCLA Laboratory of Circadian and Sleep Medicine.
“Since many people find themselves working or playing during times when they’d normally be asleep, it is important to know that this could dull some of the functions of the brain.”
In the study, mice that regularly ate during sleeping times were less likely to recognize a novel object. The disruption affected both short and long term memory.
“Modern schedules can lead us to eat around the clock so it is important to understand how the timing of food can impact cogitation” says Professor Christopher Colwell from the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA.
“For the first time, we have shown that simply adjusting the time when food is made available alters the molecular clock in the hippocampus and can alter the cognitive performance of mice.”
Eating at the wrong time also disrupted sleep patterns. The inappropriate feeding schedule resulted in the loss of the normal day/night difference in the amount of sleep although the total time spent asleep over 24 hours was not changed. Sleep became fragmented, with the mice catching up on sleep by grabbing more short naps throughout the day and night.
Category: Features, Health alert
