(www.neuroai.science)
>Are people actually using Night Shift? >Aggravatingly, yes.
What is the authors problem lol? It feels a lot better on eyeballs to use warm light things. Why does he care?
After doing that, I have found that the "temperature" of the screen doesn't really matter to me that heavily.
I used to have terrible headaches about 20 years ago when I started spending a lot of time in front of the screen. I went to an optometrist who tested my eyes and told me I could get low prescriptions (.5) but warned me that there's no way back and that many people are fine with my current vision, choosing not to get a prescription. Luckily I figured out that it was blue light that was bothering me and once I turned it down I haven't had any problems since. I'm in my mid 40s and my vision has naturally deteriorated a bit but I am still fine with no prescriptions.
And I don't believe this to be placebo. Every time I stare at a regular screen for longer than 5 minutes I get eye strain. At the same time I suspect this doesn't help everyone, but at least to me this is a great solution that still works.
[1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/do-glasses-make-your-eyes...
The weird thing is it seems to get noticeably worse or better depending on how much time I spend outside
Safe to say it works for making your eyes less tired at least.
I thought we as a society had moved on from superstition to evidence-based medicine, but in this very post there are plenty of replies countering OP's scientific analysis and data with anecdotes (which is disappointing regardless of if TFA is correct or incorrect).
Your eyes could hurt for a variety of reasons - brightness, too long screen time, being dry for external reasons, etc. Most humans are poor at identifying the cause of one-off events: you may think it's because you turned on a blue-light filter, but it actually could be because you used your phone for an hour less.
That's why we have science to actually isolate variables and prove (or at least gather strong evidence for) things about the world, and why doctors don't (or at least shouldn't) make health-related recommendations based on vibes.
Except they don't. This is evidence about one potential mechanism. Not evidence saying there are no other potential mechanisms.
This is actually a very common mistake in popular science writing, to confuse the two.
There are eight billion of us, we can’t all be different, there must be at least some categories we can’t be sorted in to, maybe those who find woollen clothing itchy and those who don’t, and those who find blue-light reduction more comfortable and those who don’t.
One of my pet theories is that this hyper fixation on The Ultimate Truth via The Scientific Method is what happens when a society mints PhDs at an absurd rate. We went up with a lot of people who learn more and more about less and less, and a set of people who idolise those people and their output.
Sometimes the causality is clear enough that you don't need sophisticated science to figure it out. Did you know that the only randomized controlled trial on the effectiveness of parachutes at preventing injury and death when jumping out of an airplane found that there is no effect? Given that, do you believe there really is no effect?
You are going to HATE to find out about night-mode in the browser
If you just like how something looks, that's fine, but there's a difference between "I like how X looks" (subjective opinion) than "X helps me sleep better" (difficult to prove but objectively true or false).
Edit: Changed this in my original message as it seems multiple people got confused by my prior poor wording.
Not invalid; suspicious.
Surely you didn't actually believe that unless you JUST landed here from space after being away for 60 years.
The the grift wheel on this particular bandwagon is strong. To the point where my fucking glasses have a blue filter on them, which fucks up my ability to do colour work becuase everything is orange.
I absolutely think this is the right approach. The glasses which do 'blue light filtering' which barely change your perception are clearly placebo, but a very strong redshift I think is obviously a different creature.
But they work.
Try things, if you like them, do them!
Try not living a neurotic “study” based life, I am trying it and its pretty great!
But my newly adopted dog had hip issues, and I bought a few months worth of a diet supplement in the hopes of doing something meaningf... dammit, it's glucosamine.
They claimed double-blind studies showed decreases in limping in just two months.
Two months, more or less, I stopped seeing him limp by the time we left the dog park. He still does sometimes, but it's rare - not every damn day, by any means.
We aren't that fricking different biologically from dogs in our skeletal attachment system. Maybe it's still a placebo, but it seems to defeat that idea. Maybe enough human issues are based on things that don't translate to dogs - sitting at a desk all day, eating junk food, walking upright... - that it helps them, but not enough of us.
Don't know. These GC supplements have convinced me it's worth my money, and he loves eating them, so he votes 'yes', too.
Unfortunately, the study that showed this used the same medicine my dog had been on, and since it was for epilepsy, I can totally believe that whether I thought it worked had no connection to its effectiveness.
My wife, on the other hand, is a hard-core night owl even with night shift. So apparently there is a lot of individual variation.
This article has inspired me to do a control experiment by switching night shift off. Check back here in a week or so for the results.
> light hygiene and using night shift
The OP article is primarily about separating the variables you lumped together.
Delightful, see ya the 27th!
