Heat Makes Us Stupid. No, Really.

June is already off to a toasty start for much of the south-central United States following an abnormally warm May for much of the country. AccuWeather forecasters say Mother Nature is set to dial up the thermostat and send parts of the U.S. to sweltering levels through early week.

Extreme heat is a drag, isn't it? You get hot, sweaty, and sticky, and it's just generally uncomfortable. When I get hot, my laziness kicks him. I get cranky and I really don't want to do anything. And it's not just me. Extreme temperatures have been linked to reductions in worker productivity.  But maybe that drop in work ethic has less to do with wanting to take a siesta in the sun, and more to do with the fact that heat makes us temporarily dumber. Harvard University researchers found that a person's brain works 13 times slower when it has to operate in uncomfortable heat.

While this obviously affects potentially everybody, there are three groups who are particularly at risk. The first is school kids from disadvantaged backgrounds (who often attend schools without air conditioning), for whom other studies have shown that for every degree of temperature increase, there is a 1% drop in educational attainment. Then there are office workers, for whom cognition is generally important. And finally, people who operate machinery - from road and construction workers to factory employees - who are among the last people you want going foggy in the head as the temperatures rise.

As Adrian F. Ward explains in Scientific American, the main reason why summer makes us so stupid is because our brains need more energy for cooling the body down in the heat than to warm it up in the cold. Thus, the brain's main energy source, glucose, becomes more depleted in summer. "We use glucose as we walk, talk, breathe, and perform other physical functions in our daily lives," notes Ward, who is an assistant professor in the market department at the University of Texas and has a background in psychology. Thus, the brain's main energy source, glucose, becomes more depleted in summer. "We also use glucose when we perform effortful mental functions, such as making decisions, exerting self-control, suppressing emotional responses, and even answering math problems."

But glucose is something of a limited resource, which means our brains are simply less capable of complex decision-making when it gets hotter out. In another study, scientists compared the sales of lottery tickets in St. Louis County - mainly ones that required gamblers to choose between multiple options and simpler tickets with fewer options. When it came to the more complex tickets, sales fell by $594 anytime the temperature went up by one degree Fahrenheit, indicating that the hotter we get, the less we want to think. The same researchers continued the experiment by asking a separate set of participants to proofread an article, with half of them in a room that was considered cool (67 degrees Fahrenheit), and the other half in a much more balmy 77 degrees. Consistent with past results, the hotter individuals made significantly more mistakes. Finally, an additional group was asked to decide between cell phone plans in warm and cold rooms, and again, the warmer people were, the shittier the plan they picked, leading the study authors to conclude that "warm temperatures hamper performance on complex tasks."

But Mel says not to worry about it so much. "In fairness, the time we can spend drinking cold beers on a hot beach is also limited," writes Lauren Vinopal. "So let's all just dumb things down together and enjoy our bimbo brains while we can."