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posted by martyb on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the need-e-readers-that-are-light-*absorbing* dept.

According to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science: using a light emitting e-reader before sleep may be counterproductive.

You may think your e-reader is helping you get to sleep at night, but it might actually be harming your quality of sleep, according to researchers. Exposure to light during evening and early nighttime hours suppresses release of the sleep-facilitating hormone melatonin and shifts the circadian clock, making it harder to fall asleep at bedtime.
...
"Our most surprising finding was that individuals using the e-reader would be more tired and take longer to become alert the next morning," said Chang. "This has real consequences for daytime functioning, and these effects might be worse in the real world as opposed to the controlled environment we used."

Originally spotted on phys.org, this story is based on research at Pennsylvania State University.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by WillAdams on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:20PM

    by WillAdams (1424) on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:20PM (#128672)

    Really? iPad at max brightness for 4 hours fixed in a stand and participants were not allowed to adjust it nor hold it --- the printed matter was indirectly illuminated and "participants were allowed to hold the book at any desired distance from their eyes"

    Also, the sample size is quite small "12 people over 5 days"

    The writeup also fails to note that not all Nooks are LCD screen devices, some have e-ink.

    • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:30PM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:30PM (#128678)

      I thought the consequences of reading with a blue light were fairly well known. An e-reader with non-LED illumination should be fine. With Android based readers, some also have settings that will change the light to non-blue as well.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by dyingtolive on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:32PM

      by dyingtolive (952) on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:32PM (#128680)

      Yeah, a lot of the details are a little dodgy, but I think the theory is sound. I've been using f.lux for the last 6 months or so, and I think it helps with making you get tired more naturally as night progresses. Might just be me getting more aware of the time from the cues of the monitors dimming, but it certainly cuts back on eyestrain more than I thought it would.

      --
      Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by GeminiDomino on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:34PM

        by GeminiDomino (661) on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:34PM (#128761)

        I've been using f.lux for a couple of years now. The "news" here is apparently "oh yeah, it goes for tablets, too."

        --
        "We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @07:24PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @07:24PM (#128741)

      Even those with e-ink displays have a backlight for reading in darker surroundings.

      Still, would not setting up led lighting have pretty much the same effect? One would think that sleep patterns have been wonky ever since electric lighting was introduced.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:41PM

        by HiThere (866) on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:41PM (#128762) Journal

        It actually has to do with the color of the light. Blue light tends to make you less ready to sleep, redder lights tend to have the opposite effect.

        Unfortunately, blue light also produces the sharpest edges to the images, making it the easiest to read under. Probably optimum would be a greenish to orangeish light, made by taking a normal "full spectrum light" and filtering out the highest blues, and dimming the others. (N.B.: We're talking photon energies here, not pigment mixing.)

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
        • (Score: 1) by legont on Wednesday December 24 2014, @02:42PM

          by legont (4179) on Wednesday December 24 2014, @02:42PM (#128914)

          Another way to interpret it would be that modern reading devices in general and blue light in particular make us more alert, while old paper books put us to sleep. Want to learn something? Use a pad. Want to doze off - use a book. e-readers should have a switch. I can see smart software that adjusts spectrum based on the contents of the text (and office management wishes:)

          --
          "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:44PM

        by HiThere (866) on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:44PM (#128763) Journal

        Most incandescent lights have most of their emission shifter towards the red. This causes less disruption to the sleep patterns than light shifted towards the blue, which is often typical of e-book illumination. Unfortunately, there are good reasons why that is desirable. Bluer lights produce sharper edges to the letters making it easier to read (as long as it's not TOO blue).

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
      • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday December 23 2014, @10:15PM

        by Freeman (732) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 23 2014, @10:15PM (#128778) Journal

        "In an E Ink display, no backlight is used; rather, ambient light from the environment is reflected from the surface of the display back to your eyes. As with any reflective surface, the more ambient light, the brighter the display looks. This attribute mimics traditional ink and paper, and users of E Ink displays have said that they do not have the same eye fatigue as with LCDs when reading for long periods of time." http://www.eink.com/technology.html/ [eink.com]

        --
        Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
        • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday December 23 2014, @10:25PM

          by Freeman (732) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 23 2014, @10:25PM (#128784) Journal

          I have a Nook Simple Touch and it is by far a much nicer reading experience than an LCD screen. The original Nook suffered from poor design. The Nook design was greatly improved starting with the Simple Touch and continuing with the Nook Glowlight (Simple Touch with white LEDs embedded in the bezel). It is also simple to add books from Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ [gutenberg.org] to my Simple Touch.

