Closed windows Make People Dumb

Researchers have found that moderately high indoor concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) can significantly impair people’s decision-making performance. These results have implications for schools and office buildings with high occupant density and windows that do not open. They may also have implications for ALL of us, if climate change causes CO2 levels to continue to build up in the atmosphere–we may end up being dumber just at the time when we need to get SMARTER!

On nine scales of decision-making performance, the most dramatic declines, in which subjects were rated as "dysfunctional," were for taking initiative and thinking strategically. Researcher William Fisk says, "These results, which were quite unambiguous, were surprising."

The primary source of indoor CO2 is exhaled human breath. Researcher Mark Mendell says, "As there’s a drive for increasing energy efficiency, there’s a push for making buildings tighter and less expensive to run. There’s some risk that, in that process, adverse effects on occupants will be ignored. One way to make sure occupants get the attention they deserve is to point out adverse economic impacts of poor indoor air quality. If people can’t think or perform as well, that could obviously have adverse economic impacts."

In 1998, the Master of the Key burst into Whitley Strieber’s hotel room and told him amazing about climate change, as well the fact that the soul is a SCIENCE that we have yet to understand. Read all the other things MOTKE told him, with a new foreword from Whitley telling which of these predictions have COME TRUE, in the new edition of The Key.

Fisk says, "People who are employers who want to get the most of their workforce would want to pay attention to this."