STOP, YOU'RE [DUMBIFYING] ME

August 27, 2018 2:30 PM

Having trouble articulating your thoughts lately? Not quite up to snuff, intellectually — or at least not the whipsmart organizer of ideas you're sure you used to be? Maybe you're just breathing bad air.

Today's Guardian reports on research suggesting that "[a]ir pollution causes a 'huge' reduction in intelligence...indicating that the damage to society of toxic air is far deeper than the well-known impacts on physical health." The research was conducted in China, but has global application, and has evidently been designed in such a way as to control for other variables involving cognitive function.

posted by adamgreenfield (34 comments total)

Good news, everyone! We're just going to get dumber.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 2:35 PM on August 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

This is just another way the Republican Party is working to ensure its future in America.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:45 PM on August 27, 2018 [9 favorites]

I think the emergency medical shorthand for this is "DIC" "Disoriented, Irritable, Combative"
posted by eustatic at 2:48 PM on August 27, 2018 [7 favorites]

honestly my final year of uni was a bit of a wash anyhow, so no huge setback.
posted by GuyZero at 2:49 PM on August 27, 2018

related - this recent SlateStarCodex post on carbon dioxide levels in poorly ventilated indoor spaces carbon-dioxide-an-open-door-policy. "The Harvard team later replicated their result with real workers in real offices and found that, controlling for other factors, workers in the best-ventilated offices scored about 25% better on cognitive tests than in the worst-ventilated ones."
posted by cfraenkel at 2:51 PM on August 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

breething & thinkerings overated
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:53 PM on August 27, 2018 [7 favorites]

I also immediately thought of the CO₂ thing. I've been spending more time in the office lately rather than the field, and I just feel duller. Stupider, more tired. The weather's been good lately so I took my laptop outside to work for part of the day, and it totally made a difference. I also use any phonecalls I have to make as an excuse to step outside and pace around in the parking lot for a bit. It helps.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:58 PM on August 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

Welp, that makes the entire west coast catching fire once a year suck all the bit more.
posted by Artw at 2:59 PM on August 27, 2018 [19 favorites]

It alarms the hell out of me that we're headed towards over 800 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, and we have absolutely no idea how it will affect our biology, especially in regards to pregnant women and infants.

We have no idea whether we'll be able to survive and reproduce in the world we're creating.
posted by MrVisible at 3:05 PM on August 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

Honestly, reading this paper gave me the howling fantods like very little else has recently, and I've been living through the same stupendifyingly shit epoch we all have. I've just been having a very great deal of trouble finishing sentences lately, or otherwise organizing my thoughts, and it's a trifle too early for me to be worried about the ordinary age-related processes of cognitive decline.

Meanwhile I've been railing against the increasingly terrible air quality here in my adopted and much beloved London, which has gotten noticeably worse since we moved here five years ago (and markedly so since the rollout of the New Routemaster buses, in yet another Boris Johnson boondoggle...but that's another story).

But I never thought to put the two patterns of fact together. Now I can't shake the feeling that we've done permanent damage to ourselves by choosing to live here. It's, uh, not a super-happy place to be, psychoemotionally.
posted by adamgreenfield at 3:07 PM on August 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

No joke, this is why I bought an epic shit ton of plants for my tiny apartment. Noticed a difference almost immediately. I call it Oxygen Corner.
posted by schadenfrau at 3:08 PM on August 27, 2018 [18 favorites]

could you be specific, if possible, about how many plants that is? like 10 or 50 or ???. i would like to go buy some plants if possible, to combat this, but i want to get enough that it will make a difference.
posted by vogon_poet at 3:18 PM on August 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

imperial shit ton < metric shit ton < epic shit ton
posted by dragstroke at 3:23 PM on August 27, 2018 [7 favorites]

To address this concern, SI Appendix, Fig. S10 reports a falsification test, examining whether API readings on the days after cognitive tests affect test scores. If the time series of API readings embody some unobserved factors that are correlated with the outcome variables, using the API readings after the test to replace the current and past API readings in regressions would yield similar results. However, for the whole sample as well as the male and female subsamples, all of the coefficients are not statistically different from zero, largely dismissing the concern about potential omitted variables.

Am I being dumb here, or are the authors saying that the mean API for any time period between 7 days and 3 years prior to the test is significantly correlated with test results, but measuring the API the day after the test is not? They already told us that day-of measurements aren't significant. Why on earth would they expect the next-day results to be significant? I'm having a hard time seeing how this demonstrates their point. Surely the API any day during the week of the test is highly correlated with the average API the month before the test. What does this show except that their data is too noisy to make this test useful in any way?

I'm happy to believe air pollution is bad and worth fixing. But, this deserves some skepticism. I'm no econometrician, but correcting for seasons and asking whether people become more uncooperative due to air pollution doesn't really seem to exhaust all the possibilities for non-causal explanations. I'll buy a beer for any mefite who asks for it in person if this is replicated using independent data. (And then we can cry into our beers together.)
posted by eotvos at 3:24 PM on August 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

An epic shit ton seems to be about one plant per 50 sq ft, or as many as I could reasonably fit in the allotted Oxygen Corner. One is kind of a large bamboo palm, though. The rest are snake plants, spider plants, and two ferns that I have somehow managed to probably murder. (I think I need to repot them? I am new to plants.) Plus a pretty one that isn’t supposed to last too long, and one delightful purple cactus thing that probably does nothing.

