“In the middle of your brain, there’s a personal assistant the size of a grain of rice. It’s a group of about 20,000 brain cells that keeps your body’s daily schedule.
Partly in response to light signals from the retina, this group of neurons sends signals to other parts of the brain and the rest of the body to help control things like sleep, metabolism, immune system activity, body temperature and hormone production on a schedule slightly longer than 24 hours.
Daniel Forger, a mathematics professor at the University of Michigan who uses math to study biological processes, wants to understand this brain region, called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in excruciating detail. He is building a mathematical model of the entire structure that he thinks will shed important light on our circadian rhythm, and perhaps lead to treatments for disorders like depression and insomnia, and even diseases influenced by the internal clock like heart disease, Alzheimer’s and cancer.”
Read more at Forbes.com
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Interesting,
i think this is the reason why, the night before i think to myself that i HAVE to wake up at six…
and the next day i actually do!
once i woke up at exactly 6:00
jimmie cooper is in MY BRAIN???
so that’s why i’m so crazy!
I realised years ago that my internal clock works on a 25.5 hour day.
It means about once a month I need to spend a whole night awake or a whole day in bed, that’s my excuse & I’m sticking to it
Can anyone explain why our internal clocks are out of sync with the Earths rotation ?
Wow very interesting. Nice share!
I\’m the time keeper, or should I say .. during the week it is my job that mind controls me in this area .. should not get to bed too late as I wont be able to get up in the morning in time then (not even with a clock). Most never get to that biological rhythm ever as long as they need to work outside their house, or are dependent on shops (opening hours) and such.
The time keeper cells that go crazy .. maybe it\’s ot them that keep time but simply some puppets that are being monitored by the real processors somewhere else, maybe they dont really have a \”I keep the time\” monitor in side .. they simply interact .. What if you take the other type of cell away there? Are they connected to the other cells, or are there even more type of cells there? Do they communicate among eachother?
Light via the retina .. interesting … light will not be taken in the same way with age .. there’s a double system .. two brain halves .. you can see the difference between those two states … (it’s not that black & white .. that you are then on one brain half, and then on the other half .. ), maybe it’s not even brain halves but body system that is not on so much with that stuff anymore, older people start to work a different system after a while but can observe those things quite well inside of their self, maybe some younger people as well.
The enormous differences between bodies and their drivers, makes this research, all research, quite difficult.
Older people ‘need’ less sleep, so does that mean that those time keeper cells work less efficient? Healthy ageing, a focus here?
@Elephant’s Child. The body is on a 25.5 hour rythmn because when this part of the brain developed the Earth’s days were longer.
@Jenny Vuong. I’m exactly the same! I once woke up at exactly 7.34! Wow! What’s even more amazing is that I hadn’t even thought about getting up at that time.
a mathematical model composed of 20,000 interacting parts… AWESOME.
but, i want to see a physical model!
giant “brain clock”, Rube Goldberg style.