Body later?
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@Marty Thanks - what you say is exactly right and what we would do if we could find another way to explain.
In a way, we heard a lot of other voices over the past few years that were talking about circadian timing and light in ways that were simply not right, and we wanted to explain that your body's rhythms are quite important and tend to work a certain way, whether or not you are a person who thinks they can achieve super-human feats of not sleeping, or whether you don't want to think about these things at all!
For instance, we hear people talk about all blue light being bad (ignoring perhaps that the sky is really blue), and so they use f.lux at strong orange settings during the daytime. It seemed first very important to us to explain that light is not at all like some kind of bad thing that you simply avoid. In fact, for most people seeking out more light is the best thing they can do.
While everyone knows about the night owls who stay up too late on a computer, there are a lot of people (usually older) who wake up well before they want to, and they need different advice to keep the schedule they would like.
We are saying here that there is a time of day when seeing bright light makes your clock run earlier and helps to improve its amplitude (meaning you will feel more alert in the daytime and more sleepy at night), and another time that makes it run later, when your body is expecting to wind down for sleep, so if it sees light, it acts as if the sun is still up and becomes later.
I have drawn hundreds of visualizations of this and tried to simplify it many times (we didn't really ship any of them), so this is a work in progress, and the best way to communicate it is still likely in the future. But if we can bring some awareness of how these systems work in the body and what it really takes to make them a little bit more healthy, it will be good.
I guess when we do this kind of thing, the idea is that we need to apply circadian ideas to many areas of life: to lighting our buildings of course, but also to when we eat, to when we take medicine, to "when" we require people to do their best work.
And so we think this complexity in a way is necessary to start that bigger discussion, and in that way we aren't saying "here is the perfect way to make a screen" because we think instead that we should be changing our houses, our workplaces, and many other things.
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@herf
"For instance, we hear people talk about all blue light being bad (ignoring perhaps that the sky is really blue), and so they use f.lux at strong orange settings during the daytime."I would recommend reading the work of:
- Douglas C. Wallace
- Dr. Alexander Wunsch
- Dr. Gerald H. Pollack
- Dr. Jack Kruse
This has to do with mitochondria and energy transfer. I am oversimplifying, because I am not at all an expert on these subjects and I will not use many words.
Basically sunlight balances the "blue" light with "red". Display devices do not. Blue has the effect of increasing the distance between the mitochondrial proteins. Red decreases the distance. In other words, relatively more blue slows down electron tunneling. Decreasing the amount of protons that can be pumped to make ATP. Effectively decreasing available energy per time. Less energy, more sick. No energy, death, no more time.
While blue has its "role" in remaining healthy. Changing one's environment by sitting inside, watching a blue screen has downsides over time. Of course these effects are small and will not be directly noticed. But small effects can result in big effects.
Other negative effects of chronic blue light expose from the top of my head:
- dehydration within the cell
- destroy DHA
Some books related to the subject discussed (some more than others):
- Epi-Paleo RX by Jack Kruse
- Health And Light by John Ott
- The Body Electric by Robert O. Becker, Gary Selden
- Cross Currents by Dr. Robert O. Becker
- Going Somewhere by Andrew Marino
- The Fourth Phase Of Water by Gerald H. Pollack
- Light in Shaping Life by Roeland van Wijk
- Light Medicine of the Future by Jacob Liberman
- The Healing Sun – Sunlight and Health in the 21st Century by Richard Hobday
- Life On The Edge by JohnJoe Mcfadden, Jim Al-Khalili
- Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane
- Life Ascending by Nick Lane
- The Vital Question by Nick Lane
- Oxygen by Nick Lane
- The Rainbow and the Worm - The Physics of Organisms by Mae-Wan Ho
- Living Rainbow H2O by Mae-Wan Ho
- Cosmosapiens by John Hands
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@rwvlasblom Nobody would say that a screen is a replacement for actual daylight, and this is not what we would claim either. But a screen used in the morning can have an effect on circadian timing. And mainly, the choices about how much daylight you let into your workspace during the day will have a big effect too. In this case, more light during the day is better, and brighter screens allow us to open the windows and enjoy the sunshine. People working in dark rooms are not helping themselves.
The rhetorical argument used by Kruse/Wunsch (distinct from the basic science) is incorrect because they talk about colors without considering intensity. This is not good science.
The effects that may happen in very extreme light levels (brighter than daylight) are not the same as the ones from domestic sources and screens. We're talking about differences of 100-1000x in intensity, and often more.
