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Who wouldn’t like a daily siesta — especially when it is hot after that post lunch period! And I am sure we have all experienced that desire to sleep when it gets warmer — it pushes us to laze around.
Now we may think this is just about activity, but a group of researchers at Northwestern University in the US have peered deeper into the brain to try to find out what is happening.
To do this Alpert et al. looked into the brains of fruits flies. Yes, fruit flies. You may not know this but fruit fly brains are commonly used for brain research — their brains are simple — so easier to research, easy to breed, and none of those pesky ethical limitations.
Of note is also that fruit flies have developed all over the world and are attracted to the same temperatures as human beings. They actually seem to have developed to cohabitate with human beings. And this is not the only similarity: they also seem to get dozy under similar conditions when the temperature rises post lunch.
And what did these researchers find?
Well, they managed to identify a circuit in the brain that is a heat circuit and, interestingly this is separate to another cold circuit (so not just one temperature circuit).
