The Science of Allay
The patented Allay band of light can make even your worst headaches less debilitating. Here’s how it works:
It's about precision
As you go about your life, the light you see generates electrical signals in your eyes. These signals cause a reaction in the brain, and it can be quite intense even in everyday light.
While everyone squints in the bright sun, some people - often those with migraines, cluster headaches, brain trauma or dry eyes - are extremely sensitive to even small amounts of light.
They end up spending much of their lives isolated in a dark room or wearing sunglasses to try to keep their pain from getting even worse.
Fortunately, Prof. Rami Burstein has discovered a precise narrow band of natural light that lets you see and function without the discomfort of everyday light: the Allay band of light.
Smaller signals, happier brain
There is no magic or luck in the discovery of the Allay light. It is based on scientific evidence from nearly ten years of research at one of the world's leading research hospitals.
The studies show that everyday light, made up of all the colors of light – red, yellow, green, blue, etc., generates large electrical signals in the eye and brain, which tend to hurt people with light sensitivity.
In contrast, a very specific narrow band of green light - which is the only light emitted by the Allay Lamp - generates small electrical signals in the eye and brain and therefore does not hurt people with light sensitivity.
Follow the Research
People with migraine often complain that light hurts them. When Prof. Rami Burstein and his colleagues conducted research to understand why, they discovered a new pathway in the brain that explains how light hurts. The pathway begins in the eye as light signals come in. Surprisingly, however, it ends right in a group of neurons (nerve cells) that tell the brain a headache is happening. When the light signals travel on that pathway and hit that group of neurons, they make the headache more painful.
As he set out to learn more about this pathway, Prof. Burstein went back in his mind to his conversations with patients and an intriguing pattern he had noticed: they often said their headaches were worse on cloudy days. Light on a cloudy day has different color characteristics than light on a sunny day. Might the color of light matter?
Studying how people’s perception of pain changes according to the color of light around them, Prof. Burstein found that headaches felt worse when patients were exposed to blue, red, and yellow lights, but not when they were exposed to a very narrow band of green light. He spent the next two years trying to understand why. What he found was that red, blue, and yellow lights generated much larger electrical signals in the eyes and the brain than the very special narrow band of green light. Smaller signals, he concluded, were less irritating.
This groundbreaking discovery led to the development of the Allay Lamp, which emits only the precise narrow band of green light that minimizes irritation and keeps the brain calm.
