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This Scientific American article discusses how exposure to bright light, like from iPad and computer screens, can cause sleep problems by suppressing your body's release of melatonin.

"Mariana Figueiro of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her team showed that two hours of iPad use at maximum brightness was enough to suppress people's normal nighttime release of melatonin, a key hormone in the body's clock, or circadian system. Melatonin tells your body that it is night, helping to make you sleepy. If you delay that signal, Figueiro says, you could delay sleep. Other research indicates that “if you do that chronically, for many years, it can lead to disruption of the circadian system,” sometimes with serious health consequences, she explains."
 

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This Scientific American article shares research on how even tiny distractions, like glancing down at a cellphone, can have huge consequences like doubling the rate of making mistakes.

"Though the distractions took only three seconds and weren't difficult tasks, students lost their places or made mistakes twice as often after those distractions as they did without interruptions. The distractions were so brief that they couldn't have caused people to actually forget the tasks they were doing, losing them from short-term memory. Rather, Altmann hypothesizes that the demands of switching attention, no matter how briefly, take mental energy that would otherwise have gone toward the task."

This Scientific American article points to a study that reveals how our memories affect our hunger.

Image: iStock/Vitalii Netiaga

"The first result is that there’s no fooling your stomach immediately after a meal. When tested shortly after eating the soup, subjects who had eaten the larger portion were more sated than those who had eaten the smaller portion, and it mattered comparatively little how much people thought they ate. Two cups is more than one cup, and your stomach gets it right, despite any visual trickery. Two and three hours after eating, however, a different sort of pattern emerged. The subjects were all hungrier, of course, but their hunger had little to do with the volume of soup they had actually eaten. Instead, it was what they remembered seeing in the bowl that mattered. In fact, those who ate the small portion and thought it was large were more sated than those who ate the large portion and thought it was small. When it comes to the feeling of fullness, the eyes are more important than the stomach."