Portable sunshine: Earbuds that shine light into your ears
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
The brain isn’t designed to get light in to it. If your
brain is receiving light; there’s a hole in your head.
That’s not healthy!
There are a number of holes in your skull and your ears are two of them.
Whether or not the brain reacts to light is either proven or disproven depending on whether you find a flaw in this research or can conduct research that finds against it.
And I think there is something more than "either proven or disproven". If you claim you have an invisible dragon in your garage, it seems very unlikely that you are telling the truth. No need to run experiments for that. (brain and light might be more likely than invisible dragons, just making a point).
I think there is something more than "either proven or disproven".
This is not an invisible dragon: they have done an experiment and produced a result. If the effect is accurate, measurable and repeatable then it is fact.
If you can scientifically prove the existence of invisible dragons through experiment then I would be prepared to believe in them.
Have you ever seen a germ? An electron? A black hole? Here be dragons!
Do you know the invisible dragon story (I think by Carl Sagan)? It is not the same kind of invisible as an electron.
And the bit about science is nonsense. Once you have acquired some knowledge you can use it. For example once you have worked out physics, you can build bridges. You don't need to build 100 bridges for every bridge you want to build to verify that your bridge will stand.
It is true, I don't know the claim here is false. All I am saying is that it is unlikely to be true. That is not science of course. Nobody would publish a paper about a belief.
There are concepts like Occams Razor that are also part of science. We never know anything anyway - we only have degrees of belief.
This is not my field (and I assume it is not yours) so I cannot refute their claims. So far they have done an experiment and they have a significant result—in fact it is so significant that it is easily observable (10 out of 13 rather than the expected 6.5). There are three likely reasons for this result 1) Experimental error 2) Placebo effect 3) Brains react to light. The likelihood is probably in that order.
If they, or another team, can repeat this finding in a double-blind test then I will be comfortable in accepting it.
This is not bad science. It may be questionable business practice to move so soon on this (especially before a double-blind test) but it isn't total quackery.
What does 'pinnacle of evolution' mean? Sharks and spiders have been around since before dinosaurs so they must be there, surely?
Do we reach it if we hit a suitably low level of child mortality?
There is an argument that we are already at the pinnacle of evolution for our environment and we will remain there until something changes and we are tested and our children start dying. That mostly happens in chunks… everything is fine, everything is fine, everything is fine, bang meteor! although it can happen in smaller steps. Whether we are still evolving in the rich, medicalised west is a matter of debate. The third world certainly has many children dying but the cause is often not something that natural selection can fix: politics & war.
Light penetrates skin, tendon, and bone, albeit in ever smaller amounts. It is not impossible that the brain reacts to light.
Perhaps we should all be taking our earbuds off on sunny days?
If shining light on the brain actually changed the levels of activity, it would have an impact on entire neural circuits, not just on this one process. At least, that's how I see it.
If they got a statistically significant result given some alpha value, then that's a valid result, assuming the experiment itself was set up in a valid way (random sampling, controlled, double blind, etc.). Statistical significance tests take the sample size into account. A large enough difference can make up for a small sample size, and vice versa.
The Valkee company is financially backed by ex-Nokia execs and other people with money and influence in Finland. They have the means to get a small University in Northern Finland to make a study in their favor.
There have been interesting studies about light sensivity in the skin, so why not the brain. However, this study doesn't really prove anything.
Also, don't underestimate the value of placebo in the treatment of mental ailments.
Often its for a good reason for instance when looking at the effectiveness of a surgical procedure in a sub-group or the treatment for a reasonably rare condition. Sometimes it is because of the need to use a random or carefully selected bias group.
But, as a one-time criminologist's statistician used to samples in 1000s (or 100s at least), I have often concluded that it was just bad science.
It is also inconceivable that a University group like this would do that—If they did they would all be in serious trouble.
Ten out of 13 patients (76.9%) achieved full remission
It will be interesting to see what the double-blind survey finds.
What? It is trivially easy to find awful research from universities.
