Thread: How Your Brain Tells Time

Out Of The Labs
How Your Brain Tells Time

Researchers are building a mathematical model of how brains keep time, and finding some surprises.

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.

That's interesting. Nice read at work to take your mind off the game.

It is an interesting read, to be sure...but they could have saved a lot of money just by asking me.

I knew about that little group of white-collar gray cells a long time ago, and I treat them better than most office workers are treated. Except when they wake me up. That's when I flog them with about 4 cigarettes and 2-3 cups of coffee in a 30 minute time period. Then I relent, and give them a 4 hour break while I check out my Email, Myspace, PPO, and whatever porn sites I stumbled upon at 4 am after a stimulating session of...

Wait, what were talking about again?