Berkeley Lab scientists surprised to find significant
adverse effects of CO2 on human decision-making performance.
Overturning decades of conventional wisdom, researchers at
the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
have found that moderately high indoor concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2)
can significantly impair people’s decision-making performance. The results were
unexpected and may have particular implications for schools and other spaces
with high occupant density.
“In our field we have always had a dogma that CO2 itself, at
the levels we find in buildings, is just not important and doesn’t have any
direct impacts on people,” said Berkeley Lab scientist William Fisk, a
co-author of the study, which was published in Environmental Health
Perspectives online last month. “So these results, which were quite
unambiguous, were surprising.” The study was conducted with researchers from
State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University.