Many may discard it — but the season of birth can affect one’s body clock, say scientists.
A new study has claimed that the month one is born can affect one’s health and personality, with babies born in the summer months being the happiest while a winter birthday may cast a permanent shadow over their happiness.
According to the scientists, this is because the season of birth dramatically affects the way the speed at which the body clock ticks, the Daily Mail reported. They have based their findings on an experiment on mice exposed to varying amounts of light in the first months of life. Some were given summer conditions of 16 hours light and eight hours of darkness per day. Others had only eight hours of daily light, to mimic the short days of winter.
After they were weaned, the mice were kept in the same light cycle for several weeks or switched to the opposite one. Finally, the animals were plunged into darkness and watched to see how they would react. Those rodents reared in summer conditions kept to a daily routine, but those brought up in little light struggled to cope with the change, according to the findings published in the Nature Neuroscience journal.
Lead scientist Professor Douglas McMahon said: “The mice raised in the winter cycle show an exaggerated response to a change in season that is strikingly similar to that of human patients suffering from seasonal affective disorder.”
Despite this, the finding raises the intriguing possibility that the amount of light to which the human brain is exposed in the first weeks or months of life affects mood.