Four Arguments for Elimination of Television

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

"No I haven't," he shouted. "I don't read quacks. Nor do I talk to quacks!" and he hung up. I went out and bought Scientific American (July 1975).

I was astonished at Wurtman's article because it completely contradicted the views my irascible interviewee had ascribed to it. Wurtman, who is a professor of endocrinology and metabolism at MIT, was arguing that the body can be seriously affected by changes in light spectra. This is the same argument Ott makes. Wurtman's descriptions are very similar to Ott's.

I began to under stand ... that there is a concrete relationship between our bodies and light, and that light is a kind of thing we ingest for nourishment and growth, like food ...

"Since life evolved under the influence of sunlight, it is not surprising that many animals, including man, have developed a variety of physiological responses to the spectral characteristics of solar radiation. The findings already in hand suggest that light has an important influence on human health, and that our exposure to artificial light may have harmful effects of which we are not aware. The solar spectrum is essentially continuous, lacking only certain wavelengths absorbed by elements in the sun's atmosphere, and at midday it has a peak intensity in the blue-green region from 450 to 500 nanometers ...

"The most familiar type of artificial light is the incandescent lamp ... [which] is strongly shifted to the red, or long-wave length end of the spectrum. Indeed about 90% of the total emission of an incandescent lamp lies in the infrared.

"Since the [human] photoreceptors are most sensitive to the yellow-green light of 555 nanometers, most fluorescent lamps are designed to concentrate much of their output in that wavelength region ... since fluorescent lamps are the most widely used light sources in offices, factories, and schools, most people in industrial societies spend many of their waking hours bathed in light whose spectral characteristics differ markedly from those of sunlight."

Wurtman offered a chart that traced the path of light through the eye showing graphically what Ott had called the "dual function." The light passes through the eye and creates chemical interactions in the pineal gland, the pituitary gland, the hypothalamus, the spinal cord, various nerve systems as well as the ovaries and the gonads, thereby affecting sexuality and fertility.

"When young rats are kept continuously under light, photoreceptive cells in their retina release neurotransmitters that activate brain neurons; these neurons in turn transmit signals over complex neuroendocrine pathways that reach the anterior pituitary gland where they stimulate the secretion of the gonadic hormones that accelerate the maturation of the ovaries."

Wurtman indicated that among rats that had had their eyes or their pituitary gland removed, ovarian growth was no longer affected by light. He suggests that no one has yet identified which light spectra are the catalysts for ovarian action.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print