1: https://www.blublocker.com/blogs/news/what-blue-light-blocki...
Blue light filters do not work for me because I fall asleep on command everyday all the time regardless if WW3 is outside.
BUT it also seems the effect of poor sleep seems to be MUCH worse for me than other people. I go from extreme motor coordination to dropping cups in a span of 3 days of poor sleep.
There’s a chemical called adenosine which accumulates over the day that induces sleepiness and there are genetic variations that can affect your susceptibility to it. Receptors notice the accumulation of adenosine and use it as a signal to “scale down.”
I think that I am more sensitive, explaining my ease of sleep but also the effect of it when it accumulates due to poor sleep (sleep flushes it away). Yeah it’s great when I’m in bed but it’s not great when I want to throw a ball and my brain wants to be stingy. It basically means that someone else’s “helpful guide to sleep” is completely different from my “helpful guide to sleep.”
Are you sleeping enough? When I was getting too little sleep, averaging 5.5 hours per night, this described me well. A single sleep interruption could make me lose most of a day of work. I'm sleeping better and longer now, and it seems I'm more able to tolerate small interruptions.
Similar to you, I also noticed that if I miss good sleep for several days, it stacks. I treat sleep like a battery. A day uses up 20% and good sleep fills it back up, but only like 30%. One missed night isn’t that bad but I also can’t recover several nights’ worth.
Teaches you to pay attention to "objective" colors. And at night, guess what, the colors get more red and less blue. I don't have to pull out as much blue paint for the night scenes.
It would be utterly naive to not thing that there's -- perhaps purely "psychological" (not sure if that's the exact concept but hey) effect by making the "white" on your screen, look like like the "white" you will definitely see in real life, which is going to be orange-r.
Blue creates a halo around letters that is distracting with my declining vision.
Also, Blue fluorescent OLED are ~50% less efficient than R/G phosphorescent OLED so you can reduce screen power consumption of a full white page by almost 30% using such a filter. That in turn might be 30% of active device power consumption (for a total of almost 10% in battery life during active operation). Ignoring that they also tend to burn out more quickly, since tandem blue has become fairly mainstream.
Many more reasons for these "filters", if you don't mind the white balance shift and reduced color gamut.
Can even use an external keyboard’s native brightness buttons. Can still use f.lux if desired too though Night Shift maybe Sherlocked there a bit…
You can get this with Apple's strongest filter, the color filter, in Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters, rather than night shift. Only red sub-pixels are illuminated with it. It can be added to the triple click power button accessibility shortcut.
That's what I use. I have a shortcut set to enable it when I put my AirPods in at night.
I agree with the premise that night shift and other color warmth features are insufficient to have a strong effect, though they do help with eye strain which is still a positive.
What about TikTok or Youtube?
That seems reasonable. The pseudoscience wankery that the fad has brought bothers me a lot too.
... but I'm not sure that's much of an argument against blue light filters, aside from color complaints. That seems to support that it's Useful and Good and is Achieving Its Intended Goal. It's reducing total luminance, because people prefer it over reducing screen brightness overall. I sure as heck do anyway (as night shift modes, they're a more comprehensive option than dark mode), though I think I'll experiment with just reducing brightness a bit.
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For melatonin in particular, fully agreed. The recent trend of "can't even get <5mg in stores, and >10mg is appearing regularly" in the USA is mind-boggling to me. AFAICT it's exclusively because it's a "supplement" and therefore practically unregulated, and these companies don't give a shit about anyone they harm, just profit.
Start with something like https://a.co/d/0dISg7oa (0.3mg, this is what I personally use) and go up from there, slowly.
Half is not a lot, sure, but their ultimate suggestion is to do the same ~half change:
>You can decrease the amount of light coming from your screen by more than half simply by dimming the screen by several notches.
which is definitely significantly more than I see people doing voluntarily in the hundreds of millions.
Do they have any evidence that people are raising system brightness to match the 50% loss from the filter? If not, it still seems like a rather significant mark in their favor. Perhaps not sufficient to meet the goals (they seem to be recommending a larger change, but aren't specific), but I see no claim that a lesser decrease in light is worse.
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Late edit: on second thought... let's go through this more rigorously.
