"Video games and sleep loss" what a crock.
There's a subtle difference between anecdote, data, and information... Due to poor experimental design, this is an semi-interesting anecdote, nothing more. Which is too bad.
Edited note: Its the timing thats bad. Doing a huge wide ranging experiment is perfectly valid iff you've already got tons of verified data and info of ALL the constituent parts and can subtract that statistical noise from the huge # of variables experiment. Its like giving higgs boson search raw data to Newton as a first experiment rather than starting with an apple off a tree. For example, medical sample of adrenaline level at bed time fed into formula to subtract out effect of excitation. Then medical experiment using scrambled video signal so the same melatonin effect based on raw light level and average color/brightness can be subtracted out of the sleep data. After subtracting out about 10 correction factors they might have real data, or even info, instead of anecdote.
I thought that the study would look at long-term effects of video games, at least.
But even with money, studying long term effects of media use is fiendishly difficult. Most studies looking at the impact of media use focus on short term effects, because that’s in many cases the only pragmatic solution.
For studying long term effects, experiments pretty much fall flat. You cannot control the media exposure of people for weeks and months. Even this experiment (probably) didn’t stop participants from using other media before they came to the lab, so control over media exposure was limited to the 2.5h or 50m.
So you have to rely on surveys and do a panel study (i.e. ask the same people the same questions at different points in time) – and that’s just messy. The randomization can no longer do all the work for you and you have to control for all variables that could plausibly also influence participants behavior, independent of media exposure. Expect mostly suggestions and never really solid results from that.
Just because everybody believes it doesn't make it true. Every once in a while people do a study on something that's widely believed and it turns out that the wide belief was wrong. One example: sugar makes kids hyper.[1] Yet studies show that the two aren't well correlated.
1: http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=52...
Is it the interactivity of the video game? Or is it light emitted by the monitor? Does surfing the web or watching TV engage us enough that it also cause similiar problems?
Lots of questions and lot of of limits to the study, but a good(I even dare say great) number of us are clearly going to be clearly affected by the outcome of a more detailed and exhaustive study.
I really hope to see more research in the area.
I don't think this is exclusive to games. I often have the same problem going to bed straight after coding. I still have things on the mind.
I find the hardest game to sleep after is Starcraft. All that multitasking and thinking about a silly loss. Can take 30-40 minutes to get to sleep if I jump into bed directly after playing a game.
Did anyone use to play Ultima Online? Surely you had the recurrent dream of being dead and struggling to find your corpse? "Must find corpse! Can't lose stuff!" I would then wake up and remember I signed out at Brit bank, relax and go back to sleep. I had issues.
On the other hand, it's light - the light from your computer screen goes straight into your eyes and to your brain, that tells you "IT'S STILL DAY". The brain / eyes need darkness / dusk to start producing melatonin, the sleep molecule.
So, turn off your screens, don't look at mobile phones, and if possible turn the TV off too, or at the very least dim them to the lowest brightness setting at least an hour before attempting to go to sleep, preferably two.
Software like f.lux will help too; studies show that white/blue lights will wake you up, while red, warm colors will make you sleepier. f.lux will make the screen a nice warm, soft red after sundown, mimicking natural sundown (while making it brighter / 'colder' during the day, keeping you awake while you work).
Apart from that I wonder how much of it is just "sitting in front of a screen with artificial light" - isn't there an issue with certain wavelengths of artificial light affecting Melatonin production, which might also affect sleep?
All in all, the study does not sound very trustworthy to me. Because of the subject, I have no doubt it will picked up by all the newspapers and TV talk shows, though.
Agreed that this is a small sample; however the use of both subjective and objective measures is a step forward.
I'm genuinely interested. I do understand that this may be a basis for further study but how much can we really take from this study to encourage further research?
I wanted to read the actual paper to give some more detailed insight, but the website of the right database is currently down for maintenance. From their abstract I can see that from the outset they excluded everyone with existing sleeping difficulties. That implies that during recruitment and before the experiment started they already asked questions about sleeping patterns (to exclude outliers from the experiment).
I’m willing to bet that they also controlled for other variables, just like you mentioned, for example other media exposure or the previous nights’ sleep. That’s what you usually do.
(While searching for the paper I actually found some other papers about video gaming before sleeping. It seems like quite some found broadly similar results to this one, so in that context the result doesn’t seem super surprising. But note: This was just me browsing around and glancing at a few abstracts, by no means a thorough or even somewhat acceptable literature review.)
I'm going to see if Dr Kyle (who wrote the post) can hop on here to give us his view.
Playing a computer game can be a spectrum of experiences, some that are very distant related to each other. For example, is the game that the person playing a single player game or multiplayer? strategy or action? The excitement level of doing some EVE trading a few hours before sleep, mining some ore in WoW, playing a tournament in starcraft, discussing politics in a facebook "game", playing a puzzle game like portal, playing an unforgiving game like nethack (and dieing), playing an fast reaction game like insert last released fps game here, are all, all, very different in the amount of excitement received.
What I would like to see, is the same study but with a game that’s basically a rather boring experience, but common with gamers. MMO Farming, practice matches vs AI, trading, windows card games and so on. That would allow us to separate the act of playing a video game, from the act of doing something exciting before sleeping.
To add a general comment, no shit Sherlock, I just finished playing 2 hours of Planetside 2 and my adrenalin is sky high. I am going to need at least an hour of reading before bed.
I definitely need about an hour of cool-down after work each day, but I've also noticed that I don't sleep as well as I'd like when I'm watching TV or gaming before bed versus reading or doing other things.
I think this just goes to show we're all different. For me, reading is a great way to relax to get the sleep. It's a way of focusing the attention on a single thing, and letting the other distractions fade away, whereas other activities (whether coding or gaming or otherwise) demand simultaneous focus on many different things.
And not to mention my books don't bathe my face in high energy photons... (I say this as another convert to Flux, but unfortunately I fear Flux isn't sufficient: I hear that research has shown just a few high energy photons are sufficient to suppress melatonin production. In which case you'd be better off wearing glasses with a blue filter.)
Right after gaming or a mind stimulating movie (i.e. Fight Club) again my mind is too busy with the stuff so sleep quality is worse than general.
For the last 4-5 years I consciously try to put a buffer between all these active engagements and my sleep by watching a sitcom or just doing light reading in between.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin
