Could air pollution make your memory worse?
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This is Ira Glass. On This American Life, one thing we like is a good mystery. Sometimes about really big things, but most times, the little mysteries are the best.
Our lost and found is currently filled with pants. I don't know what, I've never seen this happen.
Wait, this is true?
This is true. Mysteries of every size, each week. This American Life, wherever you get your podcasts.
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short wavers, Emily Kwong here. And Angela Zhang. With our bi-weekly science news roundup featuring Mary Louise Kelly from All Things Considered. Hello. Hello. Good to be back with you. Oh, thank you so much for joining us. We are going to start with something kind of serious today. I know, shocking, because we're such clowns. But we're going to be talking about air pollution and health, specifically brain health. How are you feeling about your memory these days?
I am great on things that happened years ago. I am not so great on where my car keys were left this morning.
It is some complex science. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Memory is a complex thing, and our brains are fragile instruments in that way. So we're going to talk about that. And our second and third topics are about critters and what they can teach us about the world around them.
We're going to dive deep to whale graveyards, and then we're going to zoom in to ancient squirrel droppings, if you can believe that those words can even go together.
I will come to believe them after you share these two things I definitely did not have on my radar.
It is like, it is such show and tell. Shortwave Roundup is like, here's some treasures that we harvested for you.
Yeah, you know what they say. I mean, you know, you are what you eat, or at least poop out what you eat.
And people may study it hundreds of years later. So today on the show, we've got stories on air, land, and sea. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Every episode of It's Been a Minute, NPR's What's Happening in Culture podcast starts by asking three questions. Who? How? Why now? If the culture's asking it, we're talking about it.
What impact does air pollution have on brain health?
At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and indulge your cultural curiosity. Follow It's Been a Minute wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll break down the zeitgeisty topics that are filling your feed.
All right. Angela and Mary Louise, our host, we have got a lot to get into. What do you want to do first, Mary Louise?
Let's do the air pollution and how it can affect your memory. Tell me more.
So the study I have for you today is about these really, really tiny particles of air pollution, like 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair. And these particles are released by wildfires and car exhaust, among other things. And they're bad for your heart and your lungs. And they can also get directly to the brain through the blood.
That sounds awful. What do we know about how they affect, say, a person's memory, though?
Yeah. So to study how air pollution affects the brain, researchers used a database containing information about Black Americans living in California. The researchers looked at how much air pollution someone may have experienced based on their home address. and then looked at their cognitive test scores. And while we know pollution is bad for the brain in general, what the researchers found is that it also affected a specific type of memory.
The people who had been exposed to more pollution over the years had weaker semantic memory. So really, that long-term pollution looked like it was aging the brain's memory ahead of schedule.
That's Catherine Conlon, a study author. She's a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Davis. She told me that semantic memory is how your brain stores information. So let that New Delhi is the capital of India, or that three plus two equals five.
When that's effective, we can think about how that's the kind of thing that might chip away at a person's independence or ability to have the quality of life that we would hope to have.
But how do they know it's air pollution and not some other factor in these people's lives?
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