The main explicit points in this article are, in order:
- night shift does not help with sleep (the main claim)
- blue light is not special, in particular because the "sensitive to blue" research is mis-quoted to mean "blue is bad", but it's actually sensitive to blue and green (seems very well supported)
- night shift reduces blue and green by about half (tested themselves)
- half of absolute is not a lot because vision is logarithmic (100% agreed)
- halving light affects 25%-50% of melatonin levels (linked research)
- many people use Night Shift (100% agreed, and they have decent data to back it up)
- dark mode is better than night shift (>90% vs ~50%, implied leaning on the linked research earlier)
- dimming your screen by several steps is the same or better than night shift (as it decreases brightness more, same reasoning as dark mode)
That still sounds rather in favor of Night Shift. It's targeting the correct color range (NOT the pseudoscience blathering), it has a moderate affect on melatonin levels at the light level changes it creates, and it's used by a huge amount of the population.
Nowhere in there that I can see is anything to back up "Night Shift does not work". Only "it seems to be doing things right, it just isn't quite enough on its own" and "ARGH it's not just blue light STOP PROMOTING FAD PSEUDOSCIENCE". That seems... fine? Most things are not silver bullets.
it's possible to split and separate them enough of course, but beyond "roughly half" it gets rather difficult. I've considered getting the liquid ones and a micro-dropper for smaller doses (if they'd even be small enough, many combinations are not), but 0.3mg pills are rather convenient and worth the small amount of money for me.
You might take a quick sec to look into the data. You can buy 5mcg on Amazon, although 5 mg is more common (and 10mg, and ...).
what I also haven't seen though is anything covering how well it's absorbed through your digestive system. 0.3mcg intravenously I can certainly see being effective, but orally? sublingually? not sure. but you've definitely got me interested in looking more :)
(initial results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin_as_a_medication_and_... implies it varies quite a lot, but I'm seeing it centering around 15%-ish many places. so you might want like 3mcg to hit normal levels? interesting)
You might as well try to claim hot tea doesn't help you get to sleep, or reading before bed doesn't, or whatever else you do to wind down.
I personally don't care if some narrow hypothesis about blue light and melanopsin is false. I know that low, warm, amber-tinted light in the evening slows me down in a way that low, cold, blue-tinted light does not. That's why I use different, warmer lamps at night with dimmers, and keep my devices on Night Shift and lower brightness. It works for me, and seems to mimic the lighting conditions we evolved with -- strong blue light around noon, weaker warmer light at sunset, weakest warmest light from the fire until we go to sleep. Maybe it doesn't work for everybody. That's fine. But it certainly does for me.
And maybe it's not modulated by melanopsin. Or maybe it's not about blue light, but rather the overall correlated color temperature (CCT), e.g. 2100K instead of 5700K. Who knows.
But this type of article is bad science writing. It shows why one hypothesis as to why a warmer color temperature would result in one other physiological change isn't supported. That doesn't mean "blue light filters don't work" as a universal statement. It's hubris on the part of the author to assume that this one hypothesis is the only potential mechanism by which warmer light might help with sleep.
And it's this kind of science writing that turns people off to science. I know, through lots of trial and error and experimentation, that warm light helps me fall asleep. And here comes some "AI researcher and neurotechnologist" trying to tell me I'm wrong? He says it's "aggravating" that people are "actually using Night Shift". I say it's aggravating when people like him make the elemental mistake that showing one biological mechanism doesn't have an effect, means no other mechanisms can either.
I don't know if I'd even give them that credit (emphasis mine):
> Halving the luminance, at best (around 20 lux baseline) might get you from 50% to 25% melatonin suppression.
No, it is attitude like yours that brings humanity a bad name.
"Blue light effects" have always had highly questionable evidence behind it, what has been sold and marketed under the guise of it has had _zero_ evidence behind it. But now that you are reminded that it is actually bullshit, you react with skepticism.
"Feels good to me" is hardly evidence to begin with. It's something that is even more flimsy than sociology. I have my doubts it should even be called medicine.
You have to remember that a shitton of people day after day "show" "evidence" that homeopathy works. Even though it has no plausible mechanism of action. So clear mechanism of action is about as important as the evidence itself. (see Science-based medicine)
I could understand (not justify) skepticism in many cases (such as "common wisdom" from 1000 years ago) but this particular topic should have raised your skepticism 20 years ago back when the craze/marketing stunt was starting, and not now.
Where did I say anything like that? Please don't mischaracterize my comment, that's not helpful. It's not that it "feels good", it's that it helps at least some people fall asleep more easily, and I know this from personal experience. And many, many other people have written that it does the same for them.
> "Blue light effects" have always had highly questionable evidence behind it... But now that you are reminded that it is actually bullshit
You're right that the evidence for it is questionable. But you know what else there's no conclusive evidence for? That hot herbal tea helps you fall asleep. Or soothing music. Or bedtime stories. Because the funding usually isn't there to perform the kind of large-scale studies required to establish these things, because it's just not a priority or even a good use of our dollars. And lack of evidence for, is not the same as evidence against.
