Water thinking

Water has cosmic dimensions to it. The planet Earth is made of approximately 70 per cent water and the human body is 70 per cent water as well. There is a certain synchronicity to those figures that suggests water has to be important for human wellbeing and, of course, it is. Your cells bathe in water and without adequate water those cells cannot communicate effectively with each other. Many disease states result from a lack of water and now a new study has shown that if you want to give your brain a boost in the short term, you should just drink water.

Dehydration is very common in our society. The unsubstantiated factoid is that around 75 per cent of people are dehydrated chronically and don’t even know it. Even if this figure is not verifiable, it seems reasonable given the reality that caffeinated beverages and soft drinks, the popular drinks of developed cultures, do not hydrate.

There are many symptoms of dehydration. The first objective sign of dehydration is seen in the an increase of the pulse rate as the body tries to maintain cardiac output. If the amount of fluid in the blood vessels is decreased, the body has to increase the heart rate, which causes blood vessels to constrict to maintain blood pressure. Other common symptoms of dehydration may include nausea, fatigue, headaches and dry mouth.

The other real symptom of dehydration that has been highlighted in this new study, is that without water your brain just does not work as well.

In the study subjects were asked to fast overnight consuming no food or drink on the night before the study after 9pm. Then on the day of the testing the participants were judged on three scales: a thirst scale, a mood scale and then tests that measured brain function (reaction time, verbal recognition time, visual memory and learning).

Just before completing the brain function tests, some subjects were allowed to drink 775ml of water while others did not drink any water. Those who had the water showed reaction times that were on average 14 per cent faster than those who had no water. Additionally, it was the subjects who scored highest on the thirst scale that benefited most from the water.

Intriguingly, people tended to do worse on complex rule-learning tasks after drinking water. So the effects of water are not to entirely boost mental performance, although other research has shown that hydrated people generally do better on tests and, in this study, water drinking also reduced tension, sadness and confusion.

All in all, water and being hydrated is a good thing for your mental processes. As we become more aware of this we are sure to see phrases like “You need to moisten your thinking” and “That is such a dry idea” creeping the language…or is that just a dessicated notion?