Blue light before bedtime can make it harder to sleep, and the screens on phones, computers, and televisions send out plenty of blue light. This is all true. But if you’re focused on blue light as a major problem affecting your sleep or your eye health, it’s time to look at it from another aspect.

As Philip Yuhas, a professor of vision, writes at The Conversation, blue light isn’t a uniquely technological evil. It’s part of sunlight, and your eyes are exposed to plenty of it all the time. You ‘ re fine. There are studies in mice that have found blue light can damage their eyes, but mice are nocturnal creatures (夜行动物) whose eyes are different from ours. The pigments (色素) and the lenses (晶状体) of our eyes actually block blue light fairly well-so in a sense, we already have built-in blue blocking protection

Adding more protection isn’t likely to help though. You can buy glasses and screen filters (滤光片) that block blue light, but Yuhas points out they are probably a waste of money: these products do not block out much blue light. The leading blue-blocking anti-reflective coating, for example, blocks only about 15% of the blue light that screens send out. You could get the same reduction just by holding your phone another inch from your face.

The American Academy of Ophthalmology doesn’t recommend blue-blocking products, either. Instead, if you’re concerned about your eye health or your ability to get to sleep on time, you already know what to do:

Put the screens away at bedtime. Read a book or find something else to do. While you’re using screens take a 20-second break every 20 minutes to look at something 20 feet away ( the “20-20-20 ” rule ). If you get dry eyes when you look at screens for a long time, use eyedrops labeled artificial tears.

In the history of creativity, great ideas often come when we're least expecting them. Consider Mozart, who described how new melodies would arrive while he was eating in a restaurant or getting ready for sleep at night. "It seems to me impossible to say when they come to me and how they arrive; what is certain is that I cannot make them come when I wish," he wrote.

Psychologists would seem to agree, with strong evidence that creative ideas are much more likely to occur after a period of incubation — in which you focus on something entirely different from the job at hand, while your brain works away behind the scenes. This could include taking a walk, doing housework or having a shower. Even our procrastination (拖延症) at work, such as watching funny YouTube videos, may be helpful for our problem solving, provided it is done properly.

Facing a coming deadline, we may fear taking any time away from the task at hand. But this will be counterproductive, and there should be no guilt about spending a few moments of pleasant distraction, or leaving the task altogether as we allow a solution to surfacing suddenly.

There are many reasons why a period of incubation could lead to new insights. According to one of the leading theories, it depends on the power of the unconscious mind. When we leave our task, the brain continues to look for solutions below awareness, until a solution comes out suddenly. Just as importantly, a period of incubation allows us to gain some psychological distance from our task. It would help you to widen your mental focus so that you can make connections and come back to the problem with a new perspective. Interestingly, incubation may work best when your mind is distracted with a relatively easy task, so that it is given just enough room to wander freely.

“Can you say mama? Or dada?” If you’ve spent any time around a baby, chances are you’ve heard or said things like these. 【小题1】 For instance, baby talk, “parentese” (父母语), or, according to development specialists, child-directed speech. Although this kind of small talk might seem meaningless, the conversations are important.

Baby talk is an important piece of speech and language development. Studies show that when babies are exposed to such talk every day throughout their first year of life, they develop stronger vocabularies than other kids. And the little ones are eager for it. 【小题2】 So when parents apply it, they help their babies learn more words and promote social interaction.

Child-directed speech wasn’t always valued. Before the middle of the 20th century, researchers largely ignored it as a subject of study. Until the early 1990s, many developmental psychologists and linguists believed that without any help, we would learn how to speak and form complete sentences by ourselves. 【小题3】

But over the past few decades, numerous studies have found that throughout their first year of life, when babies are regularly exposed to such talk in addition to normal speech, they process, learn, and remember words presented to them in singsong tones (语调) better. One reason may have to do with how babies interact with the world. 【小题4】 However, but their ears perk up (竖起来) when a caregiver makes that singsong tone.

【小题5】 In a 2020 study, researchers found that bat parents also used a different tone to communicate with their babies. Baby talk has also been observed in a few other species like squirrel monkeys.