Welcome to this podcast brought to you by Sleep and the Rhythms of Life Project at the University of Oxford.
I'm Sally Shuttleworth, and I'm here to introduce our two guests who will be in conversation today.
First, Russell Foster, who's professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford and author of the bestselling
book Lifetime The New Science of the Body Clock and How It Can Revolutionise Your Health.
And second, Ian Ritchie, a world renowned architect, artist and author whose work begins with light as the primary material of architecture.
Sleep occupies about one third of our lives, and since the pandemic has been a particular focus of concern and indeed anxiety,
as so many people have reported, disrupted sleep or problems of getting to sleep in the first place.
The focus of our conversation today is perhaps an unusual one.
Sleep In relation to light and architecture, Russell and Ian,
how can a neuroscientist and an architect help us to understand the world of sleep and the rhythms that govern our lives?
And what can you both learn from each other? Well in and I have been working together for quite some time.
The first project was the Sainsbury Welcome Centre in London and I think we met around a table.
And of course I'm a slight geek and I wanted to ask, you know, what's your favourite building?
And he said, the Crystal Palace. And I was completely gobsmacked because that's my favourite building and I was obsessed with it because
of this great temple of glass allowing natural light in to illuminate these extraordinary objects.
Interesting, Russell. My first recollection of meeting you was at the Royal Society.
You said, What is your favourite colour? Oh, and I replied, 481 nanometres, to which you said you're one nanometre out.
The brain probably doesn't know it.
And of course the significance of 480 nanometres is the wavelength of the maximum sensitivity of the photoreceptors that we discovered in the eye,
which are regulating the biological clock and a number of other things.
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,
but how they're regulated by light. So we have this internal day, the circadian clock,
which is fine tuning every aspect of our physiology and behaviour to the very demands of the natural light dog cycle.
The 24 hour day. And of course, it's the eye that detects this light, dark cycle and sets the internal clock.
But what's turned out to be fascinating is that it's not the visual cells of the eye, the rods and cones,
but it's this third photoreceptor we discovered which is maximally sensitive to blue light blue light of around 480 nanometres or so.
But it's more than just the colour and the intensity.
What we're also discovering is the rate of change of the light, the time of light exposure, the duration of light exposure.
And this will change and of sensitivities will change as we age.
And there's even arguments that the circadian clock changes its sensitivity with different illness states.
So, for example, in mental illness, there's a suggestion that in some groups they might be more sensitive to light and
therefore have their circadian rhythms shifted all over the place and in some cases,
less sensitive to light.
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.
So I think that any built space needs to embrace our biology so that an environment optimises vision but also optimises alertness.
So it's bright enough for alertness. It's bright enough for regulating the clock and therefore the sleep wake systems.
I think it's interesting that daylight and windows for architects was more about the view out of the window.
Rather than the amount of light coming in. And there are many examples in the 5060s through the PFI period and building hospitals
where windows were placed relatively high to the sleeping position in their ward,
so that when the patient sits up to look out the window, they can't see anything.
If one approaches an example of a ward and you've got patients who are requiring sleep at different times,
possibly because of having had operations, recovery periods, mental state How does an architect go about designing the lighting for a board?
What would be your first move as an architect? Talk to Russell Foster.
If we don't get the light right, you know, build spaces, whether they be domestic spaces or workspaces,
then the consequences of a disrupted circadian and sleep system are severe.
So short term disruption can involve fluctuations in mood, irritability, loss of empathy.
You fail to pick up the social signals from friends, family, work, colleagues, risk taking and doing stupid and unreflective things.
So all of those are really quite, quite profound changes in our emotional responses or ability to focus.
It's very interesting. People say it's all about multitasking. It isn't.
It's about actually focusing upon all the variables, options that you've got to.
And focusing is very difficult if you're not getting enough sleep, attention, concentration, decision making,
creativity, productivity, all of these things are hugely affected if you're not getting the right sleep.
And then long term and this is primarily within the nightshift community.
But there's a great example where I don't think there's any sensible lighting design.
What we know is there's increased cardiovascular disease, altered stress responses,
type two diabetes, low immunity, high rates of infection, high rates of cancer.
And of course, the big one, depression and psychosis by not getting the right sort of sleep,
which is profoundly influenced by light in our domestic workspaces.
So not getting sleep is so much more than the inconvenience of feeling tired at the wrong time.
It impacts upon our global health.
And that's why a dialogue between architects and neuroscientists is so very important, because it's fundamental to human health.
I think it's a cultural issue as well between different cultures based on where you are on the earth.
As you go towards the equator, artificial light is whiter.
The further north you go to the Nordic countries, it's more like a candle.
They go yellow spectrum. And I think that has something to do with.
The environment, the overall environment you're in, in terms of a light environment and it's embedded in somewhere into one's culture,
in one's body is not as simple as saying, well, if we do have water here in,
say, Caribbean, then you apply the same word, design a light design to one.
In Helsinki. You can have the right answer. You won't. Yes, I think that's a very important point.
And just to emphasise, of course, a light environment is immensely dynamic changes,
intensity changes in colour, in wavelength changes in the position of the sun in the sky.
These are all critical factors. And what the circadian and sleep systems need to do is extract time of day information from that.
And because the stimulus is so complicated, we have to think.
I think our first principle would be that the sensory systems detecting that complex light environment are also going to be pretty sophisticated,
which gets us back to do we know enough about the light input systems to make clear judgements about human centric lighting?
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?
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?
Well, I think we're absolutely right to actually go for it.
Without an authoritarian viewpoint, because the more buildings that we're designing with the sensitivity, even if it's incomplete,
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.
And if we were to institute a sort of an understanding, a regime of assessment, then we might get somewhere.
Mm hmm. Absolutely. The timing of light exposure, of course, is critically important.
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.
And so it's thinking about what light we need during the day in the workspace.
But of course, I suppose buildings are used increasingly over 24 seven,
and so just restricting them to a lighting regime for the daytime would also be naive.
The 24 seven well that we've landed ourselves with is totally contrary to our biology
because we have light when we don't expect it or the body doesn't expect it.
I like the idea of the ceiling being a Zen space, a space of total neutrality, not even a fire detector up there.
So you can actually look at a part of a room in the space or in.
And feel no obligation to be like silence, visual silence.
And that we've managed to succeed to do in a big project in Malta.
We have opening windows. We don't have air conditioning. We've used the sun to design the building.
And the buildings to shade each other. So it shows that if you can get the right daylight level.
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.
And at night, in the evening, we project on to it from the wall or from the columns.
So there's nothing up there other than a beautiful, diffused light level.
That's a very interesting point, because essentially what our built spaces have done is detach us from a natural environment.
And of course, what I think you want to do is reconnect us with our natural.
Yeah. And light is the first part of that. For an architect, this is the first material we use.
And I think the more we learn about the science of sleep and circadian rhythms and the way that light interacts with these systems,
the more that can inform advanced architectural design.
We're moving away from the fact that sleep is a luxury and an indulgence, and lack of sleep is a socio economic issue.
And when we were studying 10 to 13, 14 year olds, we asked the question.
Does anybody share your sleeping space? The question we didn't ask is, do you have a bed?
And as a result of these discussions,
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.
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.
And I don't think we've paid enough attention to the fact that deprivation of sleep is a socioeconomic issue,
and indeed it's something that architecture could address.
Thanks very much to Russell Foster and Ian Ritchie.
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.
The producer Ruth Abrahams from Feast Collective Productions.
Music by Madeleine Morris. Thanks for listening and goodbye.