The Human Charger – mutta eihän se voi toimia..?

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.