And with a normal book?
I used to read in bed with a small reading light shining on the white pages...
Now I read on my Nexus 7 set as white text on black. Light levels are now much lower.
Not sure I'm worse off now
If you've popped an iPad under the tree, thanks for your generosity: you've given the gift of poor sleep, disrupted circadian rhythms and an increased chance of cancer later in life. So says a quartet of boffins* from Harvard's Medical School and Cologne's Institute of Aerospace Medicine, after they watched twelve normal …
The article is a bit lightweight as it's widely known that it's due to the colour temperature of the display particularly the blue part of the spectrum delaying the night-time peak of melatonin. Hence incadescent lighting which has a warm colour palette is a lot less of a problem than LED's - monitors, TV's etc.
There are programs/apps for adjusting the colour temp of your display at night - I use f.lux. Some people go as far as wear blue-blocker glasses at night.
If you wish to overdose on the metabolic effects of screwing your natural circadian rythms and how you might mitigate or manipulate them (and diet related matters) I highly recommend the blog/twiiter feed of Dr Bill Lagakos the author of "Calories Proper".
http://caloriesproper.com/
https://twitter.com/CaloriesProper
Yeah, search the Web for 'f.lux alternative for [android / iOS]' for your device. Some use the f.lux technique of just using time and location to set the white balance, some use the ambient light to fit in.
Anecdotally, I fall asleep in bed reading a conventional book or non-backlit Kindle under a warm GU10 LED within a few pages, whereas a monitor or tablet with a daylight-like white balance will keep me awake.
I use an app called Twilight to reduce the Blue in my phone display. it follows the daylight hours and gradually puts more red in the display as the evening progresses. It's very clever and i honestly think it has made a difference in my sleep when I use the phone before bed ( I had stopped using it as i found myself waking up more regularly and generally having crap sleep). It also means you don't blind yourself when work calls at 3AM.
While the results may be in, they are flawed. The devices used are a couple of Ipads, a Kindle Fire, a Nook tablet, and a Kindle (non-paperwhite).
The results for the kindle are similar to a paper based object, but there is no test of devices like the Paperwhite, Kobo Aura, etc.
Where did you find that? I read the paper and did not find information on the readers used, but in articles such as this one talking about the study it says they only used an iPad for the actual study (they measured the light from other devices for comparison).
I would be very interested to see the study repeated using some different devices, especially e-ink with reading light and OLED displays as well as LCD. Also different modes; these days I read before bed using FBReader in night mode (light text on a black background) with minimum brightness, and my sleep is actually the best it's been for years, but of course that's just a sample of one.
I used the link on the BBC report on this story. There was a separate document which listed the devices used. Not sure if most people can see it though, but my workplace has subscriptions to a lot of technical sites.
(Edit) Found the link: http://m.pnas.org/content/suppl/2014/12/18/1418490112.DCSupplemental/pnas.201418490SI.pdf
I spent a week and a fair bit of money on timber to build bookshelves for my own little library in my house, I shall continue to stock it with pieces of dead tree and take those to bed to read. I have a Tab3 and for no good reason that I can put my finger on, dislike it for reading books, however, I have no problem downloading and reading items from the Gutenberg Project on my Laptop or PC.
As an alternative, if you would like to protect your sleep patterns and your prostate, give up eBooks at bedtime get as many girlfriends as you can and interact with them before sleep as per the article published a while back by El Reg.
You can't. But this was probably the kind of study where participants tried all setups (normal book, kindle, probably no reading for control. I haven't read the research so I'm guessing here... But that research setup is called Repeated Measures) which increases the power quite a lot, and 12 subjects can give a surprising power if the study is correctly designed.
Of course you are right in that 12 people probably don't represent the general population, and even worse, were probably all college students. So, generalisability may be limited, but the small, quick study may be a really good start! (it would be crazy to start with hundreds of people. Expensive and unwieldy).
I think most people have said it already. Eliminate strong blue light at night, warm white led bulbs everywhere. Use Twilight for Android, and I have a lot of trouble on my Linux machine keeping Redshift going, so I don't use it much at night. Take 5mg of melatonin at night. In the morning, hit yourself with blue light. I use the Philips goLite which has blue leds.
My Imaginary Friend just whispered that this story was cooked up in the Black Ops Department of the Inter Galactic Bookbinder's Brigades.. His magic lantern illuminates the clandestine cadres of Luddism wherever they may be hunkering. Stay tuned for the thrilling climax of the blockbusting social network series disguised as comments..."Hoodwink".
I read the full report. They basically based their conclusions on iPads running at 100% brightness in a darkened room. With 12 subjects. With the subjects reading for 4 hours solid before trying to sleep.
How did this ever get classed as a valid study? Sorry, but even in my small scientific brain, this is not the way to do proper experiments.
YUK!
Alan
The new streetlights that are being installed in many cities are certainly bluish. The research here and in another paper I noticed seems to show that only a little short wavelength light can have a significant effect. Is there likely to be enough stray light from streetlights to cause the sort of problems mentioned? Should we be asking for warm white in addition to the energy saving dimming between midnight and five a.m.?
Am I the only person who finds that reading in bed is very uncomfortable especially if you are trying to keep your arms and shoulder warm. As a canny Scot, my bedroom heating goes off before I go to bed and the room cools down very rapidly. If you are sitting up propped by pillows, then you might as well be in an armchair elsewhere.