Ricardo Martínez analyzes the adaptation of the brain to the time change
The director of the Cajal Institute, Ricardo Martínez Murillo, has participated in a report for El Confidencial that delves into the social debate about the possible disorders caused by the time change.
The text gathers the opinion of experts from different scientific fields who question the idea, increasingly widespread, that this time change can cause significant disorders such as alterations in the quality and duration of sleep, or the risk of suffering cardiovascular accidents.
Alterations in daily routine do exist, but they are rather insignificant. Beyond the first day, the effects are negligible because our brain has a great capacity for adaptation.
Great adaptive capacity
In his speech, the director of the Cajal Institute and head of the Neurovascular Research Group minimizes the real incidence of these possible adverse effects, and points to our brain as the great architect of our adaptive capacity, thanks to its plasticity.
For Ricardo Martínez, "alterations in daily routine do exist, but they are rather insignificant. Beyond the first day, the effects are negligible, because our brain has a great capacity for adaptation. Talk of 'jet lag' is rather exaggerated, especially when compared to the long plane journeys that have given rise to this concept, which mainly refers to the sleep disturbances they cause. However, the most sensitive people could try to adapt little by little, by varying their habits from days before, for example, by 15 minutes at a time".