It is counter-intuitive indeed! This research led professors Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young to win the Nobel Prize [1] in Physiology and

It is counter-intuitive indeed! This research led professors Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young to win the Nobel Prize [1] in Physiology and Medicine in 2017. The cue is in the effort required to capture the message from a body of text. Reading has two broad stages–putting our eyes to feed the optical data and then our visual acuity in the brain (vision) to process that data--recognizing glyphs, putting together words, sentences etc. If we concentrated on a butterfly or a fruit for hours on the end similarly, in a poorly illuminated environment, it is going to affect our eyes. The pupillary muscles have to remain contracted to let enough light in. A glow-worm on the other hand would feel more exciting and comfortable to watch in a dimly lit situation. But that's only stage one. The stage two is where the magic happens. And it has a catch! The morning/daytime spectrum from an LCD panel makes it easier for the eyes to capture the text because the illumination is great, but it also forces us operate attentively. By being attentive, our brain is pushed to operate at a higher energy level. It then uses more energy to process the load of incoming information and this whole deal exhausts us by the end of day. Sometimes when we don't look at the evening shift spectrum of a sunset (reddish shift), our body clock does not trigger a restful mode. A fatigue sets in, if you will. But this only means that it is time to take rest and not read anymore. Cue an IPS screen is still healthier for the eyes than a reflective e-ink one when it comes to long-haul reading. [1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2017/press-release/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2017/press-releas... Edit: Sorry wrote this one in a hurry. Have to go away from the computer now!