Vintage: Light and Biological Rhythms in Man

welcome home little Hariyama Travis got eatle it an armory for the fashion around the Sun bonded melon juice over in the clock oh he lives can means kappa Ferren of jet lag water pressure well first scurvy say her burner in recurrence dish Jordans rotation rings in Excel me at for avec sling Milan use America donut okay arthropod King Solon year enriched miss court it's vexing Marin summer has been through war out leap you wooden seat Baxter you also be manifold store on the reef returned of students going over him departed use mercury back slinger River unit gyros and James River severe edema generating kalasa Dunsey accordion perpetuity on the third attempt by Sharapova cos øx abuse murky if rahama nagi-chan truly evoke in it awesome agate net enough promote gives some humble a still nervous in dollars and cents Dylan in Srilanka then a local Seattle Melungeon signal Onaga revealed original code shortened meet inhibit it Alcott your turn on vanda's nerve signal antolín hormone signal or wounded melatonin builders emerge oh hey mass of use profited for Alec open sore gone James information via Blue Bomber more on you said sting or building of melatonin Jack liver neural yeah yo Alice Ellie open for Vita at Navarre need or period for skinning abuse or its Mary harvest at save RPG Lucifer a little shift Serbia 31 drama we'll burn the target shrim flick am the personal officer she resumed camp overseer of Sakura jetlag for elderly who blame them stored in Siri movie bounding of depression or some storing up for a tutorial upon Mira me reduce tempo varicose cabinetry and Europe international Lafourche Cali I would like them to identify themselves by giving us their respective research profile Russ I'm a research scientist my formative years in this field were spent investigating primarily the effects of light on reproductive physiology more recently I become interested in the mechanisms by which light and darkness mediate the effects on reproduction as well as other aspects that it influences I'm a biochemist and I'm really interested in the chemicals that carry messages in the brain and I'm interested in the particular gland the pineal gland which is the one that is involved in light dark regulation because it can be used as a model for how the brain works in many ways and as a consequence I'm interested in light and dark because indeed that modifies the function of the brain and the pineal and activity in general I've had a long personal interest in the pineal gland and melatonin its hormone the darkness woman and even very recently I've become particularly interested in I can use light and this darkness hormone to improve well-being in people but it was simply as that occupational health reasons for jet lag for insomnia I haven't managed to actually do any research work in all of those areas but the potential is terrific we'll be back on that donor database well I'm psychiatrist working here in Stockholm and I'm interested in how we can use light to study depression both to understand why some persons get depressed in the spring or fall some in winter even some patients in summer also in the field of schizophrenia which I'm very much interested in and the genetic aspect why is it that in the first three months of the year there are more persons born or later develop

schizophrenia and the third ear is sleep disturbance which is a very common symptom with all kinds of psychiatric diseases and dr. Brenner yes I'm a neuroscientist and I have spent all of my career looking at how light drives biological effects in animals and in humans and most specifically we've been concerned with how different wavelengths or colors of light can change hormones in animals and in man as well as produce therapeutic responses such as the antidepressant effects of light more recently we are beginning to look at how these lighting effects can actually be incorporated into architecture in everyday environments let me take you and you the viewers to a very everyday situation you are aware you viewing this program that tomorrow morning will be an early one you have to be a but oh five thirty you set your alarm clock at over 530 you go to bed you wake up often at five twenty five minutes ahead of their own clock how does this function how come the biological clock is that hormones psychology lack of light what is it Russ well this is a phenomenon that's been described it's referred to as apprehension stress the biological clock is a very basic internal mechanism that determines these 24-hour rhythms but it can actually be overridden by certain events such as the need to get up the catch up very early in the morning or if put it in the context of a student who has to take an exam the next morning very early and this individual knows that he or she cannot miss that exam what typically happens is the individual does not sleep very well and additionally wakes up in advance of the signal from the clock because it clocked being overwritten there are confounders in this system there are things that make it difficult to understand and this is an example of one of those okay what any one of you would like to comment on this I dispute the presence I think because some I don't think you do sleep right through the night and wake up five minutes before I think you half sleep I think you're so concerned about you've got to get up at five o'clock in the morning that you've got half an eye open most of the night and when it's obvious from the clock you may not be totally conscious that you're aware of time but when it's obvious it's time to get up then you fully wake up I see George yes I think human beings have a lot of flexibility in this regard and we can override some of our internal drives by needs that are driven socially or by sound cues left to our own devices light and darkness will drive the inner clock but in the context of society it behaves