Science Says Light Brighter!

- Audrey Gray

Research scientist Mariana Figueiro prescribes light exposure the way a medical doctor might call for a round of high-powered antibiotics: in precise doses at specific times of day. To achieve optimal sleep and mood patterns, for instance, she advises going out into daylight for at least 30 minutes first thing in the morning. (She also prescribes dimming all light sources in the evening before finally shutting everything down overnight.) That’s the minimum protocol. If she were offered a little more control—and as director of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Lighting Research Center (LRC), she often is—Figueiro would have your retinas exposed to bright white light for a full two hours every morning. She believes that if lighting designers and architects prioritized this critical morning dosage, we’d all begin to feel a lot less off-kilter.

“The light in the built environment during the day is far too low, too dim,” Figueiro said one day this past winter as she walked me around her laboratory in Troy, New York, a few miles northeast of Albany. The LRC operates out of an old machinery facility built in the 1860s, before Edison and his bulb. Its huge windows and courtyard shafts capitalize on daylight, but Figueiro’s lab stays sheathed in blackout shades for accurate experimentation. We passed four refrigerators and a freezer, and when I asked what was inside, Figueiro laughed and opened one door to reveal dozens of chilled test tubes. “It’s a lot of blood and spit!” she said. (Urine too, I heard later.)