This is a fascinating and disturbing story from a New York Times magazine article from 2006 about a syndrome that sees husbands and sons shutting themselves inside their bedrooms and withdrawing from the world for upto 23 hrs per day for periods of four years +

I had questions about how this effects the body. Would there be muscle wastage? How does the human body adjust to no daylight and what happens to the circadian rhythm? But mainly it’s the small spaces they occupy and their choice to do so, and what is behind it that perturbed me. I also wonder about the stress response/responder. Have our bodies become so accustomed to stress that the response is now over pronounced and extreme. All of this leads me back to light pollution and that wonderful talk I heard at UBC last year by the art critic (from Yale) about, amongst many things, sleep disturbance.