          --
          Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
  • (Score: 1) by jeremylavine on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:30PM

    by jeremylavine (2709) on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:30PM (#128679)

    A study showing that use of true e-readers with e-ink displays caused harm would be interesting, but that's not what is described in this article.

    Chang and colleagues observed 12 adults for two weeks, comparing when the participants read from an iPad, serving as an e-reader, before bedtime to when they read from a printed book before bedtime.

    I thought it was quite widely-known that using glowing white screens on computers and tablets at night makes it harder to go to sleep. There are various applications and approaches to dim or darken the screen to reduce the effect.

    • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday December 23 2014, @06:52PM

      by jmorris (4844) on Tuesday December 23 2014, @06:52PM (#128729)

      A study showing that use of true e-readers with e-ink displays caused harm would be interesting...

      Yea, an iPad is not an eReader. But I guess since Apple hasn't invented ePaper yet it doesn't exist in the press yet. When the article starts with the researchers making such a fundamental error it is really hard to give any consideration to any conclusions they think they have come up with. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

      Junk Science defined would be my final word on this article. Keep it in mind when reading any other science articles, they are all written by the same clueless organizations. We are tech people here and easily saw the flaw in this bunch of idiots (the researchers, the peer review process, the popular media, all of them) but when the story is about a field most of us here do NOT know so much about we should assume it is equally flawed until proven otherwise. Science is no longer deserving of our assumption of accuracy.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:36PM (#128682)

    It doesn't sound like the study took into account the color temperature of the back-lighting. But it is well known that the more blue the light, the more it screws up your circadian clock. [nih.gov]

    FWIW, I am in the process of renovating my house and I want to put led lighting in everywhere, but I want to be able to control the color temperature so that during the day it will be blue, like mid-day sun, but in the evening very yellow so it won't interfere with my ability to go to sleep. Unfortunately the only options I've found have been very expensive and not in the right form factor (mostly the phillips hue bulbs).

    • (Score: 2) by mth on Tuesday December 23 2014, @04:07PM

      by mth (2848) on Tuesday December 23 2014, @04:07PM (#128688) Homepage

      One option would be to have different light sources for daytime and nighttime. For example a strong overhead cold light for the day and lower intensity warm indirect or spot lights for the night.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @07:54PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @07:54PM (#128748)

      Look into the flexible, color changing LED strips from places like wholesale-leds.com and ledwholesalers.com. It isn't too difficult to wire up a programmable interface to those strips and have them do anything you want. I have DSPS and use blue-blocking safety glasses to help regulate my circadian rhythm. The red from those LEDs looks normal through the glasses meaning they aren't putting out any blue unless you want them to. I plan to do the same thing you're working on and I will be using those lights. A starter-kit with a 150 LED strip is around $30.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by buswolley on Tuesday December 23 2014, @04:18PM

    by buswolley (848) on Tuesday December 23 2014, @04:18PM (#128689)

    I'm a big believer in melatonin supplementation once in middle adulthood. The literature is full of potential and real benefits while the negative side effects appear trivial or non-existent. A very powerful antioxidant. Anti-aging, anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory, weight-loss mechanisms related to the regulation of circadian cycle...which is disrupted by all our late night screen watching...just a huge host of things. Do some Google scholar searches and be amazed. I was, and I'm naturally a skeptic ab out these things.

    --
    subicular junctures
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Foobar Bazbot on Tuesday December 23 2014, @05:15PM

      by Foobar Bazbot (37) on Tuesday December 23 2014, @05:15PM (#128703) Journal

      Exactly.

      If you want a good night's sleep and to be able to get up in the morning, your options are to take control of all blue light (regardless of whether it comes from a light bulb, a computer display, or anything else) in your environment and limit it to a nature-mimicking profile, curtailing your activities as required, or to take a pill once a day, and do whatever you like with the lights, screens, etc. Be a slave of your own biochemistry, or hack it and live your life as you choose?

