Why light should become an essential part of your self-care routine
he was a boy, Satchin Panda would stay on his grandparents’ farm near Chandipur on the east coast of India. He lazed in a hammock, caught fish in the lake and climbed trees to pick mangoes. His grandfather spent most of his 91 years there, working on his 20-acre plot. He produced almost everything his wife and eight children needed. They cooked whatever he grew; they bought salt and sold a little rice. “He did that for his entire life,” says Panda.
The illumination of the world has brightened our lives in more ways than the simply physical. Now we can watch the news, work on our laptops, make a Facebook friend, play video games, eat pancakes, buy shoes or download a novel at any hour of the day or night. We are undaunted by the rising or setting of the sun. Now we are all masters of the light.
The medical benefits of sleep are well established but the science of light is much newer. We have only recently started to notice the benefits of boosting our light exposure by day and asked why they occur.
Partly thanks to Panda, though, we at least know quite a lot about how light affects our body clock. When it comes to the internal clock, some types of light are more equal than others. The eye perceives three main colours in light: red, green and blue, each vibrating at a different wavelength. In the morning, high concentrations of blue occur naturally; by dusk we are left mostly with green and red.
It took Panda a year to construct an artificial segment of DNA with the embryonic stem cells that blocked one of these receptors, melanopsin. He handed it over to a lab technician just before he returned to India to get married in 2001. It took another year to breed a single blind mouse that lacked the specific receptor, and then he really got going. “It was the middle of the night and we had our experiment. And there it was: mouse number 1626 did not entrain [respond] to light.
Much of his research focuses on his own cataract patients. After a cataract operation, people usually have fewer falls, their mood lifts and they think more sharply. Tsubota also found that his patients’ sleep “dramatically improved”. He believes many of the other benefits of the operation flow from this: “The surgery replaces the opaque lens and suddenly 90% of the blue light is received, you are like a five-year-old. So cataract is a treatment for the clock as well as the camera.
We need more light to synchronise the circadian system than we do to see. The upside of this is that you can turn on a lamp to go to the bathroom at night and not immediately crash your biological clock. The downside is that most of us have no idea how our light exposure varies between home and outdoors.
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