Air pollution can negatively affect human brain function even after only short periods of exposure, researchers have found. Published in Nature Communications journal, the study by a group of UK environmental scientists and psychologists, found that people are more likely to be distracted from tasks and are less able to recognise others’ emotions after being exposed to pollution.
The 26 participants in the trial were asked to perform cognitive tests after an hour spent breathing clean air and another hour breathing air containing high levels of particulate matter from a candle. No matter how they breathed, whether through their nose or mouth, the results showed significant drops in their ability to pay attention and their ability to tell the difference between emotions, up to four hours later.
Impact on everyday tasks
“Participants exposed to air pollution were not as good at avoiding the distracting information,” said Dr Thomas Faherty of the University of Birmingham, one of the study’s co-authors. “So that means in daily life, you could get more distracted by things.” Faherty named supermarket shopping as an example of an everyday task that could be impacted by air pollution, where it “might mean that you get more distracted by impulse buys when you’re walking along supermarket aisles because you’re not able to focus on your task goals.”
People’s ability to concentrate on driving vehicles is another competence that could be affected by drops in what the authors called “executive function” (decision making and goal-orientation), as well as decreased prioritisation or simultaneous processing. A wider study will examine the effect of other pollutants such as car emissions and wood-burning stoves.
Air pollution, emotions and crime
The way the pollution impaired people’s ability “to detect and interpret emotions in oneself and others” is another potentially explosive aspect of the findings that could have implications for society.
The participants “were worse at perceiving whether a face was fearful or happy, and that might have implications for how we behave with other people,” Faherty explains. “There are associative studies looking at short-term air pollution and incidents of things like violent crime, especially in US cities. So you could kind of tentatively link those things together, possibly saying that the reason for that might be some kind of emotional dysregulation.”
Air pollution caused 6.7 million deaths a year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and is the second leading cause of non-communicable diseases after tobacco.
