As per a new study, dehydration can affect the human brain shape and activity and even slackens task performance. A Georgia Institute of Technology study has suggested when dehydration strikes, part of the brain can swell, neural signalling can intensify, and doing monotonous tasks can get harder.
Mindy Millard-Stafford said, “We wanted to tease out whether exercise and heat stress alone have an impact on your cognitive function and study the effect of dehydration on top of that.”
According to the study, when participants exercised, sweated and drank water, fluid-filled spaces called ventricles in the centre of their brains contracted. But with exertion plus dehydration, the ventricles did the opposite; they expanded. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) revealed the differences. Oddly, the ventricle expansion in dehydrated test subjects may not have had much to do with their deeper slumps in task performance.
Mindy Millard-Stafford added, “The structural changes were remarkably consistent across individuals. But performance differences in the tasks could not be explained by changes in the size of those brain areas.”
First author Matt Wittbrodt said, “The areas in the brain required for doing the task appeared to activate more intensely than before, and also, areas lit up that were not necessarily involved in completing the task. We think the latter may be in response to the physiological state: the body signalling, ‘I’m dehydrated’.”
Matt Wittbrodt concluded by saying, “It helped us to avoid the cognitive complexity behind elaborate tasks and strip cognition down to simple motor output. It was designed to hit essential neural processing one would use to make straightforward, repetitive movements.”
