4 ms·
Homo sapiens - ~250,000 - 400,000 years old Electricity for lighting - ~120 years old It's pretty new.
by minikites 12y ago
Homo sapiens - ~250,000 - 400,000 years old
Electricity for lighting - ~120 years old
It's pretty new.
- FroshKiller 12y agoCampfires, candles, torches...?
- minikites 12y ago...are all much dimmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0ES9TKAf_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0ES9TKAf_4
- ekianjo 12y agowho cares how dim they are, they enabled Humans to be active at night and therefore disrupted that day-light body cycle. Which is what the comment was about.
- minikites 12y agoYou said "being exposed to bright light late at night is nothing new" which is demonstrably false.
- ekianjo 12y agoNo, a petrol lamp was bright enough to read at night and study way longer than what the sunlight could bring you. I'm not sure what you are trying to argue with - do you think modern society just started 120 years ago only?
- minikites 12y ago"Bright enough to read" and "bright light" are very different, that's been my point since the first comment. We've had "bright enough to read" for a long time but only in the last 120 years has it been possible to have actual "bright light" late at night.
- ekianjo 12y agoWe are not arguing about the same thing then ? My comment was specifically about the fact the day-light cycle had been disrupted for a very long time in human existence already. Not matter if lights were dim, using a petrol light after dark is already disrupting that cycle. Or do you contest that?
- minikites 12y agoI am, because if a dim petrol light disrupted our sleep cycle, we would have seen sleep cycle changes sooner than 120 years ago. Instead they're correlated with the spread of electric light.
- ekianjo 12y agoBut there's ample data in literature about people doing stuff at night even back in the Middle Ages. So now, explain me - if people were sleeping later at night instead of sleeping as soon as the sun goes down, how did that no impact their sleep cycles?
- ekianjo 12y agoyou think we waited for Electricity to use Light? Ever heard of Prometheus?
- minikites 12y agoElectricity is dramatically different from torches/candles. It's brighter and safer, so it got used more. It affected how we sleep: http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/why-broken-sleep-is-a-golden-time-for-creativity/ http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/why-broken-sleep-is-a-gol... > Prior to Edison, says the Virginia Tech historian A Roger Ekirch, author of At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (2005), sleep had been divided into two distinct segments, separated by a period of night-waking that lasted between one and several hours. The pattern was called segmented sleep. > Sleep patterns of the past might surprise us today. While we might think that our circadian rhythm should wake us only as the sun rises, many animals and insects do not sleep in one uninterrupted block but in chunks of several hours at a time or in two distinct segments. Ekirch believes that humans, left to sleep naturally, would not sleep in a consolidated block either.
- ekianjo 12y ago> A Roger Ekirch, author of At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (2005), sleep had been divided into two distinct segments, separated by a period of night-waking that lasted between one and several hours. The pattern was called segmented sleep I'd like to dispute that claim (I have read the article) and I had been in touch with people who lived before Electricity started being used and none of them mentioned anything about a two-segment nights (actually refuted it). This may have been the case in certain circles but I suspect this was not a thing for everyone in society.
- ekianjo 12y agoI'd rather submit to you it's BECAUSE Homo sapiens mastered Fire AND Light that we have become a dominating specie. So, it may have damaged our health in the process, but it has been massively beneficial for our survival as a whole.