Comment by polyfractal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by polyfractal | Hacker News Reader

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sigh Fine, here are more articles. If you don't want to believe in peer-reviewed academic literature, I'm not sure why I'm bothering. Statistically significant results can be obtained with few participants. Behold the power of math.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23926261

Nocturnal light exposure impairs affective responses in a wavelength-dependent manner.

>Our results demonstrate that exposure to LAN influences behavior and neuronal plasticity and that this effect is likely mediated by ipRGCs. Modern sources of LAN that contain blue wavelengths may be particularly disruptive to the circadian system, potentially contributing to altered mood regulation.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23358248

Out of the lab and into the bathroom: evening short-term exposure to conventional light suppresses melatonin and increases alertness perception.

>Subjective alertness was significantly increased after exposure to three of the lighting conditions which included blue spectral components in their spectra. Evening exposure to conventional lamps in an everyday setting influences melatonin excretion and alertness perception within 30 min.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21298068

Non-visual effects of light on melatonin, alertness and cognitive performance: can blue-enriched light keep us alert?

Exposure to light at 6500K induced greater melatonin suppression, together with enhanced subjective alertness, well-being and visual comfort. With respect to cognitive performance, light at 6500K led to significantly faster reaction times in tasks associated with sustained attention (Psychomotor Vigilance and GO/NOGO Task), but not in tasks associated with executive function (Paced Visual Serial Addition Task). [...] Our findings suggest that the sensitivity of the human alerting and cognitive response to polychromatic light at levels as low as 40 lux, is blue-shifted relative to the three-cone visual photopic system. Thus, the selection of commercially available compact fluorescent lights with different colour temperatures significantly impacts on circadian physiology and cognitive performance at home and in the workplace.

good digging. upboats!

i'm impressed with someone's ability to ask for someone else to do research, and then be snooty when someone finds it for them. I thought that the effects of blue light on circadian rhythms was clear-cut, popular knowledge.

http://justgetflux.com/research.html

It's on their website. No one did any "research" except the people who made F.lux.

This trickery may work on Reddit (I know you're from Reddit because you use carets to denote quotations), but allow me to repeat myself:

Why hasn't anyone done a study on specifically what f.lux attempts to do? Sure, light at night causes people problems sleeping, but does f.lux actually make a difference? Can we quantify that difference in a way that controls for the fanboy (formerly known as placebo) effect?

> (I know you're from Reddit because you use carets to denote quotations)

What? People have been doing that for very many years. Here's TBL doing it in 1991 (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.hypertext/eCTkkOoW...)

We don't disagree.

Haha, what? That is the most bizarre insult? argument? that I've seen in a while. People use greater-than characters all the time for quotations. It's been used in email forever. But bonus points for trying to be edgy I guess.

To your question: All the studies are basically examining the principle that f.lux operates on. Shift colors away from blue and you can limit the decrease in melatonin production. I don't understand your question?

If you mean, "why has no one done a study on f.lux itself?", then I'm assuming no one has done a study on f.lux per se because (I'm just guessing here) no serious academic researcher really gives two shits about a piece of software on the internet.

However, that doesn't mean their research cannot be applied. F.lux is applied science, working on a fairly solid base of academic research. Real science with, yunno, quantifiable and statistically significant results. It isn't "fanboyism" or "science"...it is peer-reviewed literature.

The articles I linked specifically talk about how spectral blue light decreases melatonin production (a hormone directly related to how sleepy you feel at night) and a corresponding increase in alertness.

Doing a little extrapolation, if you decrease the amount of blue light that you are exposed to in the evening you decrease the impact on melatonin production and increased alertness.

So sure, I doubt anyone has stuck a person in front of f.lux and measured salivatory melatonin levels...but they have done the equivalent with blue and red lights. It isn't reaching to say that f.lux is doing exactly the same thing.

Did you know monitors leak anywhere from some to a lot of white light, depending on age and quality (if you turn off the lights in your computer room some time and load up a black page, is it completely dark in the room? Ever wonder why not?)? F.lux can't change the color of that light, and so the question becomes: is that leaked white light enough to negate the benefit seen in the studies?

So I bet you can imagine my persistent confusion with your linking to what amount to irrelevant studies, when this question is the one I've been asking over and over again. When you say "have done the equivalent with blue and red lights", you are absolutely, 100% wrong. It is extremely reaching to say that F.lux is doing the same thing, if you know how monitors work.

> "Melatonin is a circadian hormone transmitted via suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the hypothalamus and sympathetic nervous system to the pineal gland. It is a hormone necessary to many human functions such as immune, cardiovascular, neuron and sleep/awake functions. Since melatonin enhancement or suppression is reported to be closely related to the photic information from retina, in this paper, we aim further to study both the lighting condition and the emotional self-regulation in different lighting conditions together with their effects on the production of human melatonin. In this experiment, five participants are in three light exposure conditions by LED backlit computer screen..."

Stop being an ass.

5 participants.

Stop getting emotional.

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