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Bad enough that air such as Beijing’s makes you feel sick. Did you know it also makes you dumb?
A large new study conducted in China by an international team of researchers has found that exposure to polluted air reduces intelligence. Not by a little, but by a lot. The study found that exposure to seriously tainted air — the kind that is breathed by 95% of the world’s population — is associated with a subsequent, significant drop in test scores for proficiency in language and arithmetic.
As reported almost nowhere in the corporate media, but in full by the Guardian of London:
“Polluted air can cause everyone to reduce their level of education by one year, which is huge,” said Xi Chen at Yale School of Public Health in the US, a member of the research team. “But we know the effect is worse for the elderly, especially those over 64, and for men, and for those with low education. If we calculate [the loss] for those, it may be a few years of education.”
The loss of a year’s education is an approximation, of course, and an average. Cognitive damage was found to be worse in men than in women, worse for the elderly, and proportional to the length of exposure.
Previous studies have blamed air pollution for seven million premature deaths a year, global climate change — with all its associated droughts, wildfires, inundations and migrations — increased mental illness in children, dementia among people living near busy roads, elevated mortality among people with mental disorders, and so forth. But not until now has anyone suggested it makes us stupid.
This, of course, explains everything. Donald Trump was raised in Manhattan, breathing some of the world’s foulest air. With not much of an IQ or an education to start with, it is now glaringly obvious how Trump ended up with negative numbers in both categories.
It’s obvious too, now, what has happened to the cognitive abilities of the American voter. The more they breathe, the dumber they get.
We knew, of course, that air pollution was bad for us. But we accepted the blandishments of the polluters when they said it was a small price to pay for the lifestyle to which we have become accustomed. No pollution, they smiled, then there will be no electricity or air conditioning, no meals ready to eat, no vacations in Pago Pago. As we accepted 40,000 mangled fatalities a year as the price of driving cars, we accepted the deaths of millions and probably the end of civilization as a small price to pay for living large.
But we didn’t know there was a feedback loop. We didn’t know that the longer we lived large, the dumber we got, and the more likely to accept the ever dumber blandishments of the polluters, to turn a blind eye while they made us dumber yet.
So if you have been wondering how it could possibly have happened that we have come happily to a place where we are charging the cliff of extinction like the proverbial lemmings, led by people with IQs lower than their shoe sizes, now we know. Like I’ve always said, it’s not the heat. It’s the stupidity.
No wonder mainland China (since the bloody communist takeover) has never been able to catch up with the West or even Japan in terms of creativity and innovation. Not only do they have a government that hates and fears intelligent and independent-thinking people, their air is making them stupid. :)
Brilliant!! I love it. It’s just too funny.
Thank you. I’m blushing.
This has absolutely no science in it. I suspect it to be true but no details are given. I suspect most readers here also share my bias but I need evidence for cause and effect. Correlation is not causation. There are multiple causes of stupidity.
The study itself, in the peer-reviewed Journal of the National Academy of Sciences, and a lengthy article on the study, contain all the details there are about the “science in it.” There are links to both in the piece. The authors discuss at length why they infer causation, not just correlation. And no one claims air pollution is the only cause of stupidity.
Air pollution has been around since homo erectus first tamed fire. Think about how your clothing reeks after a backyard barbeque or a nite of camping…then figure how that smoke has affected your lungs and, by extension, your whole body.
I’m old enuff to remember the debilitating smog of the ’50s. My grandfather talked of his youth, when sun-dried horse manure – reduced to a fine powder by passing traffic – found its way into the winds, and, along with the smoke from a thousand coal furnaces and wood stoves, rendered city air virtually unbreathable.
I’m not saying that polluted air hasn’t contributed to our individual and collective stupidity – quite the contrary! I’m just saying that there’s nothing new under the sun.
Yes, there is something new under the dimly seen sun. 95% of all humans are breathing air so polluted it is dangerous to their health. 95% is new.