This is your brain on air pollution

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It's pretty obvious that air pollution makes people sick and shortens lives. Microscopic particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides emitted by things like coal plants worsen respiratory conditions as well as heart diseases. But do the pollutants that can cloud the sky cloud your mind, too?

A study led by Beijing Normal University's Xin Zhang and Yale's Xi Chen took advantage of a powerful dataset to expand our knowledge on this question. Many previous studies have focused on students, comparing school testing results with regional air quality, for example. The new study used the results of a massive Chinese survey of more than 50,000 people who took standardized tests in 2010 and then again in 2014. Such "longitudinal" studies that follow individuals over time are excellent because you can compare a person to their own previous results. That's better than using two groups of people whose differences you hope will average out.

The tests included a set of increasingly difficult math questions and verbal/language tasks. Subjects continued answering questions until they missed three in a row and were assigned a score based on how far they got.

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