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Do we lose IQ points when we go on vacation for too long?
Do we lose IQ points when we go on vacation for too long? – (franceinfo)
Doctor Frédéric Saldmann suggests that after three weeks of vacation, we lose around twenty points of intelligence quotient. But its source seems to have disappeared… Does this theory hold up?
Does going on vacation cause us more harm than good? Doctor Frédéric Saldmann, cardiologist and nutritionist, states on television and in his books on health that“in three weeks of vacation, we lose twenty points of intelligence quotient”. His theory is based on that of a German colleague, Siegfried Lehrl, developed more than fifteen years ago. But the original study cannot be found and the doctor struggles to give details about its source: “The problem is, I tried to contact him but he died.”
A missing study
Franceinfo contacted the University of Nuremberg where the researcher worked, without much result. “We do not have access to this study,” explains the university. “Unfortunately, Professor Siegfried Lehrl’s successor does not know it.” According to Dr. Saldmann, if the source is lost, many scientific articles point in the same direction. But these additional studies do not report the loss of 20 IQ points and indicate that the academic level can drop temporarily from two months of vacation. According to Franck Ramus, cognitive specialist and research director at the CNRS, IQ is relatively stable throughout our lives: “From 10 to 70 years old, ultimately, the IQ remains roughly the same within a few points. (…) 20 IQ points is huge, it’s not something you risk losing by staying too long on the beach.”
