Miten Valkeen-huijauskorvavalolla
mahtaa nykyään mennä? Google-haulla löytyi brittiläisen The
Telegraph -sanomalehden tuore testitulos (1.7.2019). Se vain
vahvistaa aiempaa arviota siitä, että korvavalo – sen ostaneiden
lukuisista kehuista huolimatta – ei voi toimia, eli huijausta
kaikki tyynni.
Koska artikkeli ei ole vapaasti
saatavilla, se on kopioitu kokonaisuudessaan tähän.
The Human Charger, reviewed: the
bizarre device that shines light down your ears to wake you up
The marketing blurb for the “Human
Charger” says that if you shine light down your ear canals, you
improve your mood, energy level and alertness by “stimulating
photosensitive receptors”. This strikes me as odd, because the
human body, in all its bounteousness, has already provided two sets
of photosensitive receptors that are much more easily accessible. You
might know them as “eyes”.
Then again, on a serious note, I am a
human and I sometimes feel like I need charging. Could this be the
perfect product for me? On an actually serious note, I work in a
windowless cavern of a newsroom that I’m pretty sure makes me
sluggish during the day and restless in the evening. Since I can’t
change my ghoulish working conditions (unless I’m rude enough about
them to get sacked), maybe I can change myself. Maybe I can change
the amount of artificial light being blasted down my earholes, which
to the best of my knowledge is currently zero.
Enter the £122 Human Charger. Or
rather, let the Human Charger enter me. It takes the form of two
black earbuds, which look like they go slightly deeper than your
common garden earbud, wired up like a set of headphones to a sleek,
silver box that resembles a heavy, screenless iPod Nano. All the
better to camouflage it, I guess. All those suckers around me will
think I’m listening to music when, in fact, I’m being pumped full
of energy like a lorry at a petrol station.
It’s a normal Wednesday morning when
I take it out of its box; I’m feeling a bit heavy-lidded, even
after cycling to said windowless cavern, and my mood is a normal
Wednesday morning shade of beige. Having charged the thing up with a
micro-USB cable, I put the buds in my ears and press the power
button. The button and the tips of the earbuds light up. This human
starts charging… now.
The device resembles a soundless,
screenless Bizarro iPod
You’ll be pleased to learn that, per
the marketing guff that sounds like it was written by a committee of
AIs, “HumanCharger® requires only 12 minutes but does not limit
the user from daily activities such as walking, talking or any other
normal daily tasks”. This means I’m able to go about my usual
email chores, until, after a few minutes, a curious sensation sets
in. Is someone talking about me? Because my ears are burning!
It’s a gentle sort of heat, but it’s
heat nonetheless. For the first time in my life I feel grateful for
the docility of conventional earbuds, which after generations of
breeding are tame enough not to roast your skull from the inside.
These guys are fiercer, but it’s easy enough to forget about and
might even wake me up a bit. Do I perceive a partial scraping-off of
barnacles?
After a while, I see the light at the
end of the tunnel, by which I mean the twelve minutes have elapsed.
I’ve had the novel experience of feeling like a phone being hooked
up to an external battery, I’m not sure if I’ve felt any change
in myself. I try it over the next few mornings with similar results,
apart from the one morning where it seemed to stimulate a desire to
move my bowels. I was keenest for it to work on the morning when I’d
come into work on minimal sleep, but I felt like crap before, during
and after my charging.
'My ears are burning!'
I ended the week more sceptical than
I’d began it. Did I do it right?, I wondered. Did I… put it in
the right orifice? I had, thank God – it just hadn’t worked, or,
if it had, it had prompted so imperceptible a change in my alertness
as to be outweighed by a gulp of coffee.
To learn about the science or otherwise
behind this device, I spoke to Professor Andrew King, who is
co-director of the Auditory Neuroscience Group at the University of
Oxford. Prof King explained that there’s “a long-standing
interest in the effects of light on the brain being mediated other
than by the obvious route, through the eyes”, and mentioned the
school of thought that held that shining light at the back of the
knee can alleviate jetlag. He said there was no doubt that light “can
modulate circadian, neuroendocrine, hormonal and behavioural
responses, and mood”, and affirmed that seasonal affective disorder
is “a very real phenomenon”, but said that what little hard
science there is in this area – the shining-light-down-the-ear area
– is “quite controversial”.
In the end, he said, “the evidence to
really support a genuine benefit coming from this is not particularly
strong.”
And you can throw in my purely
anecdotal evidence. There are several other things I could stick down
my ears to wake myself up – pencils, worms, frayed electric cabling
– that are easier to get hold of than the Human Charger and don’t
cost north of a hundred quid. Maybe that’s the real charge: £122.
