Chilled water can put your brain on freeze

Chilled water can put your brain on freeze
AGENCE PRESSE FRANCE

FEB 26: Contestants in TV quiz shows should refrain from taking nervous sips of water if they want to win that dream holiday in Hawaii.

Drinking chilled water at the wrong time can impair mental performance, psychologist Peter Rogers at Britain's University of Bristol has found.

His team rated 60 volunteers according to how thirsty they felt, before giving them a task that involved pressing buttons in response to prompts on a computer screen.

The volunteers either drank nothing before the test or had a cupful (330 millilitres) of tap water chilled to 10 degrees Celsius.

Those who had been thirsty before the test and took a drink performed 10 per cent better than those who drank nothing.

But there was a startling performance drop of 15 per cent among those who had said they were not thirsty but drank the water anyway, the British weekly New Scientist reported

Rogers believes that the temperature of the drink plays a role. Other research suggests that this can change the flow of blood to the brain.

"We like our drinks hot or cold. The body has to divert resources to deal with the local cooling effect in the gut," he says.

The research is published in full in the specialist journal Appetite.