My point is, nothing in this article does establish that it is "actually bullshit". That's a gross misreading of the science, and that's what I'm criticizing the article over.
People experiment with things and discover what works and what doesn't. Again, nobody's going around complaining that there's no scientific evidence lullabyes don't help put you to sleep. And neither lullabyes, nor turning your lights down to amber, have anything to do with homeopathy. You can't possibly suggest they're doing harm. People aren't using amber lighting at night instead of getting their cancer treated.
But for some reason, low amber lighting to help with sleep makes you and the article author upset? Why? Why does that make you upset, but not hot tea or lullabyes? Or do those make you upset too?
> And many, many other people have written that it does the same for them.
So people write for homeopathy. Homepathy actually is the precursor for using this type of "evidence" for development and study of new "drugs" (hint: this evidence ends up going nowhere useful, quickly).
> Or soothing music. Or bedtime stories. Because the funding usually isn't there to perform the kind of large-scale studies required to establish these things, because it's just not a priority or even a good use of our dollars.
Oh, there is. There are way more studies about this than you can possibly think of. There are medical journals reporting clinical experiences about this daily. You are saying this on an article about study about one of these, ironically enough.
> And lack of evidence for, is not the same as evidence against.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
> My point is, nothing in this article does establish that it is "actually bullshit".
Why not?
> But for some reason, low amber lighting to help with sleep makes you and the article author upset? Why? Why does that make you upset, but not hot tea or lullabyes? Or do those make you upset too?
You are the one who suddenly claims this makes people "anti-science", when this particular bullshit is not even 20 years old, and it was already known to be suspect 20 years ago. It is just ridiculous that it is now suddenly such a core belief of your persona that even being reminded that it is most likely bullshit is going to drive you to reject science outright.
As I said, I could at least _understand_ (but not justify) much older claims, such as ancient chinese practices or whatever. This makes they make me upset indeed (this is pseudoscience, after all), but what makes me even more upset is the creation of new pseudo-scientific or even anti-scientific "popular wisdom" _in this age_.
>> My point is, nothing in this article does establish that it is "actually bullshit".
> Why not?
I've already said it multiple times. Allow me to repeat myself:
> make the elemental mistake that showing one biological mechanism doesn't have an effect, means no other mechanisms can either.
You've written a lot, but you haven't understood that this is the core mistake of the article, and the core mistake of what you're trying to argue.
You reply with a reference to Russell's teapot, and that would be fine if you were merely trying to make the point that the effect of amber light on sleep has not been sufficiently proven. But you're the one literally calling it "bullshit", i.e. disproven. That's wrong. There's no high-quality study conclusively demonstrating it doesn't have an effect.
I also keep continuously putting the example of homeopathy because it is exactly the same. Homeopathy has plenty of (weak) evidence, but no known mechanism of action. All the proposed religious, memory of water, etc. have been disproved. Certainly you can argue that homeopathy could still be a thing because there could be some physical/biological mechanism that has not yet been disproved! But this is just nitpicking: homeopathy is still bullshit. In the same way that a teapot in space is bullshit.
Anything else is a (useless) nitpick.
In any case, even from day #1 it's been known that blue light could possibly have a mechanism, but there's always been a big stretch from there to claiming that blue light filters/night shift have an effect, and the evidence for the latter is substantially lacking. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/blue-light/
Amber light is not Russell's teapot. There's widespread anecdotal reporting that it helps with sleep. It's not something nonsensical like a teapot between Earth and Mars. And for you to suggest that they're the equivalent is, frankly, arguing in bad faith.
The world of knowledge is not divided, black-and-white, between things that are scientifically proven and "bullshit". Probably the vast majority of practical facts we rely on daily are not "proven" with empirical studies. That doesn't make them "bullshit". I hope you can understand that.
Maybe think on that a little bit.
I certainly stand by it now.
Bro, as someone who had brutal insomnia for a couple of years and now sleeps "normally" for whatever that means, I can tell you that I don't think about my sleep quality at all. I'm happy to be sleeping.
If you too sleep "ok" for whatever that means, maybe stop worrying about optimizing it and go do something else less insane.
Anecdata: 1) A good friend whose anxiety was largely alleviated (and sleep improved) by recognizing and treating their iron deficiency. 2) I have to (can't take the Western drug which was prescribed any more, and the Western doctors can't seem to bang the rocks together) take herbs for my hypertension but as opposed to the side effects I was experiencing from the drug I joke that all of the "side effects" from the herbs are good, they're targeting imbalances which were not recognized / treated previously and lo and behold I settle and sleep better... which helps reduce the blood pressure.