Blinking Lights

 By Okiki Adeduyite

AAUA Campus is sufficiently brightened. Although there are faulty solar street lights that only come on whenever they feel like, you can still find your way through places at night. Whether you're jogging the hill up to Zenith Hostel or you're hiking your way to the Health Centre, there's always a fluorescent light, distant or nearby, telling you "I got you. You can't trip." So there are really no dark spots on campus.

This 3-eyed light box is one of the illuminants used to achieve this purpose. There are a bunch of them.

 They look innocent by day with their big 3 transparent eyes, but at night, they do serious damage.

These lights are located in various places on campus: At the right-end of the Olusegun Obasanjo (OBJ) Multipurpose Hall, right in front of Works and Service Unit few steps from the school genrator, halfway on the wall of Faculty of Arts Lecture Theaters as you approach from OBJ and at the Department of Earth Sciences’ building opposite Zenith Hostel. They are obviously there to do what lights do – illuminate. But these particular lights are different from the others: they blink or flash rapidly depending on how you see it. Whichever way, that beats the purpose to which they are there.

Juliet, a 400 level student of the institution, takes to her heels whenever she forgetfully follows the road path by the right of OBJ home: "It disrupts my eyes..." she says, "... and makes me unable to see. I have to cover my face with my hands and quickly run past the place."

A light that flickers is one thing. One that dances in the darkness, imitating a disco setting and surpassing the modesty of an ambulance light is another thing. Especially when it doesn't do what it's meant to do – which is to brighten the pathway – but ends up blinding the subjects whose way it's supposed to smoothen.

Making road paths convoluted in the dark of the night appears to be a lesser worry when you look at the adverse effects and disastrous results flashing lights wields.

The 2018 Pixar film, Incredibles 2 contains flashing lights starting about an hour into the film, in which a villain called Screenslaver hypnotizes other characters. Dozens of people viewing the flick in cinemas suffered seizures due to the scene and this led to Pixar reediting the scene and theatre owners posting warnings for audience members suffering from Photosensitive Epilepsy.

In Nigeria, the number of people with Epilepsy, based on defined communities, varies from 15 to 37 per 1000 persons according to a 2006 study by Ogunrin Olubunmi.

People with epilepsy suffer seizures which are triggered by not only flashing lights but also flashing images or rapidly changing images. Flashing images made headlines in 2016 when a twitter user sent a video of flashing images to a journalist, Kurt Eichenwald, who has epilepsy. The user who sent the images with the words, "You deserve a seizure for your posts," did this in response to a piece Kurt wrote on Donald Trump's business interest. Poor reportage on the incurable illness in Nigeria militates close-to-home instances but it's no news that epilepsy, which is often alluded as an effect of witchcraft or the revenge of an aggrieved ancestral spirit in rural Nigeria, has sporadic occurrences in this part of the world.

Flashing lights causes the brain to send out too many brain waves at once. This results in a seizure and seizures can be deadly. The lights could trigger a seizure in an epileptic person. In a non-epileptic person, it's less likely but any time the brain goes through a major rewiring like that, you're susceptible to a seizure.

Not every seizure means you're epileptic. But two or more seizures are definitely an epileptic condition. According to the Epilepsy Foundation, many people don't even realize they have epilepsy until a flashing light or image triggers a seizure.

This should not be news as the use of flashing lights is a prominent method of torture used by security agencies and generally hostile countries. It is known as White Torture. Exposing detainees to rapidly flashing lights for an extended period of time affects their cognition and makes them lose personal identity which is as a result of sensory overload. Apparently, the brain needs light to function correctly. Light to the brain is just like salt to food: a sprinkle is good, but too much will mess up the meal.

Sensory Overload is a known, studied and, in most countries, approved method of torture. Such instrument of psychological death should not be found in an institution of learning.
Some might argue that the lights, which are placed in various popular locations on campus, were not intended to blink. In the case of street lights, flashing could indicate voltage problems – the LED in streetlights needs 120-227 volts. If the voltage isn't met, that could cause them to blink.

It's hard to imagine that these similar lights happen to be the only ones with voltage issues and the school hasn’t done anything about it for close to two years. Maybe the school is just not aware. And that's why the sensitization function of the press is being exercised in this texts.

This is for a better environment, for a school trying to be better and students trying to be better than the environment they've found themselves: LET THERE BE LIGHT... that doesn't blink.