Biological Rhythms - History, Types Of Internal Clocks, Adaptations To Time, Problems Due To Circadian Desynchrony, Medical Uses
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Biological rhythms are often referred to as biological clocks, since they operate on time schedules on a daily, monthly, seasonal, or annual basis. Some biological rhythms even occur on the basis of fractions of seconds. These internal clocks operate independent of the environment, but they are controlled by environmental conditions in changing situations. During times of change, such as seasonal decreases of light, or those caused by travel in an east-west or west-east direction, human beings are able to reset their biological clocks to become synchronized with the environment.
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Karl von Frisch observed that bees visited flowers only at specific times. He and Ingeborg Beling trained bees to visit a nectar feeding station between 4 and 6 P.M. The bees did not visit at other times, and they still visited even when the nectar was removed. When outside cues such as light were removed in laboratory trials, the bees still fed at prescribed times. Although von Frisch did not kno…
Some biological rhythms occur more than once a day and are called ultradian rhythms. The release of hormones from the male pituitary gland of mammals occurs about every one to two hours during the day. Sleep cycles, that is, the cycle from drowsiness to REM (rapid eye movement, dream sleep) to dozing, then light and deep sleep, and finally slow-wave sleep, is a 90-minute sleep cycle that repeats i…
The basic time adaptation in biological rhythms is entrained, which means it is influenced by external cues. Other aspects of our biological rhythms are so influential that most of us adapt our activities to the time of day during which we function best. Some people are morning people, while others are night people. Morning people (sometimes called larks) wake up with lots of energy and perform th…
Shift work is a necessity in an industrially developed country. Manufacturing, transportation, and health care rely on shift workers to maintain operations around the clock. A shift worker can be defined as someone who works evenings, nights, rotating shifts, or extended shifts. Unlike jet lag, which is usually a temporary disruption, shift work schedules and their disruptions can last for years. …
The work of chronobiologists in the area of biological rhythms has been useful to medical science in helping them diagnose illness more accurately. Twenty-four hour monitoring of heart rate and blood pressure gives the treating physician a better picture of health problems. Newborn infants of families with histories of heart disease can be monitored and abnormalities can be seen. Early detection o…
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