Researchers say electricity itself -- and the light pollution it enables -- is to blame for modern man's lack of sleep. File photo by UPI/Bill Greenblatt | License Photo

SEATTLE, June 19 (UPI) -- Recent research has shown that glowing screens are a plague on healthy sleep patterns, but a new study shows the problem is much broader -- electricity is the enemy of a good night's rest.

The circadian rhythms of modern humans are constantly disrupted by things with plugs -- lights, computers, TVs, phones. In a new study, researchers argue the reason people get less sleep than their ancestors did is the uptick in artificial light -- artificial light made possible by electricity.


To test their general theory, researchers set to find out how the introduction of electricity might affect the sleep habits of two similar communities. Two indigenous communities living in rural northeastern Argentina made for the perfect test subjects.

The two traditional Toba/Qom communities were extremely similar in a variety of ways, but only one of the two had 24-hour access to electricity.

Over a two-year period, researchers twice visited the communities -- once at the outset, allowing scientists to outfit study participants with tracking devices that monitored activity and sleep habits. Participants also kept sleep diaries.

The researchers found that the community with electricity slept an hour less per night on average.

"In a way, this study presents a proxy of what happened to humanity as we moved from hunting and gathering to agriculture and eventually to our industrialized society," lead study author Horacio de la Iglesia, a University of Washington biology professor, said in a press release. "All the effects we found are probably an underestimation of what we would see in highly industrialized societies where our access to electricity has tremendously disrupted our sleep."

Researchers also found that both communities slept more in the winter than the summer, despite the fact that length of days and nights barely change through the seasons.

"We tend to think we're isolated from seasonal effects even though we know this is the case for many animals," de la Iglesia said. "I think it's still embedded in our biology even when we do as much as we can to obscure that difference between summer and winter."

The study was published in the Journal of Biological Rhythms.