Hospitals are notorious for the many interruptions to the rest & recovery of their patients. Having been in one once or twice, I can testify that sleeping is hard due to the strange lighting. But I never dreamed how important it may become to have proper lighting. Linda Geddes reports in NewScientist (8 July 2017):
Up to a third of people are depressed in the weeks following a stroke, while up to three-quarters experience fatigue and poor sleep. “These symptoms can have an adverse effect on cognitive function, recovery and survival,” says West.
He presented data at the Society for Light Therapy and Biological Rhythms conference in Berlin in June, which showed that people recovering from strokes score lower for depression and fatigue, and show more robust circadian rhythms when exposed to solid state lighting. “The effect was comparable to giving patients antidepressants,” says [Anders West of Glostrup Hospital in Cophenhagen].
Hospital lighting also seems to have a dramatic effect on severe depression, which often involves a disrupted circadian clock with delayed sleep periods. At the Berlin conference, Klaus Martiny of the Psychiatric Centre in Copenhagen presented research showing that people being treated for severe depression were discharged almost twice as quickly if their rooms faced south-west in comparison with those whose rooms had a north-west aspect. Depending on the time of year, the intensity of daylight in the south-west rooms was 17 to 20 times brighter.
“These are very depressed patients who tend to stay in their rooms and isolate themselves, so they’re more exposed to differences in light intensity,” says Martiny. The 67 people in the study had been randomly assigned rooms, and those who stayed in the brighter rooms were discharged after 29 days on average, compared with nearly 59 days for those in darker rooms.
Solid state lighting follows the cycles of the sun as perceived here on Earth, starting in the morning with bright blue light, and then fading off as the day progresses. This imitation makes sense, of course, since we evolved in roughly such an environment, given locational variances.
I have to wonder how much our Western, age old belief that we are separate from the animal kingdom has contributed to the mental illnesses we now so often have to treat. It also has implications for space travel and future astro-colonialism. Will we genetically modify ourselves to properly process sunlight from, say, blue supergiants? Or will we engage in some futuristic accelerated evolution? Or will we restrict our colonial instincts to Earth lookalikes?
And, finally, what will be the backlash for the Abrahamic religions? Can a genetically modified human be an Evangelical Christian as well?
