Quotes About Circadian

It doesn't matter so much if they go to bed at the same time each evening, but waking up at a consistent hour is a necessity. Anxiety and depression cannot be easily treated if the sufferer has unpredictable daily routines. The systems that mediate negative emotion are tightly tied to the properly cyclical circadian rhythms. The

Our circadian biology, and the insatiable early-morning demands of a post-industrial way of life, denies us the sleep we vitally need.

Part of how easily we go to sleep is genetic: many sleep disturbances, ranging from insomnia to circadian disruption, have a large genetic component.

If we didn't need eight hours of sleep and could survive on six, Mother Nature would have done away with 25 percent of our sleep time millions of years ago. Because when you think about it, sleep is an idiotic thing to do.

There is the idea that, when we look at things, it is the yellow light that helps us the most, that we are the most sensitive for. But our circadian rhythms, which are the rhythms that help us to wake and sleep and be alert and relaxed and so forth and so on, they are much more triggered by blue light.

For a tree, to endure four months of daylight is like you or I going without sleep for four months.

I'm envious of people who can sleep as long as they want. I have the circadian rhythm of a farmer.

By keeping patients awake for longer, we build up a strong sleep pressure.

When you're in nature, when you're going to bed when the sun goes down and getting up when the sun rises, and you get into that rhythm, your body just really responds positively to it.

When subjects go to sleep later in their body temperature cycles, they actually sleep less, even though they have been awake longer.

Remarkably, the other 20 percent of blind people do manage to synchronize to the light-dark cycle. The likely explanation is that the circadian photoreceptors in their retinas are intact, even if their rods and cones are not. This allows light to work its resetting action on the clock, by striking the eyes and then traveling down the neural pathways to the pacemaker. In other words, although these people lack sight, they can still perceive light in a nonvisual, circadian sense.

The implication is that there are two pathways from the eyes to the brain: one for conscious vision and the other for circadian entrainment. This hypothesis is consistent with the known anatomy of the mammalian brain; the neural hotline to the pacemaker is separate from the brain's visual pathways.

believe it or not, our height varies according to the time of day: we are on average half an inch shorter by the time we go to bed than we were when we got up. We lose most of that height within three hours of rising, as our cartilages settle and compress and decrease our joint spaces.

I've become a day writer: most people start as night writers, and I used to be, but something happened to my endocrine system. I do miss the 3 A.M. writing jags.

People used to think that biological clocks were not only mysterious, they were seen almost as miracles. This is no longer the case.

When we sleep, consciousness fades. We spend one-quarter to one-third of our life asleep, more when we're young and less as we age. Sleep is defined by behavioral immobility (which is not absolute, as we continue to breathe, move our eyes, and occasionally twitch a limb) and reduced responsiveness to external stimuli. We share this need for daily sleep with all animals.

It's unfortunate biologically we have to sleep.

The circadian neurons are one of the few circuits in neurobiology where we have a chance to understand at multiple levels how different sets of neurons communicate with each other - including understanding the wiring rules, the biochemical rules, and the functional behavioral rules.

I'm basically nocturnal.

I try to manage my day by my circadian rhythms because the creativity is such an elusive thing, and I could easily just stomp over it doing my administrative stuff.

The fact that we don't have that biologic pressure to have highly polyphasic sleep, I think, probably tells us something in terms of, truly, whether it's useful or not.

The time of night when you sleep makes a significant difference in terms of the structure and quality of your sleep.

A functional biological clock has three components: input from the outside world to set the clock, the timekeeping mechanism itself, and genetic machinery that allows the clock to regulate expression of a variety of genes.

I don't use an alarm. I wake up naturally at 7 A.M.