Associations of Cognitive Function with Carbon Dioxide and Ventilation (2016)
dash.harvard.edu
dash.harvard.edu
> Thus, CO2 at 40,000 ppm for 2 weeks did not affect performance on multiple tests of cognitive function in physically fit young airmen, a population probably not unlike submariners.
CO2 tended to cause poor sleep, headache, and hand tremor before it caused cognitive issues.
Another bit of evidence that makes me doubt these recent studies is that the levels of CO2 in your lungs are much higher than what is in the atmosphere. Exhaled air is around 5% CO2. Each breath doesn't replace 100% of the air in your lungs. If you have a container that is 5% CO2 and you replace 80% of it with air containing 400ppm CO2, you're down to 10,320ppm. Inhale 1,000ppm CO2 and your lungs will be at 10,800ppm CO2. In other words: a 250% increase in atmospheric CO2 levels only causes a 4% increase in lung CO2 levels at the beginning of a breath. If such tiny changes significantly affected cognition, we would see impairment happen in many more circumstances (such as when walking or smoking).
If something's impairing cognition in stuffy rooms, I don't think it's CO2.
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/ehp.1104789
Their measures of focused activity were nearly unchanged, while measures like initiative and strategy declined somewhat at 1,000ppm and sharply at 2,500ppm.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1541931214581192
"Within the limitations of this experiment, (1) breathing 4% CO2 for one hour slows information processing by impairing the response selection stage of processing and not the stimulus encoding stage and (2) with increasing time-on-task information processing is increasingly impaired and the magnitude of this effect is similar for each processing stage. These findings help define a useful model of human information processing and identify the locus of CO2 impairment."
That could explain the null results found by the Navy.
In the interest of science, I discovered a few strong breaths of air next to the sensor will kick the HVAC on full blast.
Apparently his wife was showing signs of Formaldehyde poisoning after they moved into a newly constructed home. This motivated him to investigate the air quality in their house and he bought industrial-level air testing equipment to figure out what was going on (since many of the consumer-grade devices were wildly inaccurate). He also did a deep dive into the research on how air quality impacts cognitive and creative performance. Fascinating talk, worth watching.
UK: most of the bog standard double glazed windows have a little vent up at the top so you can open a fairly small slat and get a small air gap.
35min: his risk priorities are mould, particulate matter, volatile organic chemicals, co2, on the grounds that CO2 is easier to manage
Old single-pane windows were missing the vent probably because a) old building codes let you have less ventilation or b) the old windows were leaking air around the frames in addition to conductively leaking heat through the single-pane glass.
Most Victorian era houses have 'air bricks' in various locations (terracotta bricks with a small grid of holes in them) and the houses were pretty leaky.
UK government is moving to remove * cooking on open gas from the building regulations for new homes in a few years (big methane/burning fume generator). Eventually as post above parent says we will move to more rational ways of heating the houses. Piping an inflammable gas to millions of houses has always struck me as a bit strange.
Two, I do not want to have to wait hours for the tank to heat up again after someone takes half a minute too long in the shower.
The power just isn’t there when it comes to electric water heating. I am very glad to live in a house with a combi gas boiler right now where the whole house can have a shower on demand, straight after each other if need be.
Until we all have massive heat pumps or some other way of getting high-power heat from domestic electric, it makes complete sense to me for us to pipe gas around while most of our domestic energy usage in the UK goes to heat.
Even forgetting the evenness issues, which ceramic stoves share too, the modulation just isn't there. Lower power on induction and ceramic means alternating the same power on and off. This does average out over the long term to a lower power, but what if you need a constant lower power? The power settings also tend to be discrete and far apart, which is again completely useless for a lot of fine applications. It's completely useless for instance you want your pilau rice to steam properly at the end of cooking at a low power in a shallow, broad stainless steel pan (as it should be), rather than sticking to the bottom of the pan.
Unless you mean the idea is "how do we make it look like we're doing something about building performance without hurting volume house builders' feelings?".
The 'proper' solution all homes should be built with is low air permeability (no trickle vents) and a whole house ventilation system, ideally with a heat exchanger.
"Despite this minimal deviation in temperature, the researchers found remarkable differences in cognitive functioning. In one lab study, participants were asked to proofread an article while they were in either a warm (77°) or a cool (67°) room. Participants in warm rooms performed significantly worse than those in cool rooms, failing to identify almost half of the spelling and grammatical errors (those in cool rooms, on the hand, only missed a quarter of the mistakes). These results suggest that even simple cognitive tasks can be adversely affected by excessive ambient warmth."
When it is cold enough, body starts to shake, each muscle is convulsing, consuming glucose and making it into heat.
Brains use a lot of power that comes from methabolism. Could it be that human body tries to warm itself using brains to utilize glucose by doing cognitive tasks?
What cognitive tasks are most energy consuming?
1. Organize a long meeting.
2. Invite as much people as possible.
3. Pitch my stuff at the end of the meeting.
4. Profit.
I jest.
edit: 5. Bring a small oxygen tank to keep myself sharp!
That has all the smell of a con artist, and some people are good on sensing this. Others aren't, and if the population of the meeting is random enough, many people will fall over it. It is also not a new discovery.
Am I reading this correctly ?
I do this for my job in the US.
Either way, at least on a personal level, increased awareness of the risks is not a non-issue :-)
It also depends on office layout, every floor could be completely unique and built by different people. Perhaps your skyscrapers HVAC takes it into account but the office you are in is laid out with an enclosed conference room. The vents are not enough and the HVAC isn't sensing per room just an average sensor somewhere so it doesn't compensate.
The takeaway for me is just to keep it in mind, not cause a big fuss. I think that's a sane thing to do.
I work in a leed platinum building, and I've been testing the air with 2 different brands of CO2 monitors, and I see them stick to around 850 ppm once everyone is in for the day.
My last office was a skyscraper and it's AC was just domestic wall mounted conditioners. There was ventilation, but it was only in the central area.
The office before that was a two floor building with the same thing, except no ventilation in the door and solid roofing. Ventilation came from wall vents to outside. The conference room got stuffy and we would have to leave the door open. In our offices we would just open the windows. The office before that was a three story narrow building with openable windows and domestic AC units again.
All very professional commercial buildings, but definitely no fancy HVAC.
Same goes for buses in my city in summer. Drivers get a bonus for savings on gas so the aircon is turned down to bare minimum and it is suffocating inside especially as bus gets crowded. And opening windows is prohibited.
Electric trams on the other hand have aircon to the max so it is freezer temperatures.
One of the reasons I bike.
Doors opening probably helps though?
Anecdotally a submarine crew is too exhausted to feel effects from CO2 when it's in spec. If atmospheric controls were down and CO2 shot up, headaches were normal. Far from a controlled experimental environment.
They are hiring a backend developer and other non-technical roles in Amsterdam.
It is also not only about CO2 and O2. I wouldn’t know what they are tracking now but the idea is that they track everything environmental-building related.
At the very least, I'd track at least 3-4 factors beyond simple CO2, so it makes sense to integrate that all at once at HVAC level rather than carry around 5 sensors.
I know at my workplace, we tend to have short meetings (thankfully!). However we inhabit the upper sections of old downtown square, which was 7 different buildings architecturally "glued" together. But when we do have meetings, they're back to back with other meetings given the shared meeting space.
But this is even more sinister if what I'm thinking is correct: the toxins accumulate even if it doesn't impair the first meeting (or 3), and effects worsen through the day for anyone in there.