In July 2016, a heat wave hit Boston, with daytime temperatures averaging 92 degrees for five days in a row. Some local university students who were staying in town for the summer got lucky and were living in dorms with central air conditioning. Other students, not so much — they were stuck in older dorms without AC.
Jose Guillermo Cedeño Laurent, a Harvard University researcher at the time, decided to take advantage of this natural experiment to see how heat, and especially heat at night, affected the young adults’ cognitive performance. He had 44 students perform math and self-control tests five days before the temperature rose, every day during the heat wave, and two days after. “Many of us think that we are immune to heat,” said Cedeño, now an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health and justice at Rutgers University.
“So something that I wanted to test was whether that was really true.” It turns out even young, healthy college students are affected by high temperatures. During the hottest days, the students in the unair-conditioned dorms, where nighttime temperatures averaged 79 degrees, performed significantly worse on the tests they took every morning than the students with AC, whose rooms stayed a pleasant 71 degrees.
A heat wave is once again blanketing the Northeast, South and Midwest. High temperatures can have an alarming effect on our bodies, raising the risk for heart attacks, heat stroke and death, particularly among older ad.