differently also obviously enjoying studies in an Antarctica in that particular study the light intensity during the long winter night was very low and yet the melatonin rhythm and those individuals was synchronized by the social environment which if these individuals would not have been on a regular work schedule the melatonin rhythm would actually drifted around but because of the social circumstances that dictated what these individuals should do the system was overridden and they remained perfectly synchronized but coming back to your original question again if it's correct mmm that you can self adjust your clock in the sense that you wake up very early in the morning it's probably worth pointing out that you have a perception of time and that you can that your perception of time is controlled by light-dark cycles and you can stretch the day so that today is twice as long as it was previously and your perception of what is an hour then stretches to two hours and all of this can be done with like dance experience which most people have nowadays is flying across distances long distances covering many time zones now you are you lord okay blah are not automatic food and garden buried every holy por una risottos kosher and are not handler am lhara kosher some go till Hawaii of Western Illinois River Song okay the is sunburned madam there is not one a or come here Mian some your heart center of the Hemi jet lag oh these

trashy door public I said to do some stormy masked idiot Hillard in treatment robust secure a pig war camp enough to know or will he'll starve also Appa Don didn't need to gory or rather we have to smear those Caledonia coma ham so @wk Boris what your Marion language equivalents walk nearly incident Upton Ksenia walk in Duty some of them have 6wk kana some no man senators not taxable yeah what they believe in Timon at him are some padding or two under the nest failure on the door Dozier you know not to distress and okay pastor - set your Porsche laghima the Telus en topic well and so box now I am order ho toh holy polar and three feet away can ye go on you see honestly a sense maybe would hurt us though I had Yahoo told us we had another one that I'm Elliott not use be handling that suture come here Doria done first time all run and yo we are come home decor and install directs and oppa to stem all around so Vicki foster on going in the socket 14 Marietta you strim was and so if he can't her own Gong at all Pham Cong near or sand oil rats at the sample nest common do not create the mall Rondonia had the tank to vote on how he was parenting those who were affected also real enough to know dope the tractor Amazon author stealth your hafnium a oblique a me a lemon family infirmary as Nam or owed me no Nora looks not born and oh really - because that means of the rural center of the hell have fastened intellicus to real estate needs me or them also have bought me none old and so on summer where I may alter Hampton sister Chatham on the normal comity on Saturday will children after the individual to Chancellor money Afra her how do we react correctly to the protest signals from the biological clock can we do anything about it or this is just a natural biology biological phenomenon Russ we've all made recommendations at various times how to at least partially combat jet lag the phenomenon of ill feeling when you fly east and west the interesting issue I always raised is that animals in that regard are considerably smarter than humans animals that migrate birds that migrate they migrate north and south where they don't get into these problems but humans break the rule and start migrating east and west and that affects the biological clock that we're discussing how do you combat that how do you get around it there are recommendations in terms of foods to eat there's certainly recommendations in reference to light that would be an interest of ours there's recommendations in terms of taking melatonin that darkness hormone which I think everyone in the panel here has probably done at one time or another to combat work and I might add but your experience is very good but dr. Arnn do you don't buy as a layman you don't know or assay as an air passengers you don't buy this not yet hopefully one day but it's been a very long time in development there are a lot of problems with this at the moment imitation melatonin is being developed in other words a chemical molecule which is similar and hopefully has similar effects which can be patented and protected by patent there's nothing wrong with melatonin oh no I didn't mean to imply that but I think that it's a problem visits of generic I want to ask you race horses get jetlag don't they I presume they fly at a very good question it's not only humans that fly around the world but they frequently take animals circus animals or horses or whatever the maybe they suffer from these same types of problems they're just more different you can't ask a horse you can ask them they don't reply so you know you don't know if they're in jetlag is readily although their performance is certainly that horse is in Vienna the circus horses have been treated with bright light for hundred years and with the notion that they are Arabic horses and they are used to bright light but those are training them say that they can see both on the fur and their behavior that

