How Does Air Pollution Impact Your Brain?
Key topics
The article discusses the impact of air pollution on brain health, and the discussion revolves around personal experiences with air pollution, the effectiveness of air purifiers, and the broader implications of pollution on cognitive function.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Active discussionFirst comment
3h
Peak period
11
0-6h
Avg / period
5.3
Based on 32 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Sep 15, 2025 at 5:04 AM EDT
4 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Sep 15, 2025 at 8:31 AM EDT
3h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
11 comments in 0-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Sep 19, 2025 at 10:53 AM EDT
4 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
a) fuck IQ. But since you are using it as a benchmark (here, at least). What is your IQ? How did you gain most of it?
b) How much are you smoking? Are you getting sub-level espresso effects from nicotine? (If you don't drink coffee, got anything to compare it with?)
c) How's your breathing? How often are you sick(ly)?
d) Where do you see yourself under the Bell curve? Professionally and or any other way you might believe is relevant.
Just think high frequency, max amplitude bell curves under bell curves. And then ... yeah, who says you didn't?
b) 1 cigarette a day or none depending on the period. But rises significantly when drinking and partying
c) I am in good health and overheating is generally a problem that arises sooner that breath issues when exercising Almost never sick. I get between 0 to 2 illnesses a year depending on how much I find myself with lots of people in a room
d) Hard to tell. I feel smarter than a lot of people but I only feel it's because I am much more curious. On the other hand, I am pretty slow. I have self-confidence/laziness issues that prevent me to actually look for a dev job.
Started smoking at 19, first occasionally, then regularly, now occasionally again What do you say, doc ?
a) you never trained your IQ using methods designed to increase IQ, meaning your self-assessed avg IQ would increase significantly within 150 hours of IQ practice
b) 1 cigarette is irrelevant, which makes c) irrelevant in context.
d) It's common to feel smarter than the rest. Especially if you surround yourself with people who tend to keep their intelligence back for the sake of recreation and fun OR they never really tried for reasons.
Chess is cool, ELO 1350 - 1450 after 3 years of regular playing is also cool and shows that chess is something where you actually are trying, pointing at the fact that your self-confidence issues are merely the result of lack of practice aka consistent increases of mastery in subjects you care for (or want to care for).
Bottom line: You (most likely, > 0.97) did not lose any IQ points due to smoking. :D
{ "@context": [ "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams", { "Hashtag": "as:Hashtag", "sensitive": "as:sensitive", "dcterms": "http://purl.org/dc/terms/" } ], "id": "https://neurofrontiers.blog/?p=11319", "type": "Note", "attachment": [ { "type": "Image", "url": "https://i0.wp.com/neurofrontiers.blog/wp-content/uploads/202...", "mediaType": "image/jpeg", "name": "A cartoon depicting a traffic jam of identical black cars, each driven by a brain. Thick clouds of exhaust rise and gather above the stalled vehicles." } ], "attributedTo": "https://neurofrontiers.blog/author/neuronerdb/", "audience": "https://neurofrontiers.blog/?author=0", "content": "<h2>How does air pollution
When I started Uni, the "A diploma will guarantee you great job opportunities" mantra was unshakeable.
Now I think, the pendulum swung so hard in the other direction, that kids of same age have tons of refuttals at their disposal. It must take a lot more work, from parents, to instill and motivate what was once seen as a good career starter.
The mechanisms that separate more from less affected segments go back one and more generations, which is why it's not harder for parents to keep their kids on track despite "more stuff" but a lot of parents have it harder because their own brains/organisms are more affected than those of others.
And "some take more care of themselves than others" loops right back into my argument, which is so damn annoying.
It's taken me a great big freaking while to "rewire what fires together", including motivation and attention and I've looked at so many angles, while so many more and important ones require a bio-chem lab, an fMRI and PhD level knowledge in Molecular Bio-Tech.
Anyone wanna sponsor some of it :D? I'm serious, but among the elderly (37).
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/peak-pollution
Poor breathing = less NO, less oxygen → potential stress on thyroid metabolism (and almost any other metabolism).
NO is nitric oxide: the paranasal sinuses are a major source of NO gas.
And NO gas has antimicrobial effects (helps sterilize inhaled air), acts as a vasodilator (helps regulate blood flow and oxygen delivery), and enhances oxygen uptake in the lungs.
No way it's good to be inhaling any of that - break dust and all.
It would be interesting to know how much leaded avgas specifically affects people. Clearly most of it is emitted high up in the atmosphere but there's still a lot of idling and taxiing around airports...
Elevated lead levels are found in the blood of airfield employees. https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/hhe/reports/pdfs/2012-0115-3186.pd...
That was in 2012, I'm sure things have changed a bit in aviation since then.
To make things even messier, heavy metals like lead and mercury can also be airborne and have been linked to harmful effects on the brain. For simplicity, we’ll talk about all of these under the same umbrella of air pollution, because they all contribute to negative health outcomes, including effects on the brain.
Look for MERV and CADR ratings for filters. Then spend an afternoon building yourself a CR box with a box fan, or a narrower one with some computer fans. It'll work better than most commercial purifiers.
Because it's not as fine of a filter, far less air pressure is required to filter the air. This results in much, much quieter purifiers.
The endgame of this sort of goal is PC case fans. They've been optimized for decades now to squeeze every last bit of airflow for less and less noise, and they last for a couple decades or more.
The filter lives in my bedroom where I figure it's doing the most good by giving me cleaner air when I'm sleeping. (maybe 1/3 of my life, so cheap investment in PM reduction!)
so it realy looks like it is now impossible to tell just how pollution is/has effected the way we think, as where and how could we get a clear, clear baseline, and who cares anyway, it is guaranteed to get worse(long term average) everywhere on an continious ongoing basis, and the rest is pressure from nimby groups to relocate local sources, elsewhere, where perhaps it rains crap on there food
History shows otherwise.