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Lightway Crystal Light Pipes
Thanks to the crystal dome and reflective layers from pure silver and glass light diffuser, the delivered sunlight doesn’t lose its natural coloring and behavior.
- Sunlight influences a person’s mood and life processes.
- Sun rays represent an energy source for all life on Earth.
- Sunlight supports the ability to learn.
- Sunlight is a drug which stimulates the production of serotonin in the body making a person happier.
- Sunlight influences a person’s performance and correct reaction to impulses.
Lightway Crystal Light Pipes illuminate un-light-able spaces with healthy sunlight.
All you need is light
“Build civilization 2.0 on the basis of sunlight, completely of light and nothing but light,”
was one of the messages of independent author, thinker and commentator Tor Nørretranders, who received a doctorate in the field of environmental planning and sociological sciences. Tor Nørretranders means by this that we must again live into sunlight. “Civilization as we know it today stems from the planet beneath us. Civilization as we must build it into the future will flow from the stars above us. As the Beatles sing in a known song – “All you need is love,” we can paraphrase: “All you need is light,” says Tor Nørretranders.
Sunlight Supports the Ability to Learn
“A study carried out in the United States has proven the connection between the presence of sunlight together with the ability to look out of the room to the surroundings with improved study results of the observed subject, improved cognitive results in offices and higher sales in stores. Sunlight is a “drug” which stimulates production of serotonin, dopamine and gamma-Amino butyric acid in the human body which improve the control over various stimuli, motivation, muscle coordination, increases calmness and the ability to concentrate,” claims Lisa Heschong, director of the Heschong Mahone Group and certified architect.
“Children in most schools with plenty of sunlight show better results in tests than children from schools without sunlight,” claims James R. Benya, independent advisor in the area of light and sunlight with rich international experience. “The time has come for architects, engineers and designers from all over the world to seriously consider the results of this research. This is a good time to include environments with abundant sunlight among regulations and norms. Buildings well-lit with sunlight must even become the rule, not the exception. In schools it should be absolutely obvious,” James R. Benya goes on to say.
Symposium on Sunlight
In mid April 2009, in Rotterdam, delegates from 22 countries met (200 architects, specialists on sunlight, pedagogues and other interests in the effect of sunlight on health) at a symposium on the benefits of sunlight on energy saving and health. Several international experts presented their findings in the field: Professor Marilyn Andersen, director of a laboratory for sunlight research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA, Professor Steven Lockley from Harvard Medical School, visiting Professor Tor Nørretranders from Denmark’s Copenhagen Business School, Professor Mohamed Boubekri from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, USA and American architect James Carpenter. Recent studies have tried to find a relationship between elements in the environment, sunlight for example, and human performance and health. First findings show strong positive connections. Light can influence people on physical, physiological and psychological levels and its lack can clearly have influences on human health,” says Marilyn Andersen.
How does sunlight influence this organ?
The Pineal Gland
Scientists are constantly examining how exactly the pineal gland works. It is a small gland producing the hormone melatonin, which is important for the maintenance of biorhythms (internal clock) and sleep regularity. At night, the level of melatonin in the blood drastically increases. The activity of the pineal gland is influenced by the hypothalamus, which transmits information about how much sunlight falls on the retina. Daylight and sunlight therefore have an effect on our sleep.
Season has an influence on fertility
Women are more fertile in spring than in any other season. Israeli scientists came to this conclusion on the basis of the re-examination of more than 600 cases of infertility treatment.
“There are several theories explaining spring fertility: People have less sex in summer’s heat; male sperm is lower in quality in this period,” claims Dr. Natan Rožanskij from Jerusalem’s University Hospital Hadassa, where the research was carried out.
Biological clocks clearly function the same in people as in animals, for whom spring means mating season and the birth of young. Even a woman’s system gets signals at this time that it is the optimal time for maturation of a fetus.
Amount of sunlight can also influence the producing of hormones which culminate in spring. “In Lapland and Finland, as soon as the half-year of darkness starts, women completely stop ovulating; with the return of sunlight the activity of the ovaries multiplies, so there are more pairs of twins born here than in any other place in the world,” says Rožanskij.
Source: ČTK
Healing Sunlight
Light is not here so that we can see, but it is the most basic attribute of the environment. Without it, just as without oxygen or water, there would be no life on Earth.
During evolution our bodies also adjusted to the everyday behavior of sun rays, which, as a number of scientific findings show, influences many physiological processes in the body. The development of civilization, however, has closed us into rooms where bulbs and lamps shine on us for work and studies instead of the sun. Their light is different than that of the sun’s in its spectral or color composition. Some colors (especially blue and violet) are almost absent, while yellow, orange and red are in overabundance.
The issue is that the colors with longer wavelengths (yellow, orange and red) have striking stimulating effects. Over a long period of work the body is kept in a permanent state of stress and has a negative effect on vision. In the 80s Dr. Fritz Hollwich proved that people who spend most of their work-time under strong lights have a remarkably higher level of the stress hormones ACTH and cortisone. This can then influence their psychological well-being and their vitality itself.
