Electricity Makes Us Dull

www.sciencedaily.com...

Blame smartphone alerts, constant connectivity and a deluge of media for our society's sleep deprivation. But the root cause of why we get less sleep now than our ancestors did could come down to a much simpler reason: artificial light.

New research comparing traditional hunter-gatherer living conditions to a more modern setting shows that access to artificial light and electricity has shortened the amount of sleep humans get each night.

I think we can all confirm this. If you have artificial light you tend to use it at night.


www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...

Sleep deprivation is commonplace in modern society, but its far-reaching effects on cognitive performance are only beginning to be understood from a scientific perspective. While there is broad consensus that insufficient sleep leads to a general slowing of response speed and increased variability in performance, particularly for simple measures of alertness, attention and vigilance, there is much less agreement about the effects of sleep deprivation on many higher level cognitive capacities, including perception, memory and executive functions. Central to this debate has been the question of whether sleep deprivation affects nearly all cognitive capacities in a global manner through degraded alertness and attention, or whether sleep loss specifically impairs some aspects of cognition more than others. Neuroimaging evidence has implicated the prefrontal cortex as a brain region that may be particularly susceptible to the effects of sleep loss, but perplexingly, executive function tasks that putatively measure prefrontal functioning have yielded inconsistent findings within the context of sleep deprivation. Whereas many convergent and rule-based reasoning, decision making and planning tasks are relatively unaffected by sleep loss, more creative, divergent and innovative aspects of cognition do appear to be degraded by lack of sleep. Emerging evidence suggests that some aspects of higher level cognitive capacities remain degraded by sleep deprivation despite restoration of alertness and vigilance with stimulant countermeasures, suggesting that sleep loss may affect specific cognitive systems above and beyond the effects produced by global cognitive declines or impaired attentional processes. Finally, the role of emotion as a critical facet of cognition has received increasing attention in recent years and mounting evidence suggests that sleep deprivation may particularly affect cognitive systems that rely on emotional data. Thus, the extent to which sleep deprivation affects a particular cognitive process may depend on several factors, including the magnitude of global decline in general alertness and attention, the degree to which the specific cognitive function depends on emotion-processing networks, and the extent to which that cognitive process can draw upon associated cortical regions for compensatory support.

www.phrases.org.uk...

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise

The length and precision of this proverb leave little room for interpretation as to its meaning.

In 1928, Carl Sandburg suggested that 'Early to bed and early to rise and you never meet any prominent people'.

Using artificial light to enable late night socialising gets you places while stunting your spark and creativity. The world is run by prominent people deficient in creativity.

Less artificial lighting will boost our creativity and save money and the environment.

A source in emergency planning tells me electricity rationing in the UK is inevitable.

I'm looking forward to it.

I use a blue light filter on my phone. It seriously reduces migraines and helps you not be wide awake come bedtime.

I think the clarification to the wording artificial light should be to blue spectrum light.

a reply to: Iamthatbish

justgetflux.com...

It's not just the amount of sleep that's changed though. I remember reading that up until the mid 18th(?) Century, I think it was linked to the agrarian and/or industrial revolution (long time ago I read it so sorry if I'm a bit fuzzy) we actually used to sleep twice a day. Ever since the pressures of 'modern' life led us to take our sleep in one session we have suffered poorer quality sleep as well as shortening the amount of sleep we get.

a reply to: Iamthatbish

Good point.

a reply to: One_Love_One_GOD

Great link.

a reply to: HumberWarrior

This is very interesting.

Getting up at first light in the summer is the best way to achieve what has to be achieved in a peasant farming or hunter gatherer lifestyle. Sleeping during the hottest part of the day prepares you for working through the late afternoon/evening. Horses often sleep around ten o'clock in the morning. Presumably this is when predators are less likely to attack.

I sense a conspiracy here. The 'pressures of modern life leading us to take our sleep in one session' I read as industrialists and landowners forcing the peasants to exhaust themselves and thereby become less of a threat.

sleepfoundation.org...

Our internal circadian biological clocks, on the other hand, regulate the timing of periods of sleepiness and wakefulness throughout the day. The circadian rhythm dips and rises at different times of the day, so adults' strongest sleep drive generally occurs between 2:00-4:00 am and in the afternoon between 1:00-3:00 pm, although there is some variation depending on whether you are a “morning person” or “evening person.” The sleepiness we experience during these circadian dips will be less intense if we have had sufficient sleep, and more intense when we are sleep deprived. The circadian rhythm also causes us to feel more alert at certain points of the day, even if we have been awake for hours and our sleep/wake restorative process would otherwise make us feel more sleepy.

Changes to this circadian rhythm occur during adolescence, when most teens experience a sleep phase delay. This shift in teens' circadian rhythm causes them to naturally feel alert later at night, making it difficult for them to fall asleep before 11:00 pm. Since most teens have early school start times along with other commitments, this sleep phase delay can make it difficult to get the sleep teens need -- an average of 9 1/4 hours, but at least 8 hours. This sleep deprivation can influence the circadian rhythm; for teens the strongest circadian “dips” tend to occur between 3:00-7:00 am and 2:00-5:00 pm, but the morning dip (3:00-7:00 am) can be even longer if teens haven’t had enough sleep, and can even last until 9:00 or 10:00 am.

As a parent I feel one of the main harmful influences on children's health and mood is rushing them to get ready for school in the morning. School as we know it is more about creating submissive serfs rather than imparting information.

I can see what my political platform should be.

VOTE FOR ME AND GET DOUBLE BEDTIME!

Think I've found reference to the original stuff I read years ago. Pretty sure it was this guy.

Roger Ekrich

Have always felt the urge/need to sleep twice a day but have never been able to because of the way we live our lives in modern times. Even for children, society, even in less developed countries than those of Western society, such as India etc, is geared towards a similar model of one block of sleep. I don't think it was designed to keep us submissive, that has just been a handy side effect. I think it was just misuse of technology to extend the day whilst insisting on maximising use of all available daylight hours for production/profiteering.

Artificial light that isn't full spectrum has also been proven to be bad for our physical and mental health. Remember a project/study in one of the Scandinavian countries where a factory of some sorts that had high levels of sickness absence had it's entire fluorescent lighting system replaced with a full spectrum system and sickness/absence quite literally evaporated overnight to well below national averages. The workers were not told why the lighting system was being changed.

I'll see if I can dig anything up on that one at some point. I'm a bit slow at times as I really don't get much computer time.