Idk if it’s legit, but I moved in in December (closed windows), and I got stupid almost immediately. Two weeks in I bought a bunch of plants, and the next morning was the first morning I woke up without intense choking brain fog that didn’t go away until I left the house. So. Good enough for me.
posted by schadenfrau at 3:34 PM on August 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

But also when I googled the internet told me you only needed like 1 plant / 300 sq ft or something. I decided to go with more. Also it turns out plants are really awesome to have around.
posted by schadenfrau at 3:36 PM on August 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

If you subsequently smoke the house plants, does that negate the ensmartening? Axing for a friend.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:43 PM on August 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

Here's a TED talk from Kamal Meattle on the effects of houseplants on indoor pollution. He recommends four shoulder-height plants per person, and has recommendations on varieties of plants and their care.
posted by MrVisible at 3:43 PM on August 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

If you subsequently smoke the house plants, does that negate the ensmartening?

I think if you make edibles out of the flowers you’re probably coming out ahead.
posted by schadenfrau at 3:50 PM on August 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

Coming out a head, surely.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 4:00 PM on August 27, 2018 [11 favorites]

Goddammit.
posted by schadenfrau at 4:02 PM on August 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

The three plants are Areca palm, Mother-in-Law's Tongue and money plant. The botanical names are in front of you. Areca palm is a plant which removes CO2 and converts it into oxygen. We need four shoulder-high plants per person, and in terms of plant care, we need to wipe the leaves every day in Delhi, and perhaps once a week in cleaner-air cities. We had to grow them in vermi manure, which is sterile, or hydroponics, and take them outdoors every three to four months. The second plant is Mother-in-law's Tongue, which is again a very common plant, and we call it a bedroom plant, because it converts CO2 into oxygen at night. And we need six to eight waist-high plants per person. The third plant is money plant, and this is again a very common plant; preferably grows in hydroponics. And this particular plant removes formaldehydes and other volatile chemicals.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:18 PM on August 27, 2018 [7 favorites]

Just a reminder that, however bad your outdoor air is, it’s probably worse inside.
posted by q*ben at 4:29 PM on August 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

As with everything in my life, I had to immediately google "areca palm cats".

I liked having lots of maidenhair ferns (haha spelled it 'furn' first) but they are now known as snacking ferns in my house. Better than cat food according to the kitties.

I suspect the air in my house is terrible, I always feel stupid now.
posted by kitten magic at 4:38 PM on August 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

The third plant is money plant, and this is again a very common plant; preferably grows in hydroponics.

Hmm...

Jokes about weed aside, this is depressing reading after weeks of smoke this summer.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:32 PM on August 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

In case anyone else was wondering: there are plenty of good choices for air-purifying plants that are pet safe! "Mother-in-law's Tongue," or Sansevieria trifasciata (also known as snake plant) is not one of them, though areca and money plant are okay.
posted by halation at 5:41 PM on August 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

Honestly, I've been worrying about this over the last couple of months. I work in a kitchen, next to a couple gas burning pizza ovens, a deep fryer, and a gas stove with an oven. It's stupidly hot, and I know there's not a ton of good air there, and yeah, I feel like I'm suffering a good chunk of cognitive decline. Inability to remember the specific words that I'm trying to use (ladle is currently the word that I can never remember, and in all those standardized tests, I always tested in the 99th percentile in vocabulary) irritability, exhaustion, the whole thing. If I had any prospects of something better, I'd probably jump at it, and at the very least, I need to start looking.
posted by Ghidorah at 5:41 PM on August 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

Hmm. Our new mother company gave us small philodendron plants when we were brought, which a lot of people abandoned at the office. I took the two saddest looking ones home to join mine last month, which are thriving now. Maybe I need to rescue some more.
posted by tavella at 6:53 PM on August 27, 2018

Oh god. I live in an area of British Columbia that's been one of the most severely affected by wildfire smoke for weeks now. It totally makes sense this is affecting brain function...I guess it's not just my lungs I need to worry about.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 7:23 PM on August 27, 2018

If you subsequently smoke the house plants, does that negate the ensmartening? Axing for a friend.

Ask vs ax is about codeswitching, it is not about intelligence.
posted by aniola at 8:17 AM on August 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

Ooh, crap! Thanks for the correction and sincere apologies. The people I knew who used that growing up were white, so I guess I never really associated it with Ebonics. I will not make that mistake again.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 9:25 AM on August 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

"We have no idea whether we'll be able to survive and reproduce in the world we're creating."

That's literally just life. Eat, don't die, fuck, repeat with new generation and all the way blindly hoping it works. The worst outcome of climate change and our pollutants is extremely low stakes, the extinction of humanity doesn't mean much since there will still be organisms that survive and we're extremely closely related to all of them so much so that it's almost purely hubris to think as if humanity was the end-all be-all to life here.
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:07 AM on August 28, 2018

It’s not. I have no particular stake in a human future, and am perfectly happy to give the ants or the cephalopods free run of the place. I would like to be able to, y’know, manipulate abstractions, parse language, express myself and follow the flow of others’ expression for as much of my remaining time as possible, though.
posted by adamgreenfield at 11:26 AM on August 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

breething & thinkerings overated
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 0:53 on August 28 [7 favorites +] [!]

no breething & thinkerings undaerated lern 2 reed
posted by quinndexter at 9:52 PM on August 28, 2018 [1 favorite]