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Adjusting the lights based on how our brains work could save billions on electricity

A team of researchers at Barrow Neurological Institute has made a breakthrough discovery that could save us billions simply by adjusting the flicker rate of our light sources.

Nearly all artificial light sources flicker. This flicker is bothersome to us, because it causes eye strain, and in photosensitive people it can even cause migraines or seizures. Increase the frequency of the flickers and they don't become as noticeable, but this requires more electricity. Doctors Stephen Macknik, of Barrow's Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiology, and Susana Martinez-Conde, of Barrow's Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience examined how we perceive light and discovered a way to optimize the brightness of the light to how our brains perceive light, without increasing the amount of electricity required.

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"We found a temporal sweet spot in visual perception that can be exploited to obtain significant savings by redesigning light emitting devices to flicker with optimal dynamics to activate visual system neurons in the human brain," said Dr. Macknik, according to Science Daily.

Macknik and Martinez-Conde examined two different, and apparently conflicting, aspects of how we perceive the brightness of light — Bloch's Law and the Broca-Sulzer Effect.

Bloch's Law states that how bright a light source is to us is determined by the length of time we perceive it, however this 'plateaus' after a specific time. So, short duration flashes can appear very different in brightness to us, with shorter duration appearing dimmer than longer, but eventually longer flashes do not appear to be of different brightness from one another.

The Broca-Sulzer Effect is nearly contrary to this, stating that a short pulse of light will appear much brighter to us, but that this brightness falls off again when you increase the flash duration.

The two scientists discovered this apparent contradiction is due to past experimental bias from subjects participating in vision studies. They improved the design of their experiments, specifically to address this bias, and they found that their results matched the Broca-Sulzer Effect — that we perceive short duration flashes to be brighter.

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"Researchers have been studying temporal vision for more than 125 years, but because ours is the first experiment of its kind to control for all known forms of criteria, it is the first to accurately measure the role of temporal dynamics in brightness perception," said Dr. Macknik. "Thus, the power savings are ripe for the picking because we can adjust our lighting to flicker to take advantage of this peak in perception."