      At one time I tried setting screens to warm colors in the evening, using f.lux and the like, but the complexity of the task was overwhelming -- in addition to the sheer number of displays that I might spend substantial time gazing into on any particular evening, I'd have had to find quite a few pieces of software, and learn all their configurations, because those screens were run by Windows, desktop Linux, Maemo, Android, and WebOS. And then there's the simple fact that I don't like warm color temperatures -- after getting a few devices sorted, and simply resolving not to use the remaining ones in the evening, I was more frustrated by the sick orange cast over everything than by the limitation on other devices.

      Now I take a melatonin pill at 20:00 every evening, and set my screens how I like them.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @06:35PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @06:35PM (#128726)

        Because trying to compensate for unhealthy behaviour with drugs has always worked out totally great.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @07:14PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @07:14PM (#128739)

          Melatonin is a hormone produced inside the brain (pineal gland) and production is suppressed by mainly blue light sources reaching the eye.

          • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:18PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @08:18PM (#128755)

            And 3mg is a huge amount. For FIXING sleep disorders, the lowest possible dosage is recommend. Meaning a couple drops of the liquid or 1/4 or less of a normal pill (it's easier to crush them and do it by weight rather than attempt to slice up the pills). The amount you buy in the stores is for knocking you out in the middle of the day. It doesn't last long in your system and is completely different from a slow, natural release of melatonin building up to when you fall asleep and gradually tapering off as you sleep. At 1.5mg+ it isn't effecting your circadian rhythm. So if you're staying up late with bright lights, then your rhythm is being pushed forward. Taking 3mg isn't fixing that, it's knocking you out. Either you're going to be sleeping longer or you're going to be waking up in the middle of what your body thinks is night. You might have been asleep for 7-8 hours, but your body was only in 'sleep mode' for maybe 4 or 5 of those hours.

            Side effects of melatonin are numerous and include depression, sexual dysfunction, 'foggy' mind, potential long term eye damage, reliance on melatonin pills for sleep, and circadian rhythm disruption (getting DSPS, N24, or ASPS and you REALLY don't want one of those). There have been no studies to determine if long term use is safe and there's more and more evidence slowly building up that it isn't safe over the long term. There's a new study that's close to publication. Just one day of bright lights just before sleep and bright lights right after waking was causing a 2.5 week disruption of circadian rhythms in rats.

            Melatonin isn't a wonder hormone/drug.

            -From a sighted N24 sufferer.

            • (Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Wednesday December 24 2014, @01:36AM

              by Foobar Bazbot (37) on Wednesday December 24 2014, @01:36AM (#128810) Journal

              At 1.5mg+ it isn't effecting your circadian rhythm.

              Seems like it is. See this paper [jphysiol.org] presenting a phase response curve for 3mg dosage. Is there a reason to dismiss this paper?

              It's really simple (at least for me, with an electrical engineering degree) to understand and use the effect of melatonin on the circadian rhythm -- it's really just a phase-locked loop. It's much less simple to deal with other aspects of melatonin, such as the acute soporific effect or the various side-effects you mention, and I welcome any information on them. But when you don't cite anything, and you seem to be wrong about the one aspect I do know a little about, you make it awful tempting to dismiss you altogether.

              Anyway, if 3mg is "for knocking [me] out in the middle of the day", it does a pretty poor job of it. As I said, I take one pill (3mg) at 20:00, and I generally sleep from 00:00 to 08:00. I agree that 3mg is way more than needed -- at first I took approximately 1mg (break a 3mg pill, pick a piece/pieces totalling about 1/3, and discard the rest) out of concern that 3mg would have the claimed "knock-out" effect, and it worked fine. But out of curiosity, I decided to try 3mg for a week, and couldn't tell any difference. (Everything I read says the 3mg dose should be at least making me drowsy, but it doesn't! Really wish I knew why...) For now, I'm taking the whole pill out of laziness.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 25 2014, @12:31AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 25 2014, @12:31AM (#129015)

                I take 3-6 mg. But I only use it once or twice a month.

  • (Score: 1) by ilPapa on Tuesday December 23 2014, @05:03PM

    by ilPapa (2366) on Tuesday December 23 2014, @05:03PM (#128699) Journal

    I was beginning to think the reason I wasn't sleeping well had to do with all the cocaine. Now I'll just get rid of the tablet (though it works pretty well as a cocaine chopping board).

    --
    You are still welcome on my lawn.