Weather Affects Our Memory And Brain Ability

By Margarita Nahapetyan

According to psychologists from Australia, bad and gloomy weather is good for our brain and memory, whereas sunny and bright days are good just for our soul. An international team has carried out their research and discovered that while dark and rainy days make people feel gloomy, they also sharpen our memory and improve recall power. However, those who feel good under the sun, are able to remember less well.

The study was led by Australian psychologist and Scientia professor Joseph "Joe" P. Forgas, from the School of Psychology at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. For their study, Forgas and his colleagues conducted few experiments involving shoppers at on of the stores in Sydney. The scientists randomly put 10 small ornamental objects on the check-out counter, which included plastic animal toys, a toy cannon, a pink piggy bank and four small matchbox-sized vehicles, as well as a red London bus and a tractor. On days when it rained, sad music was played in the store, such as requiems or slow pieces by Chopin. And, when the day was full of sunshine, customers heard cheery, uplifting music such as Bizet's Carmen and Gilbert and Sullivan tunes. The music was intended to enhance a more negative mood (on rainy days) and a more positive mood (on a sunny day) to the customers.

The experts were questioning shoppers the moment they were exiting a store, for a total of 14 days, over a period of two months. Each time the tests have been carried out from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. local time. The team conducted memory tests on the consumers and marked the results according to the state of the weather on that day. After the shoppers were done with their business in the store, they have been asked how many of the ten objects they remembered seeing on the counter. The same clerk was used in order to control for extraneous, random factors, such as personality, behavior of the clerk, number of consumers, and so on.

Psychologists discovered that the majority of individuals who visited the store on a rainy day, performed much better on the test, compared to customers who went shopping when the weather was good. The results were pretty conclusive, showing that many shoppers were able to recall three times more objects when the weather was unpleasant and dark than did people who shopped when the weather was sunny and bright. This was put down to the negative mood linked to gloomy weather.

The experts said that when people feel happy they tend to have a thinking style that is less focused and concentrated on the surroundings. In a positive mood individuals are more likely to make more snap judgments about people around them. They are more willing to forget and yet they are paradoxically far more likely to be overconfident that their recall is correct. Mild negative mood, in its turn, is more likely to increase attention to the surroundings and produce a more careful, thorough way of thinking.

According to the scientists, the accuracy of people's memories, along with the quality of their decision-making abilities, is affected by their moods, which is affected by the weather. Professor Forgas cocluded: "More and more evidence from experiments like this is showing that mild, fleeting moods can have a profound yet subconscious influence on how people think and deal with information."

The results of the new findings have been published this week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.