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A study has revealed that the color of light has an impact on the body’s internal clock in animals. This has an impact on the psychology of the animal and helps them adjusting their behavior accordingly.
The study has been performed at the University of Manchester.
It is a well known fact that the intensity of light, also known as radiance changes at sunrise and sunset.
The color of the light varies at twilight, where it is bluer than it is during the daylight hours.
This color and intensity of the light adjust the internal clock of the body thereby indicating brain about the time of the day and night.
For the study the researchers have put the mice in visual stimuli and they have recorded the electric activity of the brain of the brain which serves as a clock.
They found that neurons in that area were more sensitive to color changes. They noticed that they are more sensitive to color changes between yellow and blue, compared to the intensity of the light.
The researchers then repeated the experiment in the environment where there is change in intensity of light but not the color. They noticed that mice which will generally be active after dusk is more active before dusk, thus they found that the body clock didn’t match to the cycle of the day and night.
Timothy Brown from the Faculty of Life Sciences, who led the study said, “This is the first time that we’ve been able to test the theory that color affects our body clock in any mammal. It has always been very hard to separate the change in color to the change in brightness but using new experimental tools and a psychophysics approach we were successful.”
He added, “What’s exciting about our research is that the same findings can be applied to humans. So, in theory, color could be used to manipulate our clock, which could be useful for shift workers or travelers wanting to minimize jet lag.”