they really function much better so this is knowledge is so there is no sort of universal trick or recommendation for theirs there is definitely one good trick and that is to take a cruise across the ocean if you're going because then you're not accelerating the internal clock over the time zones really this is a disorder of modern travel and we've only had it for a number of years and the brain has not evolved a new mechanism hence these tricks are needed yes you have you've made studies on shift works I mean I've heard during the lectures here and I would like to know do we take care of the knowledge you now are being presented in planning the behavior the surroundings and shift works they night people coming back from day from night work to shift today it can we improve that how should it be done there was simply inadequate information I mean certainly attempts have been done and and there are lots of studies that are ongoing but to find a perfect adaptation I mean how long should you be on a shift what environmental cues should there be to help you be on shift you know their problems exist there's a lot of data it's hardly a solve problem shed Yuling recommendations exist from experts in the field such as I believe dr. Akash debt hearing in Sweden dr. fall card in England and a great deal of time has been devoted to setting up specific schedules which are less distressing or if you like more efficient performance all this dangerous both Chernobyl and the Three Mile Island accident happened between so two or three in the morning when people are more fatigued and not so alert and there are traffic accidents pilots may be tired so it may be very important and I think this with space travel where it's really needed that people should be alert on all shifts then we really have the information and know what to do and like we heard that the astronauts at NASA are primed with light so you shift some in one direction and they work on the nerdier shift and we light later to shift the other in a direction in Houston and they are then transported in this light to Cape Canaveral so if we really need to have people alert on shift work the knowledge is there but any is it practical George and the RUS I think the basic problem is this we are daytime creatures that's our evolution and with shift work we are asked to be awake and performing during the night when biologically we are adapted to be asleep and I think there are three potential solutions that are developing now and we don't have all the answers one is as dr. Arendt stated biocompatible scheduling schedules work schedules which work with a clock instead of against the clock secondly improving the education of the workforce for better sleep hygiene and better dietary hygiene and thirdly potentially the use of lights to help the workers clock adapt to the environment I'd like the actor the inadequacy of information and you can realize this immediately when you talk to people who are concern with shift workers they typically cannot agree on what is the best means to combat it the one thing that seems to be an agreement is something that's already been said namely it would be better to move the schedule forward than to move backward for the same reason it's more difficult to fly from the United States to Sweden than from Sweden to the United States it's more easy to face advance our rhythms than to phase delay so shift work is prolong the day yeah let it go long the day in essence so in terms of shift work it would be better if you work during the day than to take an early night shift rather than work during the day and then try to go backwards I think there's general agreement in that area but how many days it should stay on it whether they should in fact acclimate whether should have naps during their work period when they're working night is all in a state of confusion at the current time we've been talking about the biological clock concerning 24 hours if and you mentioned us in Scandinavia I'd like to know how

do people cope living on the Arctic and Antarctic Circle to live and constant light and constant darkness and apparently there are hundreds of thousands of people having their about biological clock functioning how they cope with greater difficulty I think than those persons living near the equator we can take some examples through them so Norway they have empirically determined it's 46,000 people in from so they know that when ascends sets below the horizon on November 25th that they have to make certain adaptations and one of the things they have determined without scientific input is they feel better when they use higher and brighter lights higher intensity and brighter intense lights and this is why electricity consumption in throne so is 20% higher that anywhere else in Scandinavia and they also know that when the Sun comes above the horizon they're going to feel better they even have a special day to recognize the Rising Sun on January 21st but do you think that's light or do you think that it's there's something about the Sun just appearing above the horizon I suppose but this does this go for general environment and when we work I mean you mentioned that we work in two little intensive life I mean that's not intensive enough if do we have to increase the level or Lux when it comes to a normal life so to speak I believe we are looking at a potential revolution in architectural lighting but it will not be this simple revolution because we don't need bright light all the time if we were to provide this at all the times first of all it would waste energy and secondly there are wrong times of day to have bright light stimuli so it must be worked out and the designs yet are not established before going into the syrup therapy with using lights as therapy as a drug let me just have a small test to you what's the color reducer that's green and what's the color of this red that's red okay when we talk about light that's sort of mixture of all these colors which is saying say in rainbow if you would define the effects on human body on these two colors all that any differences between red and green or I can't make blue here but blue of course stands for George absolutely when we compare the effects of different wavelengths for example suppressing melatonin we find that the wavelengths in the center of the spectrum are the most powerful the green and the blue wavelengths have this strongest ability red light at the same intensity will not have the same power but if