A friend got a deep brain implant for dystonia (which may be related to parkinson’s). I wonder if implanted optical fibers shining on optically active brain cells would have any positive health effects.
It may be negative, of course.
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Yeah, but the pineal gland (in reptiles) is accessible directly via that curious patch that looks like a particularly large scale on top of the head (look at many pet lizards for this)…
I have to imagine that the folks who buy this may also be wearing nighttime foot stickers to “remove toxins” etc…
I would be interested on anyone who bought this if they put only one in, and you look in their other ear canal, do you see light?
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So what you’re saying is that it will make me brighter?
(I can’t believe you missed that. It was right there!)
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There is some divergence of opinion here. The Valkee people use blue / white light because they’re following a “sunlight substitution” model. The Vielight crowd, with their nasal torch and parietal-lobe headset, prefer near-infrared light.
The reasoning for infra-red cerebral stimulation is roughly as follows: Evolution has found it convenient to use heme groups (and more generally, porphyrin rings complexed around a metal atom) in many components of cell biology, because they are a convenient way to hold a spare electron until it’s needed in Redox chemistry. Hence the Cytochromes, and cytochrome oxidase, as well as hemoglobin and myoglobin. But that whole ‘conjugated ring, delocalised electron’ feature of porphyrins means that they also absorb near-IR wavelengths. Therefore (and here I am skipping some steps in the argument), cytochromes and COX need near-IR stimulation to function properly, and your brain will work better under bright illumination. Which is why Evolution gave me a bald spot.
No-one has followed the obvious corollary of treating heart attacks by threading a light-fibre catheter up through the veins into the heart and flooding the cardiac interior with bright lights.
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Replace one of the LEDs with a light sensor and they will have a fully automated test of the intellectual capacity of their customers…
If you fall for this gimmick you don’t need it. Just put a torch to one ear and watch it shine out through the other.
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I didn’t know Gwyneth Paltrow was branching out into consumer electronics.
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They have, just for imaging rather than therapy:
It looks like a group built a therapeutic catheter for testing in the early 2000s, but I only see one early publication on it. If it had legs, it would at least have gone to preclinical trials.
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Isn’t that Rule No.1 from The Official Con-artists’ Manual?
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Musical pushback to earbud scam:
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Ooh. Have they had competitions yet? The publicity would surely drive sales.
They could even split the difference by creatively reading the results. Infrared light boosts hand-eye coordination on alternate Tuesdays in the spring, but when Venus is in retrograde higher frequencies should be used to boost spatial awareness. This stuff writes itself.
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What? I can’t hear you, it’s too dark in here!
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“The subject’s mood improved markedly, however, he has been unable to sleep for the past six weeks.”
“My God, what’s he doing with that pencil?!”
“Trying to put the light out.”
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I hope these work better than my ear candles.
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Well, at least this high tech nonsense is safer than the low tech nonsense of “ear candling”. Presumably, these flashlight earbuds won’t accidentally set your hair on fire…
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White light does indeed do the things they say. But not through the ears. Light enters the eye and passes into the posterior cortex to create conscious vision. It also travels into subcortical regions that produce unconscious vision (i.e. blindsight phenomenon) and into the suprachiasmic nucleas of the hypothalamus where it resets our circadian rhythm. This has been known about for ages, and there are a number of products that use this pathway for clinical benefit, e.g. lightboxes for treatment of seasonal affective disorder. Light shined in your ears does not go to your suprachiasmic nucleas and hence it will do absolutely nothing beyond a placebo effect.
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Actually, white light produced by LEDs are not a flat distribution of wavelengths. They use a phosphorus layer to convert a base wavelength into a set of wavelengths.
The primary color output by the LED element is still the dominant color emitted. You can see a big spike around 450nm here:
https://www.lrc.rpi.edu/programs/nlpip/lightinganswers/led/whiteLight.asp
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Yup, that’s what I wrote: a broad hodgepodge of wavelengths, which is to say, an irregular distribution over a wide range. The distribution is inherently less intense at a given wavelength than direct LEDs, since the light gets spread out from a relatively narrow distribution of about 10-30 nm to hundreds of nm.
Some white light LEDs use better phosphors that are more efficient at converting the fundamental wavelength, but those can be pricey. With those, the fundamental is harder to pick out because it’s at the same or lower level as the rest of the wavelengths.
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