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Video game nightcap robs sleep
Joanne Laucius
CanWest News Service
Friday, June 27, 2003
OTTAWA -- If you want to get a restful night's sleep, make your nightcap a warm glass of milk, not a thrilling video game.
Playing a video game suppresses melatonin, the hormone that helps you sleep, say Japanese researchers at Akita University School of Medicine, who monitored male students using computers late at night.
Using a bright computer screen is believed to affect the biological rhythms that govern sleep. But adding an exciting element to a computer task has even more of an effect.
The study comes in the wake of a Japanese white paper on communications, which suggests that computers affect biological rhythms. Almost 54 per cent of Internet users reported delayed bed times, and 45.4 per cent reported they slept less.
The researchers, who reported their findings in the Journal of Applied Physiology, tested the seven subjects between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. doing an exciting task -- a video shooting game -- and boring computer tasks -- arithmetic -- using both a bright and a dark display on the video terminal.
The subjects were all monitored for their temperature and heart rates and supplied samples of saliva to determine levels of melatonin, a hormone produced by the pineal gland in the brain, which helps to regulate the wake-sleep cycle. Melatonin production is triggered by the dark.
The researchers found that melatonin production was suppressed after the subjects played the video game while using the bright display.
There was almost no difference in melatonin production while the subjects were performing the boring task with the bright and the dark screens. Melatonin production was suppressed slightly while the subjects were playing the video game on the dark screen.
Factors other than melatonin production were also affected. The heart rate was significantly higher while the subjects played the video game using the bright screen. Body temperatures usually decrease at night. But the researchers found that the subject's temperatures were higher while they were doing a task using a bright screen.
Video game nightcap robs sleep
Joanne Laucius
CanWest News Service
Friday, June 27, 2003
OTTAWA -- If you want to get a restful night's sleep, make your nightcap a warm glass of milk, not a thrilling video game.
Playing a video game suppresses melatonin, the hormone that helps you sleep, say Japanese researchers at Akita University School of Medicine, who monitored male students using computers late at night.
Using a bright computer screen is believed to affect the biological rhythms that govern sleep. But adding an exciting element to a computer task has even more of an effect.
The study comes in the wake of a Japanese white paper on communications, which suggests that computers affect biological rhythms. Almost 54 per cent of Internet users reported delayed bed times, and 45.4 per cent reported they slept less.
The researchers, who reported their findings in the Journal of Applied Physiology, tested the seven subjects between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. doing an exciting task -- a video shooting game -- and boring computer tasks -- arithmetic -- using both a bright and a dark display on the video terminal.
The subjects were all monitored for their temperature and heart rates and supplied samples of saliva to determine levels of melatonin, a hormone produced by the pineal gland in the brain, which helps to regulate the wake-sleep cycle. Melatonin production is triggered by the dark.
The researchers found that melatonin production was suppressed after the subjects played the video game while using the bright display.
There was almost no difference in melatonin production while the subjects were performing the boring task with the bright and the dark screens. Melatonin production was suppressed slightly while the subjects were playing the video game on the dark screen.
Factors other than melatonin production were also affected. The heart rate was significantly higher while the subjects played the video game using the bright screen. Body temperatures usually decrease at night. But the researchers found that the subject's temperatures were higher while they were doing a task using a bright screen.
(around 50 minutes ago, local time 
