> “I’ve got to tell you, we puzzled over that for at least a year, to try to really wrap our heads around whether we’re doing it right and what might explain su

> “I’ve got to tell you, we puzzled over that for at least a year, to try to really wrap our heads around whether we’re doing it right and what might explain such a pattern of results,” said Graff Zivin. I don't understand the reason for puzzlement. The result is straightforwardly intuitive. Discomfort is distracting, not to mention it takes a lot of energy to maintain homeostasis when it's either too hot or too cold. If anything, the researchers should be trying harder to falsify the obvious conclusion rather than dig up more reasons to believe it. Googling "temperature" and "productivity" leads to multiple articles explaining how different office temperatures influence workers' productivity. The sweet spot seems to be somewhere between 70F and 75F, and productivity decreases as the temperature moves away from this range. Why would children respond any differently to discomfort? Does anyone seriously believe that the temperature has absolutely no impact on productivity? So discomfort itself can be a confounding factor. I would very much like to know whether discomfort explains all the variance, or whether there's something else about high temperatures that affects the human brain in a different way. (Are our brains like CPUs that need to throttle down when they get too hot?) Likewise, I'd like to know whether acclimatization can explain the lack of long-term effects, because if so, the "global warming is making us stupider" angle is just plain stupid.