Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences

To everything there is a season – and your brain is no exception.

It’s well known that some people report that their mood is influenced by the seasons. But can the time of year affect other cognitive functions?

To find out, Gilles Vandewalle and colleagues at the University of Liege in Belgium scanned the brains of 28 volunteers while they performed attention and working memory tests at different times of the year. To ensure the results were influenced by the seasons rather than the environmental conditions on the test day, the participants were confined to a lab for 4.5 days prior to the test, exposed to a constant light level and temperature.

Although their test scores didn’t change with the seasons, activity in some brain areas showed a consistent seasonal pattern among the volunteers: brain activity peaked in the summer on the attention task and in the autumn on the memory task.

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