alt Hacker NewsIf you want citations search my post history, but CO2 cognitive impact studies have a replication issue.
We’ve been studying the impact of CO2 for decades, at much higher levels than you see in office buildings and have never recorded any cognitive impact (until many thousands of PPM) until the Satish study in 2012 and a handful of other studies that Satish was involved in.
If you think about it for a second these studies can’t be accurate. If they were, you’d see differences on SAT scores of hundreds of points depending on building ventilation. You’d see huge variations between taking the SAT in the springtime when the windows are more likely to be open or in the winter.
You’d expect to see massive performance differences across nearly every metric between regions that use AC vs those that depend on opening windows.
And we do not see anything like that.
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Yes, I'm a little skeptical as well. My apartment generally runs between 1000 and 1500 ppm, and I sometimes work outside, but I haven't noticed large differences in ability to work and concentrate between the two. (What does help is moving back and forth.)
I tried keeping my room well-ventilated (500-700 ppm) for a few weeks and didn't notice much impact on sleep and work. There was a burst of positive effects a few days into the experiment but it didn't last and was likely unrelated.
The air definitely starts feeling stale and gross around 2000 to 3000, so I try to keep it below 2000.
That's all personal anecdote, but it similarly drives me to ask: Where's the replication?
I've only seen legitimate CO2 concentration studies with small impact on sleep quality (>1000ppm ie unventilated rooms can cause 1-5% decline in sleep efficiency, observable as more nighttime wake ups or longer sleep).
As an example of a negative result-- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41526-019-0071-6
Astronauts given two different batteries of cognitive tests showed no dose-response relationship to CO2 concentration