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Welcome to this podcast brought to you by Sleep and the Rhythms of Life Project at the University of Oxford.

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I'm Sally Shuttleworth, and I'm here to introduce our two guests who will be in conversation today.

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First, Russell Foster, who's professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford and author of the bestselling

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book Lifetime The New Science of the Body Clock and How It Can Revolutionise Your Health.

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And second, Ian Ritchie, a world renowned architect, artist and author whose work begins with light as the primary material of architecture.

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Sleep occupies about one third of our lives, and since the pandemic has been a particular focus of concern and indeed anxiety,

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as so many people have reported, disrupted sleep or problems of getting to sleep in the first place.

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The focus of our conversation today is perhaps an unusual one.

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Sleep In relation to light and architecture, Russell and Ian,

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how can a neuroscientist and an architect help us to understand the world of sleep and the rhythms that govern our lives?

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And what can you both learn from each other? Well in and I have been working together for quite some time.

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The first project was the Sainsbury Welcome Centre in London and I think we met around a table.

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And of course I'm a slight geek and I wanted to ask, you know, what's your favourite building?

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And he said, the Crystal Palace. And I was completely gobsmacked because that's my favourite building and I was obsessed with it because

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of this great temple of glass allowing natural light in to illuminate these extraordinary objects.

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Interesting, Russell. My first recollection of meeting you was at the Royal Society.

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You said, What is your favourite colour? Oh, and I replied, 481 nanometres, to which you said you're one nanometre out.

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The brain probably doesn't know it.

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And of course the significance of 480 nanometres is the wavelength of the maximum sensitivity of the photoreceptors that we discovered in the eye,

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which are regulating the biological clock and a number of other things.

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As you and I have discussed and there's been this revolution over the past 20 years or so in understanding not only how circadian rhythms tick,

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but how they're regulated by light. So we have this internal day, the circadian clock,

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which is fine tuning every aspect of our physiology and behaviour to the very demands of the natural light dog cycle.

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The 24 hour day. And of course, it's the eye that detects this light, dark cycle and sets the internal clock.

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But what's turned out to be fascinating is that it's not the visual cells of the eye, the rods and cones,

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but it's this third photoreceptor we discovered which is maximally sensitive to blue light blue light of around 480 nanometres or so.

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But it's more than just the colour and the intensity.

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What we're also discovering is the rate of change of the light, the time of light exposure, the duration of light exposure.

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And this will change and of sensitivities will change as we age.

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And there's even arguments that the circadian clock changes its sensitivity with different illness states.

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So, for example, in mental illness, there's a suggestion that in some groups they might be more sensitive to light and

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therefore have their circadian rhythms shifted all over the place and in some cases,

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less sensitive to light.

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And so this emerging information, what's exciting is we can start to think about how we can incorporate these new discoveries into building design.

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So I think that any built space needs to embrace our biology so that an environment optimises vision but also optimises alertness.

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So it's bright enough for alertness. It's bright enough for regulating the clock and therefore the sleep wake systems.

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I think it's interesting that daylight and windows for architects was more about the view out of the window.

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Rather than the amount of light coming in. And there are many examples in the 5060s through the PFI period and building hospitals

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where windows were placed relatively high to the sleeping position in their ward,

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so that when the patient sits up to look out the window, they can't see anything.

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If one approaches an example of a ward and you've got patients who are requiring sleep at different times,

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possibly because of having had operations, recovery periods, mental state How does an architect go about designing the lighting for a board?

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What would be your first move as an architect? Talk to Russell Foster.

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If we don't get the light right, you know, build spaces, whether they be domestic spaces or workspaces,

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then the consequences of a disrupted circadian and sleep system are severe.

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So short term disruption can involve fluctuations in mood, irritability, loss of empathy.

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You fail to pick up the social signals from friends, family, work, colleagues, risk taking and doing stupid and unreflective things.

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So all of those are really quite, quite profound changes in our emotional responses or ability to focus.

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It's very interesting. People say it's all about multitasking. It isn't.

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It's about actually focusing upon all the variables, options that you've got to.

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And focusing is very difficult if you're not getting enough sleep, attention, concentration, decision making,

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creativity, productivity, all of these things are hugely affected if you're not getting the right sleep.

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And then long term and this is primarily within the nightshift community.

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But there's a great example where I don't think there's any sensible lighting design.

