Lumifer comments on What is up with carbon dioxide and cognition? An offer - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (43)
It is odd, isn't it? The effect sizes seem ridiculous*, but there's nothing obviously wrong with that study (aside from the sample size). Cochran has blogged about oxygen before as well. To compile some of the relevant papers:
The problem for me is that while it makes sense that since we run on oxygen and the brain uses a lot of oxygen (the whole 'BOLD' thing etc), more oxygen might be better, it has the same issue as Kurzban's blood-glucose/willpower criticism: if the brain needs more oxygen than it's getting, why doesn't one simply breath a little more? While sedentary during these sorts of tasks, you have far more breathing capacity than you should need - you are able to sprint all-out without falling over of asphyxiation, after all. So there's no obvious reason there should be any lack, even more so than for glucose. And shouldn't CO2 levels closely track various aspects of weather? But as far as I know, various attempts to correlate weather and cognitive performance or mood have turned up only tiny effects. In addition, too much oxygen can be bad. So is it too little oxygen or too much nitrogen or too much carbon dioxide...?
What monitor is that? You could try recording CO2 long-term, especially if it's a data logger. Opening windows is something that's easily randomized.
I did some looking and compiling of consumer-oriented devices a while ago: https://forum.quantifiedself.com/t/indoor-air-quality-monitoring-health/799/40 I was not too impressed since nothing hit the sweet spot of accurate CO2 and PPM measurement under $100. The Netatmo looked decent but there are a lot of complaints about accuracy & reliability (checking the most recent Amazon reviews, still a lot of complaints).
I've been thinking maybe I should settle for the Netatmo. I've been working on a structural equation model (SEM) integrating ~100 personal data variables to try to model my productivity (some current sample output), and it would be nice to have even noisy daily C02 variables (as long as I know how noisy and can use it as a latent variable to deal with the measurement error). Correlation-wise, I think backwards causation can be mostly ruled out, and the most obvious confound is weather, which is already in my SEM.
* taken at face value, with reasonable estimates of how much rooms differ from day to day or week to week, CO2 levels would explain a lot or maybe most of variability in IQ tests or cognitive performance!
I don't see how it can be about oxygen. In the paper I linked, I think they directly add relatively pure carbon dioxide. And the total concentration is 0.1%. So the concentration of oxygen in the air is not really changing.
The texas natural experiment seems like an especially convincing complement to the more artificial setting, thanks for pointing it out.
If you look into this I will leave open the offer to buy certificates after the prize. So far not many takers on the prize, this comment is currently in the lead based on the literature review, not sure if there will be takers closer to the cutoff.
The sample size is small, but given the effect size I don't think it even matters that much. The error seems like less than a factor of 2.
This looks right to me (well "a lot," I don't think "most"), I assume that something is wrong. An obvious possible culprit is their cognitive test.
I believe the human breathing regulation mechanism (how frequently/deeply you breathe) is driven by CO2 concentrations. So manipulating the CO2 affects the breathing which determines how much oxygen is your body getting.
Doesn't that go the wrong direction? I.e., if you have more CO2, don't you end breathing more and so having more oxygen?
Yes
Which direction is "wrong"? :-)
You're dealing with a self-regulating biological system. The relationships between inputs and outputs tend to be complicated.