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[Content note: reading this post might cause feelings of suffocation or provoke panic attacks in susceptible individuals. Epistemic status is very speculative.]

Last month I moved into a small cottage behind a big group house. The cottage is lovely. The big group house is also lovely, but the people in it started suffering mysterious minor ailments. Headaches, fatigue, poor sleep \\u2013 all the things that will make your local family doctor say \\u201cTake two placebo and call me in the morning\\u201d. Using my years of medical training and expertise, I was able to\\u2026remain completely unaware of the problem while my housemates solved it themselves.

There\\u2019s been a flare-up of research interest in indoor carbon dioxide levels, precipitated by a Berkeley study (paper,\\xa0popular article) finding that increasing CO2 concentration from the level of a well-ventilated building to the level of a poorly-ventilated building had profound effects on cognitive ability, cutting various test scores by as much as 50%. This was so dramatic as to be implausible, but seems to match the result of previous\\xa0Hungarian studies\\xa0and a later\\xa0Harvard study\\xa0on the same subject. The Harvard team later replicated their result with real workers in real offices and found that, controlling for other factors, workers in the best-ventilated offices\\xa0scoredabout 25% better on cognitive tests than in the worst-ventilated ones. NASA got really interested in this research because spaceships require a lot of intellectual work and don\\u2019t have a lot of open windows. They\\u2019re still running tests but\\xa0they say\\xa0that \\u201cpreliminary results suggest differences\\u201d between better- and worse- ventilated environments.

On the other hand, a 2017 study\\xa0failed to\\xa0find the effect, possibly because their cognitive tests were easier. And bloggers\\xa0have pointed out\\xa0that submarines have more CO2 than the worst terrestrial buildings, but don\\u2019t have any problems overt enough for the Navy to notice or worry. So it\\u2019s a crapshoot of contradictory results and considerations, just like everything else.

Aware of this research, my housemates tested their air quality and got levels between 1000 and 3000 ppm, around the level of the worst high-CO2 conditions in the studies. They started leaving their windows open and buying industrial quantities of succulent plants, and the problems mostly disappeared. Since then they\\u2019ve spread the word to other people we know afflicted with mysterious fatigue, some of whom have also noticed positive results.