MUDr. Radkin Honzák
Is Light Medicine?
And God said let there be light. And there was light. And God saw that light was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light day, and darkness he called night. Genesis, I, 3-5
Some things are so obvious and appear so banal to science that they are not worth devoting time to. While all ancient civilizations had sun cults, moon and planetary gods, the enlightenment announce that their secrets had been completely cleared up by Newton’s laws and sun spots became more interesting than pure sunlight.
A prime example of little interest in this is the story of curing rickets, whose occurrence grew remarkably with rise in industrial production accompanied by the formation of smog, adversely affecting the natural production of vitamin D. Sunlight’s significance for healthy bone development was recognized by doctor and minister Theobald Adrian Palm while comparing conditions in England and Japan; his findings were published in the 1890s. But they were overshadowed by the search to find another aspect of the same complex causes, molecule vitamin D, discovered 50 years later.
Today no one doubts the beneficial influence of sunlight on growth and healthy development of bones and teeth, enough growth hormone in children, vision, metabolism, physiological concentration of glucose and cholesterol, activity of the cardiovascular and urinary systems, reproductive function, immunity, resistance to stress and fatigue and overall psychological well-being. A disruption of one’s sunlight regime causes not only discomfort in all areas, but also clinical problems starting in bone fragility or tendency to infection or tumor proliferation and ending in depression.
It can sometimes paradoxically mean a great gain for medicine when a doctor gets sick. It mustn’t be a swiftly fatal disease because then he wouldn’t be able to analyze his own observations, but it must be unpleasant enough to push him to research a theme which would otherwise have escaped him.
Dr. Norman Rosenthal lived peacefully in Johannesburg, where there were practically only two seasons – one nice and one rainy, but in both the sun sank fast below the horizon almost perpendicularly. As an adult he travelled to the USA where he was active in New York. He wrote in the forward of one of his books that he was mesmerized by “the colorful fanfare of autumn” and felt bittersweet emotions caused by sunset, which he didn’t know in his country.
But soon he tasted the reverse of this shiny coin – seasonal depression triggered by lack of sunlight. Through the problems of patients with similar symptoms he very quickly recognized the nature of the difficulties and, maintaining friendly contacts with research workers examining the newly-discovered hormone melatonin, he soon connected these two areas and began to write a new chapter on circadian rhythms. The chapter is extensive and still unfinished.
From its very beginning, development of life on the planet has been influenced by the alternation of light and dark in a 24-hour – circadian – cycle. It is then clear that life has had to adjust to it. We find these rhythms in all living organisms from bacteria to animals. We rise in the morning because a system of oscillators, our “internal clock”, announces that the time for actions has come; the secretion of melatonin, which acts as the night guard of sleep, stops. Body temperature and blood pressure rise, the kidneys start working and intestines swing into motion. All these systems have their oscillators with an interesting memory; if, e.g. we transplant a kidney from a donor from another time zone, it functions in the rhythm and time it was used to. But it is finally managed by the suprachiasmatic nucleus, an oscillator which has its own genes which, from their discovery, have been called “clock-genes”. This central oscillator, by means of nerve and humoral impulses, influences all activities from total body stimulation to cell division.
Our biological clock, flexibly adjusting to changes in day length, is managed by sunlight. It was long believed that we had only two types of light-sensing elements, rods and cones, and that light was only there for us to see. But as Ben Akiba said, everything is otherwise. Several years ago a third kind of light-sensitive cell was found in the human retina, not serving to create images, but capturing only deep blue light of wavelength around 480nm. They are usually given the abbreviation ipRGCs (intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells). They contain melanopsin, probably the oldest pigment for distinguishing light and dark, first discovered in the light-sensitive structures on frog skin. It seems that in primates it only occurs in the retina and there only in 1% of ganglion cells.
Unlike the signals from rods and cones which proceed via the optic nerve to the primary visual centers, signals from ipRGCs spread through special fibers and head straight to the “third eye”, the oscillator in the hypothalamus. The melanopsin receptors in the eye also regulate the creation of melatonin and through a complex system of melanopsin-pineal gland-melatonin synchronize our internal perceptions of time with external time. The invention of light bulbs meant another divergence of Homo sapiens from natural conditions. Current lifestyle leads to many people suffering not only from lack of sunlight, but also lack of darkness, essential for melatonin activity. Defects in the critical light oscillator control system lead to the collapse of other internal rhythms and to disorganization of other functions from psychological to physical. At fault can be both the intake of quality light (night shifts, inadequate lighting, sleep disruption), as well as problems with oscillators (e.g. genetically induced lack of melanopsin in seasonal depression). Phototherapy in indicated cases is the most natural path for providing satisfactory doses of light with required parameters.
MUDr. Radkin Honzák
Source: Zdravotnické noviny, Mladá fronta a.s.