When you talk about any radiative hazard, you have to say what range of intensity is involved, and in this case, it's pretty clear that (because they're way too dim) screens do not cause harm in the first place that can be balanced with red light. And similarly, the spectra we're talking about are fundamentally similar to daylight.
I think everyone's missing that a blue sky is 20,000-50,000K - it's very blue. Only civil twilight gives us a "purple" spectrum (with red+blue), and this is again at lower intensity levels.
I wish these authors would do the work to explain their claims by bringing actual power units (how many photons per unit area, and which wavelengths) and relate them to existing studies, even if they're rodent models. The work I've done in measuring and modeling these effects says there isn't any risk here, and these claims are way off-base.
However, shutting yourself off from the sunlight all the day has a real risk, and we work hard to explain how this all works.
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@herf said in Body later?:
@rwvlasblom Nobody would say that a screen is a replacement for actual daylight, and this is not what we would claim either. But a screen used in the morning can have an effect on circadian timing. And mainly, the choices about how much daylight you let into your workspace during the day will have a big effect too. In this case, more light during the day is better, and brighter screens allow us to open the windows and enjoy the sunshine. People working in dark rooms are not helping themselves.
The rhetorical argument used by Kruse/Wunsch (distinct from the basic science) is incorrect because they talk about colors without considering intensity. This is not good science.
The effects that may happen in very extreme light levels (brighter than daylight) are not the same as the ones from domestic sources and screens. We're talking about differences of 100-1000x in intensity, and often more.
When you talk about any radiative hazard, you have to say what range of intensity is involved, and in this case, it's pretty clear that (because they're way too dim) screens do not cause harm in the first place that can be balanced with red light. And similarly, the spectra we're talking about are fundamentally similar to daylight.
I think everyone's missing that a blue sky is 20,000-50,000K - it's very blue. Only civil twilight gives us a "purple" spectrum (with red+blue), and this is again at lower intensity levels.
I wish these authors would do the work to explain their claims by bringing actual power units (how many photons per unit area, and which wavelengths) and relate them to existing studies, even if they're rodent models. The work I've done in measuring and modeling these effects says there isn't any risk here, and these claims are way off-base.
However, shutting yourself off from the sunlight all the day has a real risk, and we work hard to explain how this all works.
Thank you for the reply and the information you bring with it. I will read about this to find out of this is true.
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@TwoCables A choice of wording is correct precisely if it communicates the meaning that you intended to communicate to your intended audience. This absolutely does not do that (as you can tell by this thread existing), and as such the choice of wording is simply wrong: grammar doesn't enter into it. Good communication and UX design does.
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@bluesam3 Also, we have been designing f.lux as a tool you can use to control your body, and most people only expect it to control a screen.
Right now we are kind of living in the awkward moment between the two, and probably we will find better ways to make the two things separate & understandable in the future.
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As recommended, I read this article:
nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2017/advanced-medicineprize2017.pdfAs a native English speaker, I had no difficulty understanding it. It was full of references to "internal biological clock", "clocks in tissues throughout the body", "circadian clock", "circadian rhythm" and how these might be "entrained" or "synchronized" by external signals like light.
But there was no reference to the "body" being "late" or "early". I do not believe that the "body" being "late" or "early" is idiomatic English. I believe "the body's clock running late/early" or "your circadian rhythm being slowed down/sped up" is idiomatic English. Do these not communicate the desired message?
I understand that the science is advancing. And I understand that there's some reason to treat the whole "body" as a "clock", rather than to separate the concepts. But I think most everyone actually does understand that, and the accepted ways of denoting this concept are your "body's clock" and/or "circadian rhythm".
Certainly I think most people who are installing f.lux have at least a dim understanding that they are trying to get their body in sync with the sun, whatever that means exactly. And yet they are still rightly confused by the non-standard phrasing "your body is later".
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Post removed, replying to old threads to criticize other users is not okay. -ADMIN
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Saying, "The English can be "wrong" until the rest of the world catches up", is basically agreeing that the grammar is incorrect and that very few people will comprehend your non grammatically correct sentence. Grammatically correct sentences are made up a structure including nouns, verbs, etc. If you've decided to create your own grammar then it explains why most people won't know what you are trying to express.
Also, the body may have a circadian clock but the body consists of MANY other parts and systems that have nothing at all to do with clocks. It would be like saying, "An electrical outage is making the building later". Even if the building contains a clock that would not be a correct statement. "An electrical outage is making the clock in the building run late". would be correct.
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"Your body is made of clocks" is just not true. It may have rhythms but they are part of many other systems. Is my hair a clock? Is my tongue a clock? Etc.
