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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday December 19 2019, @08:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-blues-may-be-good-for-you dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Not such a bright idea: why your phone's 'night mode' may be keeping you awake

"Night mode" is one of those features you may be aware of only because your phone keeps telling you about it. At some point while you are lying in bed at night sending texts, your screen may politely suggest you activate a function that shifts the colours of your screen from the colder to the warmer end of the spectrum. It is supposed to help you sleep better.

Findings in a study led by Dr Tim Brown and published in Current Biology suggest this is the very opposite of correct. The research, carried out on mice, appears to rubbish the notion that blue light disrupts sleep. All things being equal, warm yellow light is worse.

[...] According to the study, brightness levels are more important than colour when it comes to stimulating the body clock. However, when the light is equally dim, blue is more relaxing than yellow.

This makes basic sense: daylight is yellow, twilight is blue, and sunrise and sunset are pretty reliable ways to tell your body clock what time it is. Of course, at this point, we only know it works on mice – and mice don't have phones. "We think there is good reason to believe it's also true in humans," says Dr Brown.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by dltaylor on Thursday December 19 2019, @10:10AM (1 child)

    by dltaylor (4693) on Thursday December 19 2019, @10:10AM (#934142)

    Mice are nocturnal. Human are, mostly, diurnal (personally, I have a nasty case of delayed sleep phase, verified in a sleep study). There is no objective reason why the influence of the color of ambient light should be in any way similar between mice and humans. Logically, since mice sleep during the day, daylight colors SHOULD make make them sleepy.

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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19 2019, @11:54AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 19 2019, @11:54AM (#934161)

    You are being timeist... some mice self-identify as diurnal (typically the pink-haired ones with multiple piercings).