Healthy buildings, productive people

A  Have you felt tired at your desk lately? According to new research, some often overlooked environmental factors within buildings -- the degree or type of ventilation, airborne contaminants, lighting and noise levels, for example -- can play a surprisingly large role in how good or bad you feel, and even how well you think. It is estimated that we spend more than 90 percent of our time inside, but builders in general have paid little attention to the health aspects of indoor spaces, instead focusing on superficial design features and on meeting minimum environmental standards to keep costs down.

B  Researchers at Harvard University in the US looked at the effects of indoor air quality on workers’ cognitive performance -- important both for health and for companies’ bottom lines, says Joseph Allen, assistant professor of environmental health and principal investigator of the studies. ‘The true cost of running our buildings should take into account the health and productivity of people in those buildings,’ Allen says. In fact, an analysis by the team showed that the cost of making alterations that could boost cognitive performance significantly was minuscule compared with the related increase in productivity -- about $40 per person per year, compared with a $6,500 increase in employee productivity.

C  The team’s first study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, was conducted at the Syracuse Center of Excellence, a US research organisation devoted to studying and developing sustainability. The centre houses a laboratory that allows researchers to test a wide range of indoor air quality factors using sophisticated ventilation. Each day, the indoor environment was controlled with a ventilation system which included small amounts of carbon dioxide and other pollutants. The researchers exposed 24 participants -- architects, designers and engineers -- to a range of simulated indoor environmental conditions over six full work days. The participants completed the same cognitive tests each afternoon. The results were striking. In conditions with low levels of volatile organic compounds and carbon dioxide, participants scored 61 percent higher on the cognitive tests than in conditions with high levels of these pollutants. On measures of crisis response and strategy, scores were 131 percent higher.

D  A follow-up study looked at the effects of ventilation rates on cognitive function. The researchers tested workers in a commercial building in Boston, Massachusetts, over a period of several months. They found that when the ventilation rate was increased from 20 cubic feet per minute per person to 40 cubic feet per minute, cognitive scores improved by 15 percent. At even higher ventilation rates of 60 cubic feet per minute, scores improved by 50 percent compared to the baseline. This suggests that the benefits of better ventilation continue to increase as we approach and exceed currently accepted standards, Allen explained.

E  Other environmental factors also matter. Lighting, in particular, has been shown to affect mood, alertness and sleep quality. In one study, workers in offices with windows received 173 percent more white light exposure during work hours and slept an average of 46 minutes more per night than those without windows. Noise, too, plays a role. Open-plan offices, while popular for collaboration, have been linked to higher stress levels and lower concentration due to uncontrolled background conversations and other distractions.

F  The implications for employers are significant. Improved indoor environments not only enhance cognitive performance but also reduce sick leave and staff turnover. Allen estimates that poor indoor air quality costs the US economy tens of billions of dollars annually in lost productivity. Conversely, investing in healthier buildings yields a substantial return. "We’re not talking about expensive, futuristic designs," says Allen. "We’re talking about simple, proven interventions: better ventilation, low-emission materials, access to natural light, and thermal comfort." The challenge, he adds, is that these factors are not part of standard building practice -- but they should be.

Book review on Musicophilia

A  Music and the brain are both endlessly fascinating subjects, and as a neuroscientist specialising in auditory learning and memory, I find them especially intriguing. So I had high expectations of Musicophilia, the latest offering from neurologist and prolific author Oliver Sacks. And I confess to feeling a little guilty reporting that my reactions to the book are mixed.

B  Sacks himself is the best part of Musicophilia. He richly documents his own life in the book and reveals highly personal experiences. The photograph of him on the cover of the book--which shows him wearing headphones, eyes closed, clearly enchanted as he listens to Alfred Brendel perform Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata--makes a positive impression that is borne out by the contents of the book. Sacks’ voice throughout is steady and erudite but never pontifical. He is neither self-conscious nor self-promoting.