I've been involved (as a lay member of a research review panel) with university students who want to do clinical research. They come to the RRP with a proposal, and we walk through it and point out where they might have problems. It is amazing how many groups ignore things like small sample sizes or double blinding or control groups etc. Those are all basics that any student should have been aware of. And then there are the more subtle things like anonymising data or getting proper consent.
Having said all that, this news release link (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bright-light-into-th...) gives more information about methodology.
Note that they're researching SAD, which is not depression, and is rarer. Most people with depression don't show great results from light boxes.
I disagree that a team of researchers from a University of this standing that is composed like this would run study multiple times and cherry pick the dataset with the result they desire and if they did they certainly would be risking serious professional (if not criminal) damage.
The researchers are:
Markku Timonen1 M.D. Ph.D, Juuso Nissilä1, MSc.,
Heidi Jurvelin1, MSc., Anu Liettu M.D.,
Jari Jokelainen1, M.Sc., Antti Aunio MSc. ,
Pirkko Räsänen3, M.D. Ph.D., Timo Takala M.D. Ph.D.
It's also trivially easy to find doctors who are idiots and wingnuts who believe obvious nonsense.
Having light sensitive cells inside your head (in other places than eyes) obviously sounds ridiculous if you believe in intelligent design. However if you think about evolution and how it works, I would say there is pretty good chance all our cells do not have just the functions they absolutely need to have.
This class of traits is something that Steven J Gould named as evolutionary spandrels. So in practice, I would expect the ultraviolet receptors in the skin to have at least one meaningful function. The fact that exposing people to ultraviolet light changes their hormonal balance would tend to suggest this as well. They're definitely doing something.
As a separate argument, a creationist could also provide some information theoretic arguments for why some cells have pointless features. Unnecessary complexity in a biological organism, like in any other computer program, is a dangerous risk. As risk management, we might want to handle that danger by accepting a harmless redundancy and not building an additional subsystem that chaotically interacts with all our other subsystems.
Then again, maybe they are. It's just too suspicious.
At home we have a 600W halogen that is much yellower than our 400W daylight box. Subjectively the daylight bulb feels much more natural. That's not to say there are or aren't any benefits for SAD/depression of course.
'natural' until you look out the window to see it's dark, of course. For that reason I tend to prefer the halogen if I want light in the evening - the yellow tone provides plenty of light without trying to pretend that it's daytime.
Other light sources, such as white LEDs can produce 5700 K light, but their spectrum is actually much different from solar. They can get away with emulating 5700 K with only two or three wavelengths, while a black body emits approximately continuously throughout the wavelengths (this is due to the way correlated colour temperature is calculated; incandescents and the sun waste a lot of energy on non-visible infrared wavelenghts).
For electricity efficiency purposes, LEDs are great, because they don't waste electricity generating wavelengths we don't see (or ones that are cancelled out by other wavelengths). But for SAD, white light is likely not the requirement; our eyes have cells that have different sensory response based on wavelength -- apparent colour is an afterthought. Some of these cells are thought to affect SAD through melatonin inhibition, so the big question would be: what wavelengths are these cells most sensitive too, so we can optimize lights for them? Some cursory googling says that the jury is still out on that one.
tl;dr: colour temperature of light isn't what we should be optimizing for when dealing with SAD, because our eyes have spectrum sensors, not colour sensors. Be wary of marketing hype because you can likely get away with $1 lightbulbs, instead of $300 lamps.
Also my first question was regarding its side effects, evolution is just something i used to support my question, but my question in general still remains unanswered..
Still irrelevant, evolution isn't an intelligent concept that looks at every option and picks out the best solutions. What's more, evolution isn't something that happened in the past, it's still happening; we are not the best possible animal, we are probably not the best possible human.
The eyebrow might also have never been of any competitive advantage without also being a hindrance in any way.
Evolution is all about the death of children. If a mutation leads to the death of its carrier before they can reproduce then it will be naturally selected out of the gene pool. Anything that isn't removed in this way will still remain.
In a smaller way if a mutation helps a parent (or other relation) to raise more children to adulthood then more copies of the mutation will appear in the gene pool.
All mutations start out without a use. Maybe the advantage that an eyebrow brings has yet to be realised.
Darwin was clear about this, sadly the eugenics movement of the late Victorian age were not.