Comment by ekianjo
1 month ago
> high CO2 levels cause cognitive impairment
Sounds seriously unlikely. How would this work in practice, at the level of bodily functions?
1 month ago
> high CO2 levels cause cognitive impairment
Sounds seriously unlikely. How would this work in practice, at the level of bodily functions?
Why would this be unlikely as a prior? High CO2 changes your blood chemistry and breathing rates. Different breathing rates have a well understood effects on lots of systems including sympathetic/parasympathetic activation. There is no reason to expect humans to be evolutionary adapted to CO2 levels that we couldn't have experienced historically.
Several other posters in here have posted peer reviewed studies replicating these effects, but personally I find individual direct experience with my own body to be massively more generally useful when making health decisions than studies in other people, or some known mechanism.
I don't know the mechanism, but: https://www.google.com/search?q=co2+cognitive+impairment
This has the hallmark of confounding factors. There is no way you can design a study to control for CO2 alone vs other trace contaminants in the air.
In that case it wouldn't matter much to an individual making personal decisions about their environment. Either way, an environment with enough outdoor air exchange to keep CO2 low would avoid these effects.
But hypothetically, what other trace contaminants would you expect to be so universally correlated with CO2 in different environments that they could account for repeatedly observing these effects in different studies? That seems implausible.
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