Explainer
Background pieces that explain a concept or mechanism.
Why Are Video Calls So Tiring? What the EEG and Camera-Off Experiments Found
Video call fatigue has been tested with EEG in a lab and with a camera-on field experiment at work, and both found effects. The explanations for…
How Much Exercise to Offset Sitting All Day? The Number Got Smaller When Researchers Stopped Asking People to Guess
Accelerometer studies put the figure at roughly 30 to 40 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity a day, lower than the familiar hour drawn from self-reports. Here is…
Why Do I Get Tired After Lunch? Mostly Not the Food
A review of the post-lunch dip reports it can occur even in people who ate no lunch and did not know the time of day. Here…
Does an Ergonomic Chair Help Back Pain? What the Evidence Actually Shows
Nobody has shown that an ergonomic chair reduces low back pain, and the chair-intervention evidence is rated very low to low quality. What survives is narrower:…
How Long Does It Take to Refocus After an Interruption?
The famous 23 minutes and 15 seconds does not appear in the paper it is credited to. What the interruption research actually measured is messier, and…
Can You Catch Up on Sleep on Weekends? Two Literatures, Two Answers
Two bodies of evidence answer the weekend catch-up question in opposite directions: short-run laboratory markers and a 13-year mortality cohort. Here is what each one can…
Does Drinking Water Help You Focus? The Studies Were Not Done at a Desk
The dehydration-and-cognition studies induced fluid loss with treadmill walking in a warm room and a prescription diuretic, and the pooled effect concentrates above 2% body-mass loss.…
How High Should Your Monitor Be? The Standards Give a Number, the Trials Give a Shrug
Every ergonomics page hands out the same monitor height rule as if it were a clinical finding. It is a comfort convention from occupational health guidance,…
How Long Before Bed to Stop Drinking Coffee (Your Cutoff Is Not 2pm)
The 8.8-hour figure everyone quotes is a modelled output for a single 107 mg cup, not a validated curfew. Here is the subtraction to run against…
Do Blue Light Glasses Work? The Three Claims the Marketing Blurs Together
Blue-light eyewear is sold on three separate promises (less eye strain, eye protection, and better sleep) that get merged into one. The evidence base is different…
Cognitive Offloading and AI: Why Your Confidence Outruns Your Code
The popular story is that AI makes you dumber. The evidence supports something narrower and more useful: offloading judgement to an automated aid miscalibrates your confidence…
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