you raise red light to be bright enough it too can have this effect as can for some human beings the non visible ultraviolet light can have these effects but again the center of the spectrum seems to be the most powerful in the green range and you're talking about human beings I mean obviously it is not the same for all creatures I mean beasts living in different kinds of situations if you're living underwater the spectrum you see is different than on land and so wavelength can be very important and it can be different between species but when it comes to humans Leonard you treat patients with good light you're here time Kristin Josh and my son is them they premiered ammonia the Bowyer Gannicus was not after semester Akuma in September zone sushi instead mangonia give up nah knowing and enough edema lying and walk Hillman and toesik hog and so yes perentie yes they go to cut the fam may help little at me man wake my Angus come from Telecom tube also a toy oh man my little door and smoke also ok variant Asante oven also call me a little who have instead cafeteria such a countenance mobile so at Alana will yell a susukino area Wolfenstein awesome we live Scottie hacia when a hawk so we can scout the

whole week today all data will number see Tony at all from the officer where's the ball my mom was the T does know from to Louisville or saamne Austin R&R to team and how gorgeous it boom or normal + sexo go down Oceana Sugiyama vague stock safe dota occasional burner top and until you do what about kebab' added additional item they Tamil Hindi equivalent Irish Anspaugh they are the best of me India hate intense Kalkaska Simon there is still for you not the viewers probably think that light this is sort of universal men mental medicine which is not well we talk about bright light then it's as you're said we shouldn't sit in it all day that's very irritating so the question is a long time the duration when should the light be given in the jury or in their 24 hours and which wavelength and how often and what are the individual differences as I said with aging when the lens is getting shading out some colors so what we have come up with in a white room where we can have about ten patients sitting and getting the same amount of light we give two hours in the morning because if you give more then you don't get more beneficial effect we don't know are short we can cut this if one or half hour or 50 minutes is enough so that that's ongoing we also don't know if green or red is better than the whole spectrum the idea right now is that it should be as close to sunlight as possible okay do patients who are depressed and you treat with light do they prefer light as opposed to a drug therapy and how effective or drugs relative to light therapy is there an advantage a very good question because in the first place we have tried to do across so we should give next year's I will offer you light treatment or drug and we have not got any patient to previously have used light treatment to volunteer to take a drug instead but also another of the patients we are recruiting they may previous years have been trying drugs and many of those we winter depression really have had severe side effects or to the drug or they may have had professional works needed to be able to read and this double vision on drugs and so they have not been able to work so that's of course a selection and those who have used light it's very difficult to get them to use so they're very happy with the they're very happy and they have founded patient association called us Punk'd and the light point and they are very they are gathering information and i mean they are absolutely convinced because they are the real experts on our beneficial light may be to carry them over the door but i think we can look at light as vitamins or food you need vitamin ABCD if you are lacking one right i mean be it's not good to supplement with the other or if it's b12 so in 10 years time i think that maybe you will you should have green light and may be of a certain intensity a specific time of day and this is what i mean i is a vitamin a maybe for born for some and we know that there are colorblind people and what has come up which i think - very interesting prospects that's that there are in besides rod and cones in the retina that's seeing the red and green maybe an other type of receptor that may be very important to you while well better you know but and also obviously colors important amines are their industries

built upon 4-point color preferences and the color preferences aren't there for nothing I mean insects see not the color as we see it but plants are colored the way they are to attract insects to pollinate them color wavelength is clearly important I mean you know a blue mood is a blue mood why is it a blue mood because that has a certain emotional component to it and of course that's related to the fact that the sky is blue and that water is blue yellow is hot because the Sun is hot so I mean people there are even some studies that have been done looking at the effect of color on psychiatric patients and whether or not they are helped by having a mood I mean having a different color room if you watch the frequency of what room they will go into depending upon what color it is in a couple of studies that have looked at that could you elaborate on artists famous artisans having different pictures Oh what about Van Gogh certainly I mean the incoming color in the area the mood you want to generate but that changes as dr. Baynard has shown the eye yellows and as the eye yellows the artist changes his colors as he gets older in order to get the effect that he wants to get I mean somebody commented that the constable and was Turner I guess was a Turner began to to change his colors as his I began to get yellow and he was trying to match what was in his head with what he kept seeing this is a very interesting he asked to this