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Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

neuroai.science

41–50 of 257 posts

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#41
post #35

Night shift seems to have a very strong causal effect on my sleep cycles. Up until about ten years ago I was a night owl, rarely falling asleep before midnight and rarely waking up before 8. Then I started getting serious about light hygiene and using night shift and now I'm a serious day person, rarely staying awake after 11 and rarely waking up after 7. But the real clincher is that when I travel I don't change the…

>inspired me to do a control experiment

Delightful, see ya the 27th!

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#42

Blue light filters definitely work for me. But it needs to be a strong filter (quite a bit stronger than the strongest setting of Apple's built-in filter).

Yes, article title is clickbait. Partial filters don't work, but as they suggest, 100% filter of blue light (resulting in no blue light present), DO work.

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.

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#43
post #32

You can just do things. Not everything needs a study, you don’t have to justify yourself to anyone! Try things, if you like them, do them! Try not living a neurotic “study” based life, I am trying it and its pretty great!

(just nothing from Goop)

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#44
post #32

You can just do things. Not everything needs a study, you don’t have to justify yourself to anyone! Try things, if you like them, do them! Try not living a neurotic “study” based life, I am trying it and its pretty great!

Absolutely and this is something that can be tested rather easily. If blue filters aren't immediately helpful to eye strain then they probably don't work for you but if they are they probably do work for you.

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#45

If you aren't aware, your phone's screen can go much dimmer than the minimum brightness offered by the slider, if it supports HDR. There are apps that use an HDR screen overlay to lower brightness all the way down to the dimmest you can perceive. In my own experience, 'half' the brightness of 'minimum' brightness is plenty dark enough to not disturb sleeping at all if using my phone in bed.

Also for third-party monitors with MacBooks: BetterDisplay

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…

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#46
post #3

> Everybody wants better sleep 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.

What did you do to tackle your insomnia?

I spoke about it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnNPRqLVtaM

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#47
These are the kinds of articles that give science a bad name, and that make people anti-science.

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.

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#48
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you do to tackle your insomnia?

Primary, idiopathic insomnia doesn't really exist. It's almost always anxiety, although a few other mental and physical conditions can also cause it. But more likely anxiety.

That was my experience as well.

Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#49
post #9

They absolutely help my eyes not be so strained. If its placebo, its a working placebo. >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?

I'm not an MD or expert in this field enough to know if OP is right or wrong, but I think it's fairly reasonable to be irritated people are claiming software has a health benefit based on vibes/feels. 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…

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Re: Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet

#50
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so do placebos

So what? If I could take a sugar pill that guaranteed I feel comfier looking at my screen, nobody can tell me it "doesn't work". I'm not trying to optimise my life, I'm trying to have my eyes feel better.

Placebo and “manifesting”—the latter sounds mockable but pretty much the same thing, harmless if helpful so hey!
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