Lighting a candle at home may affect your brainpower.
Indoor air pollution from its smoke, with poor ventilation, can affect our ability to focus, research suggests.
It follows a study of 26 people put in a room with a blown-out candle for an hour, and in the same room with clean air for the same period on a different day.
Volunteers did tests, before and after entering.
Four hours after inhaling candle smoke, people did worse in a test of their ability to focus on a picture and ignore distractions.
Dr Thomas Faherty, co-author of the University of Birmingham, paper, said: ‘Even short-term exposure to air pollution may have negative effects on brain functions essential for daily activities.
Indoor air pollution from candles’ smoke, with poor ventilation, can affect our ability to focus, research suggests. Pictured: File image
Four hours after inhaling candle smoke, people did worse in a test of their ability to focus on a picture and ignore distractions. Pictured: File image
‘It does show it is important to ventilate a space, for example after blowing candles out on a cake.’
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, judged people’s ‘selective attention’ – their ability to focus on a face and ignore distractions.
Their performance significantly worsened after exposure to the polluted air, unlike after exposure to clean air, when asked to rapidly press buttons in response to pictures of 120 faces.
When inhaling indoor pollution, the volunteers also did worse when asked to identify whether pictures showed people who were happy or fearful.
The effects on the brain could be caused by pollution triggering inflammation in the body, which affects the brain, say experts.
Pollution particles may also enter the bloodstream through the lungs and make it through the barrier protecting the brain.