story and that is that as young human beings children actually see a different range of colors than we who have aged a bit and it is due to changes inside of the eye in the lens children see blues much brighter and violets much brighter and I actually are able to see a little bit down into the ultraviolet spectrum but by the time we reach later in adulthood we've lost this ability I think it's quite obvious that we've now been talking of the importance of the visual system giving signals into the hormone machinery but what about blind people how do they get signals to this wonderful biological clock governing so much it seems that in fact properly organized from a clock point of view if they have no perception of light their internal rhythms the avert ones of sleep-wake and the internal ones of hormones seem to run at a different periodicity than 24 hours it's not true of all blind people by any means but it is true of some and this periodicity can be up to 25 hours and in very rare cases less than 24 hours so that the lack of the light time cue is very important what's more when their sleep is running free as this is called they can be very sleeping in the middle of the day and wide awake night and this will cause a lot of problems light is very painful when we got when you got headache here we've been talking about light as the therapy as a drug being helpful you help patients can light be not just painful but as earnest absolutely overexposure to light can do several things that are toxic you can burn the skin it can burn portions of the I certainly everyone knows that one doesn't stare directly at the Sun for any length of time because that will cause blindness we're not talking in light therapy about levels of light that are hazardous however we're talking about things that are much lower to the natural hazardous levels look at the situation light is just does not this mean that moonshiners or amateurs or charlatans would use light therapies it come to us we've got light therapy for you isn't that big date you unfortunately there are any number of charlatans who are doing exactly that without being very familiar what they are doing there are instruments sold by these individuals where you can expose yourself to different colors of light

and they make all kinds of claims almost like witchcraft for the treatment of any number of disease states that's a very unfortunate situation and it's not unique to photo therapy to light therapy it's common in all areas of Medicine and many other professional areas yes I'd like to be very strong on this point because I think there's been tremendous publicity and public interest in the use of lights for therapeutic purposes and I think the best advice is if one feels they have a psychiatric disorder that light might be useful for first they should seek a professional diagnosis from a recognized professional and secondly they should employ lights only as directed because it is a medicine it is a therapy it's not something trivial if I would ask you each of you to give the viewers a personal good piece of advice how to improve their relations to light everyday life we've been touching on these things what do we most neglect for example Russ right I think we should look at light as a drug we've all been saying that it is a drug because it very strongly influences a part of the brain melatonin production in the pineal gland and as a consequence we should abused light in other words we evolved man evolved like other animals in a regular light dark environment we have learned to live with that type of environment and adjust our physiology accordingly I guess the bottom line is that light can be a bit light bright light particularly at unusual times in the middle of the night is less than ideal because our brain gets the wrong information and sends the wrong information to the remainder of the body so I guess as closely as possible we should stay with the right regular alternating light dark environments that doesn't mean we're going to as a species because we've already established the fact we're going to continue to abuse ourselves with jetlag and so forth but as much as possible have a dark alternating with the light environment for every 24 hour period doctor works justice at the meeting commented that she's from Switzerland said that that one should go on out for a good walk in the Sun about an hour's walk and that does a great deal for your psyche and she had data to back it up and I think it's a great idea and not too sophisticated not very cheap okay Josephine I think you should have a skiing holiday in the winter that's a bright light off the snow EP a month somewhere by the sea in the summer lots of gardening in the summer evenings and a good book in the winter a walk after lunch and perhaps a bottle of melatonin pills one day in the bathroom at the meeting in Dania kripke from San Diego had studied persons in San Diego how much this time they spent in sunlight by having a watch with a photometer and to me surprisingly many persons were not out in sunlight for one hour even in sunny California or some as little as 50 minutes when they walked from the car to the office and been back and you said it's very cheap obviously if time is money and people don't spend an hour a day outside my recommendation is the same particularly at our latitude in Sweden to take a brisk walk okay George your piece and good advice right I think that we've all been working on a very complex biological system the biological clock and the hormones that work from it and that's been great scientific fun but when it comes down to it we come back to the very simple conventional wisdom that for optimum health of the human being we need good food good sleep fresh air and sunshine should we ask the electrician to just say thank you to you and dim down the lights these people are going to produce melatonin so could you have the lights down please