C  The preface gives a good idea of what the book will deliver. In it, Sacks explains that he wants to convey the insights gleaned from the "enormous and rapidly growing body of work on the neural underpinnings of musical perception and imagery, and the complex and often bizarre disorders to which these are prone." He also stresses the importance of "the simple art of observation" and "the richness of the human context." He wants to combine "observation and description with the latest in technology," he says, and to imaginatively enter into the experience of his patients and subjects. The reader can see that Sacks, who has been practicing neurology for 40 years, is torn between the "old-fashioned" path of observation and the new-fangled, high-tech approach: He knows that he needs to take heed of the latter, but his heart lies with the former.

D  The book consists mainly of detailed descriptions of cases, most of them involving patients whom Sacks has seen in his practice. Brief discussions of contemporary neuroscientific reports are sprinkled liberally throughout the text. Part I, "Haunted by Music," begins with the strange case of Tony Cicoria, a nonmusical, middle-aged surgeon who was consumed by a love of music after being hit by lightning. He suddenly began to crave listening to piano music, which he had never cared for in the past. He started to play the piano and then to compose music, which arose spontaneously in his mind in a "torrent" of notes. How could this happen? Was the cause psychological? (He had had a near-death experience when the lightning struck him.) Or was it the direct result of a change in the auditory regions of his cerebral cortex? Electroencephalography (EEG) showed his brain waves to be normal in the mid-1990s, just after his trauma and subsequent "conversion" to music. There are now more sensitive tests, but Cicoria has declined to undergo them; he does not want to delve into the causes of his musicality. What a shame!

E  Part II, "A Range of Musicality," covers a wider variety of topics, but unfortunately, some of the chapters offer little or nothing that is new. For example, chapter 13, which is five pages long, merely notes that the blind often has better hearing than the sighted. The most interesting chapters are those that present the strangest cases. Chapter 8 is about "amusia," an inability to hear sounds like music, and "dysharmonia," a highly specific impairment of the ability to hear harmony, with the ability to understand melody left intact. Such specific "dissociations" are found throughout the cases Sacks recounts.

F  To Sacks’s credit, part III, "Memory, Movement and Music," brings us into the underappreciated realm of music therapy. Chapter 16 explains how "melodic intonation therapy" is being used to help expressive aphasic patients (those unable to express their thoughts verbally following a stroke or other cerebral incident) once again become capable of fluent speech. In chapter 20, Sacks demonstrates the near-miraculous power of music to animate Parkinson’s patients and other people with severe movement disorders, even those who are frozen into odd postures. Scientists cannot yet explain how music achieves this effect.

G  To readers who are unfamiliar with neuroscience and music behavior, Musicophilia may be something of a revelation. But the book will not satisfy those seeking the causes and implications of the phenomena Sacks describes. For one thing, Sacks appears to be more at ease discussing patients than discussing experiments. And he tends to be rather uncritical in accepting scientific findings and theories.

H  It’s true that the causes of music-brain oddities remain poorly understood. However, Sacks could have done more to draw out some of the implications of the careful observations that he and other neurologists have made and of the treatments that have been successful. For example, he might have noted that the many specific dissociations among components of music comprehension, such as loss of the ability to perceive harmony but not melody, indicate that there is no music center in the brain. Because many people who read the book are likely to believe in the brain localisation of all mental functions, this was a missed educational opportunity.

I  Another conclusion one could draw is that there seem to be no "cures" for neurological problems involving music. A drug can alleviate a symptom in one patient and aggravate it in another or can have both positive and negative effects in the same patient. Treatments mentioned seem to be almost exclusively antiepileptic medications, which "damp down" the excitability of the brain in general; their effectiveness varies widely.

J  Finally, in many of the cases described here the patient with music-brain symptoms is reported to have "normal" EEG results. Although Sacks recognises the existence of new technologies, among them far more sensitive ways to analyze brain waves than the standard neurological EEG test, he does not call for their use. In fact, although he exhibits the greatest compassion for patients, he conveys no sense of urgency about the pursuit of new avenues in the diagnosis and treatment of music-brain disorders. This absence echoes the book’s preface, in which Sacks expresses fear that "the simple art of observation may be lost" if we rely too much on new technologies. He does call for both approaches, though, and we can only hope that the neurological community will respond.