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What we know is there's increased cardiovascular disease, altered stress responses,

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type two diabetes, low immunity, high rates of infection, high rates of cancer.

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And of course, the big one, depression and psychosis by not getting the right sort of sleep,

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which is profoundly influenced by light in our domestic workspaces.

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So not getting sleep is so much more than the inconvenience of feeling tired at the wrong time.

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It impacts upon our global health.

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And that's why a dialogue between architects and neuroscientists is so very important, because it's fundamental to human health.

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I think it's a cultural issue as well between different cultures based on where you are on the earth.

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As you go towards the equator, artificial light is whiter.

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The further north you go to the Nordic countries, it's more like a candle.

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They go yellow spectrum. And I think that has something to do with.

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The environment, the overall environment you're in, in terms of a light environment and it's embedded in somewhere into one's culture,

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in one's body is not as simple as saying, well, if we do have water here in,

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say, Caribbean, then you apply the same word, design a light design to one.

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In Helsinki. You can have the right answer. You won't. Yes, I think that's a very important point.

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And just to emphasise, of course, a light environment is immensely dynamic changes,

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intensity changes in colour, in wavelength changes in the position of the sun in the sky.

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These are all critical factors. And what the circadian and sleep systems need to do is extract time of day information from that.

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And because the stimulus is so complicated, we have to think.

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I think our first principle would be that the sensory systems detecting that complex light environment are also going to be pretty sophisticated,

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which gets us back to do we know enough about the light input systems to make clear judgements about human centric lighting?

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And I don't think we do. But the problem is on the basis of what we do know, shouldn't we start to do something now?

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And so I think that's a bit of a challenge is how far can architects take this information and embedded in buildings when the story is incomplete?

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Well, I think we're absolutely right to actually go for it.

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Without an authoritarian viewpoint, because the more buildings that we're designing with the sensitivity, even if it's incomplete,

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we will get the measure of its success or not, because we have lots of people out there who are the guinea pigs carrying into these buildings.

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And if we were to institute a sort of an understanding, a regime of assessment, then we might get somewhere.

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Mm hmm. Absolutely. The timing of light exposure, of course, is critically important.

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And the way that you can incorporate that into building design, I think, is going to be really the exciting vanguard in the next decade.

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And so it's thinking about what light we need during the day in the workspace.

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But of course, I suppose buildings are used increasingly over 24 seven,

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and so just restricting them to a lighting regime for the daytime would also be naive.

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The 24 seven well that we've landed ourselves with is totally contrary to our biology

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because we have light when we don't expect it or the body doesn't expect it.

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I like the idea of the ceiling being a Zen space, a space of total neutrality, not even a fire detector up there.

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So you can actually look at a part of a room in the space or in.

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And feel no obligation to be like silence, visual silence.

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And that we've managed to succeed to do in a big project in Malta.

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We have opening windows. We don't have air conditioning. We've used the sun to design the building.

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And the buildings to shade each other. So it shows that if you can get the right daylight level.

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You get a new type of feeling in the office space. You don't need a suspended saying you don't like coming from the ceiling.

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And at night, in the evening, we project on to it from the wall or from the columns.

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So there's nothing up there other than a beautiful, diffused light level.

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That's a very interesting point, because essentially what our built spaces have done is detach us from a natural environment.

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And of course, what I think you want to do is reconnect us with our natural.

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Yeah. And light is the first part of that. For an architect, this is the first material we use.

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And I think the more we learn about the science of sleep and circadian rhythms and the way that light interacts with these systems,

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the more that can inform advanced architectural design.

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We're moving away from the fact that sleep is a luxury and an indulgence, and lack of sleep is a socio economic issue.

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And when we were studying 10 to 13, 14 year olds, we asked the question.

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Does anybody share your sleeping space? The question we didn't ask is, do you have a bed?

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And as a result of these discussions,

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we realised that many of these children were sleeping on the family's sofa while the television was going on and the parents were there.

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And the people who were doing night shift work and are chronically tired, the children who are failing at school because they're chronically tired.

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And I don't think we've paid enough attention to the fact that deprivation of sleep is a socioeconomic issue,

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and indeed it's something that architecture could address.

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Thanks very much to Russell Foster and Ian Ritchie.

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This was the first episode of a new podcast brought to you by Sleep and the Rhythms of Life project at the University of Oxford.

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The producer Ruth Abrahams from Feast Collective Productions.

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Music by Madeleine Morris. Thanks for listening and goodbye.