The Air You Breathe

How quality of air can impact your brain performance

When we talk of healthy brains we automatically think of things like exercise and nutrition that I have covered at times here. But the thing we put into the brain most is oxygen. So, let’s have a quick look at how the air we breathe impacts brain performance.

We are often encouraged to take a deep breath to oxygenate our brain — this sounds intuitively good. Similarly, we also know that feeling of sitting in a stuffy room full of people and the stuffy air making us feel tired and giving us a slow brain fog – opening the windows gives us a real and proverbial breath of fresh air.

Indeed, that expression “breath of fresh air” conjures up feelings of relief and invigoration, but what is the science behind this, indeed is there any good science behind this?

The brain needs oxygen to function and is oxygen hungry. We know from an energetics viewpoint that the brain is only 2% of body mass but consumes about 20% of energy – this is also similar to estimated oxygen consumption. However, unlike energy storage there is no way of storing oxygen and the brain and body is very efficient at getting oxygen to the brain. However, the downside is that only short periods of oxygen deprivation can have disastrous impacts.

I will focus on air quality here, because I reported on a number of interesting studies in 2021

Let’s visit a study I wrote about on Medium from last year by Laurent et al. This study was a particularly well-done study that tracked office workers in different cities across the globe over one year by using a device to measure fine particle matter (i.e. air pollution) and CO2 levels and matched this to cognitive performance.