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by ekianjo 4940 days ago
Wow, that's ground-breaking research. Doing something that maintains your brain more active for a longer time before sleeping makes your sleep worse. Nobel prize level at least.

I thought that the study would look at long-term effects of video games, at least.
2 comments
arrrg 4940 days ago
Do you want to pay for such a study? I’m sure that many psychology or sociology departments would happily take your money.

But even with money, studying long term effects of media use is fiendishly difficult. Most studies looking at the impact of media use focus on short term effects, because that’s in many cases the only pragmatic solution.

For studying long term effects, experiments pretty much fall flat. You cannot control the media exposure of people for weeks and months. Even this experiment (probably) didn’t stop participants from using other media before they came to the lab, so control over media exposure was limited to the 2.5h or 50m.

So you have to rely on surveys and do a panel study (i.e. ask the same people the same questions at different points in time) – and that’s just messy. The randomization can no longer do all the work for you and you have to control for all variables that could plausibly also influence participants behavior, independent of media exposure. Expect mostly suggestions and never really solid results from that.

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bryanlarsen 4940 days ago
"Wow, that's ground-breaking research."

Just because everybody believes it doesn't make it true. Every once in a while people do a study on something that's widely believed and it turns out that the wide belief was wrong. One example: sugar makes kids hyper.[1] Yet studies show that the two aren't well correlated.

1: http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=52...

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eumenides1 4940 days ago
I also agree that it's important to verify assumptions. I also think that the general comments in response to the article also indicate that a lot of us want to know more about the matter.

Is it the interactivity of the video game? Or is it light emitted by the monitor? Does surfing the web or watching TV engage us enough that it also cause similiar problems?

Lots of questions and lot of of limits to the study, but a good(I even dare say great) number of us are clearly going to be clearly affected by the outcome of a more detailed and exhaustive study.

I really hope to see more research in the area.

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