I have a good feeling, that I will write quite a number posts about sleep, circadian rhythm and all the good stuff about stress relation with sleep wake cycles, and how our body responds to them. Circadian rhythm and the cellular oscillators that underlie them are ubiquitous and for good reason. For most organisms, dawn means food, predation, and changes in all the geophysical variables that accompany the sun, warmth, winds, and so on.
It's a big deal when sun comes up, and most living things time their days with an internal clock that is synchronized by external cues. Given this common and ancient evolutionary pressure, circadian clocks must have evolved early, and common elements are likely to be present up and down the evolutionary tree.
We and everything else alive, from plankton and fungus to elephants and ants, are synchronized to the orbit and rotation of the earth in and out of the sun's light to assure us the food supply. All things great and small have internal sundials that measure time with molecular clocks in every cell that switch enormous regulatory genes on and off. The light, whether a particle of a wave, always sparks biochemical reactions. Plants grow, we animals eat them and each other. We die and become fertilizer.
Now, do you know that when you raise your hands up to the window, cells called cryptochromes in your bloodstream pick up the blue spectrum light through your skin? These cryptochromes carry a piece of the sky all through you. That light energy and the carbohydrate (sugar) you eat even keep the symbiotic bacteria that live in the dark deep of you middle thriving.
We, and every other living thing on earth are truly beings of light. To make sense of diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer, you need to understand as well the connection between our physiology to the earth, sun and sky.
We were suppose to roam for food and sex, get some, and then head for the hills, when there were caves when it got cold, dark at night. It is not so complicated. Exactly the same scenario was lived out by the ancestors of the dogs and cats, and it's what mountain gorillas still do today. Put down your TV remote, sit down and think of it.
Do you see squirrels, snakes, birds or even monkeys doing barbecuing? On a planet inhabited by trillions of lifeforms, we human alone only can control the light. But guess what? We pay the price, and it is surely expensive. Owning the night did not come cheap.
The use of fire for protection, warmth, and cooking has left a mark on our reproductive and immune systems that requires human sacrifice to this day. By altering the rhythms of light and dark exposure, we who control the light never get cold, and fend off the night and any predators, human or animal, that might be lurking in the shadows.
We've abolished winter. Now only we, in the galaxy and the universe, stand still. Winter, or any period of chill, is a big deal in evolution. Adversity, in this case cold, is a prime motivator. Think about how you personally deal with being cold, you strive to stay warm. If your car breaks down in the snow, you find a shelter and wait for help, you then make a plan to fix it, figuring out way to warm yourself down a bit, and the memory of that incident sticks with you, changing your behavior forever. If all of those changes occurred in you because of the one time inconvenience of your transportation break down, imagine what millennia of ice and snow did for our species intellectually.
All of our evolved physiology and intellectual is, literally, geared to light and dark, hot and cold. Just as mineral content in our bones identical to stardust, testifies to our extraterrestrial origins, the photoperiodic cells in our blood tie us to the sun and the moon. We are always, every minute of every day of our earthbound existence, a complete part of it all.
In the last century, after surviving many many ice ages, we began to live on a planet with multiple 'suns', instead of eclipse's darkness at noon that drove them mad, however, we've created morning at midnight. It's driving all of us mad! All life forms must go dormant to survive the dark and cold, or they lose the ability to plan and adapt.
During long cold periods, our ancestors dozed off and on for weeks at a time in dark caves, slowing down metabolic functions to save energy, when food was scarce. This system mirrored, during one revolution around the sun, the same game plan that we use every rotation in and out of our sun's light. In fact, day and night, are the short version of summer and winter.
Over the millennia, we evolved hibernational and gestational periods that always ended in the spring, when food was fresh and plentiful. Our first encounter with 'energy control' or what we call as fire, changed all that forever. The light from the fire was enough to create summer in our ovaries (women) all year round. The minute all of those flowing sex hormones for mating kept us awake all winter by suppressing melatonin, we left earth's family, never to return.
Right now, I need to hit the bed. It's late and I'm exhausted. Stay tuned and sleep well.
We and everything else alive, from plankton and fungus to elephants and ants, are synchronized to the orbit and rotation of the earth in and out of the sun's light to assure us the food supply. All things great and small have internal sundials that measure time with molecular clocks in every cell that switch enormous regulatory genes on and off. The light, whether a particle of a wave, always sparks biochemical reactions. Plants grow, we animals eat them and each other. We die and become fertilizer.
Now, do you know that when you raise your hands up to the window, cells called cryptochromes in your bloodstream pick up the blue spectrum light through your skin? These cryptochromes carry a piece of the sky all through you. That light energy and the carbohydrate (sugar) you eat even keep the symbiotic bacteria that live in the dark deep of you middle thriving.
We, and every other living thing on earth are truly beings of light. To make sense of diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer, you need to understand as well the connection between our physiology to the earth, sun and sky.
We were suppose to roam for food and sex, get some, and then head for the hills, when there were caves when it got cold, dark at night. It is not so complicated. Exactly the same scenario was lived out by the ancestors of the dogs and cats, and it's what mountain gorillas still do today. Put down your TV remote, sit down and think of it.
Do you see squirrels, snakes, birds or even monkeys doing barbecuing? On a planet inhabited by trillions of lifeforms, we human alone only can control the light. But guess what? We pay the price, and it is surely expensive. Owning the night did not come cheap.
The use of fire for protection, warmth, and cooking has left a mark on our reproductive and immune systems that requires human sacrifice to this day. By altering the rhythms of light and dark exposure, we who control the light never get cold, and fend off the night and any predators, human or animal, that might be lurking in the shadows.
We've abolished winter. Now only we, in the galaxy and the universe, stand still. Winter, or any period of chill, is a big deal in evolution. Adversity, in this case cold, is a prime motivator. Think about how you personally deal with being cold, you strive to stay warm. If your car breaks down in the snow, you find a shelter and wait for help, you then make a plan to fix it, figuring out way to warm yourself down a bit, and the memory of that incident sticks with you, changing your behavior forever. If all of those changes occurred in you because of the one time inconvenience of your transportation break down, imagine what millennia of ice and snow did for our species intellectually.
All of our evolved physiology and intellectual is, literally, geared to light and dark, hot and cold. Just as mineral content in our bones identical to stardust, testifies to our extraterrestrial origins, the photoperiodic cells in our blood tie us to the sun and the moon. We are always, every minute of every day of our earthbound existence, a complete part of it all.
In the last century, after surviving many many ice ages, we began to live on a planet with multiple 'suns', instead of eclipse's darkness at noon that drove them mad, however, we've created morning at midnight. It's driving all of us mad! All life forms must go dormant to survive the dark and cold, or they lose the ability to plan and adapt.
During long cold periods, our ancestors dozed off and on for weeks at a time in dark caves, slowing down metabolic functions to save energy, when food was scarce. This system mirrored, during one revolution around the sun, the same game plan that we use every rotation in and out of our sun's light. In fact, day and night, are the short version of summer and winter.
Over the millennia, we evolved hibernational and gestational periods that always ended in the spring, when food was fresh and plentiful. Our first encounter with 'energy control' or what we call as fire, changed all that forever. The light from the fire was enough to create summer in our ovaries (women) all year round. The minute all of those flowing sex hormones for mating kept us awake all winter by suppressing melatonin, we left earth's family, never to return.
Right now, I need to hit the bed. It's late and I'm exhausted. Stay tuned and sleep well.
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