Gigaom:
An eye doctor says he’s recently seen a few 35-year-old patients whose lenses, which are typically clear all the way up until around age 40, are so cloudy they resemble 75-year-olds’. A sleep doctor says kids as young as toddlers are suffering from chronic insomnia, which in turn affects their behavior and performance at school and daycare. A scientist finds that women who work night shifts are twice as likely to develop breast cancer than those who sleep at night.
What do all these anecdotes have in common? Nighttime exposure to the blue light emanating from our screens.
Considering I’ve spent the last 20 years staring at a computer screen for 10 hours a day, I read this article with great interest and a lot of worry.
f.lux is a great little app for OS X which softens the blue glow. Also available for jailbroken iOS devices.
https://justgetflux.com
Natural Light
– Morning 500-590 nm (Red-Orange) light
– Midday – 450-475 nm (Blue) light
– Afternoon – 590-620 nm (yellow, orange, red)
Incandescent Light 620-750 nm (Red)
Compact Fluorescent Light 500-570 nm (Green)
LED Light 450-475 nm (Blue light)
Saved me the click. I was just going to post this link. The app works great.
Humans evolved for millions of year with
just fire as light and going to sleep after sunset.
Even farmer followed this routine.
Artificial light mimic the Sun.
If you don’t get enough sleep
the brain doesn’t record its memory,
Body’s immune functions don’t recharge and
clean up while sleeping.
Steve Jobs was famous for not sleeping
even after he got the diagnosis of Cancer.
He didn’t slow down.
especially in a society that doesn’t value sleep.
Humans have higher rate of cancer than any other animal
because they live far away from they evolved which
is the African dry grasslands. with lots of Sun,
low sugar, low fat, law salt.
Modern life will be the undoing of so called Smarted Species
ever created by Evolution.
might want to run your “smart” essay through a basic grammar check
And one of those symptoms—cancer incidence in shift workers—long predates computer use.
Humans are extremely adaptable. Astronauts aboard the ISS have had to deal with night and day cycles that aren’t natural yet adapt. They even have to re-adapt to terrestrial life after returning because of that. Alaskans, Northern Canadians, Scandinavians, and Northern Russians have adapted to widely changing light patterns for eons now. Sleep patterns vary by age, location, and circumstances.
That is, however, completely different from looking at a glowing screen all day long.