Sun, sea and shrinking brain power

Add a restorative drink while airborne and, depending on the beverage, you could drop another 10 to 20 IQ points, according to Alcohol Concern.

And you haven?t even checked into your hotel yet. It is at this point that phrenic Armageddon really kicks in. Research by Professor Siegfried Lehrl of the University of Erlangen in Germany, a specialist in mental performance, suggests that sunbathing and relaxation cause one?s frontal lobes literally to shrivel. Barbados or Benidorm, it doesn?t matter.

Prof Lehrl says that inactivity reduces oxygen to the brain, which causes the dendrites and axons (parts of the nerve cells involved in sending electrical impulses) to degrade. Add dehydration caused by excess heat, alcohol, or both, and brain cell volume may decrease by up to 15 per cent.

?Fourteen days of complete rest can be enough to bring your IQ down by 20 points ? more than the difference between a bright and an average student,? says Prof Lehrl. ?Vocabulary shrinks, and we even detect personality changes.?

For men, this loss of intelligence may well be exacerbated by the vision of the opposite sex in bikinis. A 2008 study for The Journal of Consumer Research concluded that merely looking at women in beach garb ?instigates generalised impatience in intertemporal choice?.

In layman?s terms, men?s judgment and self-critical faculties are compromised, and, in worst-case scenarios, they will propose to (or proposition) the first girl who winks at them.

At this point, you might be tempted to down a cold beer at the poolside bar. Don?t! Researchers at Bristol University discovered that drinking anything overly cold reduces brain power by as much as 10 IQ points, as energy and blood are diverted from the brain to the stomach, to balance the drop in temperature.

So how can you negate the nightmare effects of your dream vacation? According to Prof Lehrl, you should exercise your brain on holiday for at least 10 minutes a day by playing an intellectually stimulating game (chess or Scrabble, for instance), mitigate inactivity with regular long walks, rehydrate constantly ? and chew lots of gum. Gum? ?The part of the brainstem that keeps us alert is constantly stimulated by chewing, as a result of which the attention level rises, as does the flow of blood to the brain.?

If you lack the willpower to follow the professor?s advice, the good news is that, unless you did propose to the first girl who winked at you (and she accepted), the consequences of a vacation are temporary. Four days later, your IQ usually returns to normal.

So next time you see raucous holidaymakers necking beers and mooning passers-by, try not to be too judgmental: they are probably email-overloaded nuclear safety engineers who have neglected to chew gum. Hopefully, they will leave a sensible interval between returning to work and installing their reactor?s control rods.

Source: http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568409/s/176171b3/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Chealth0Chealthnews0C86982440CSun0Esea0Eand0Eshrinking0Ebrain0Epower0Bhtml/story01.htm

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