jtrent238 test blog: How to Make the Most of Our Body Clocks

July 8, 2022

Many of us are passingly familiar with circadian rhythms as a way to refer to our sleep cycle. In the past two decades, however, researchers have discovered that the clock in the brain is by no means the only one in our body. It turns out that most of our cells contain a group of genes that might be thought of as gears in a mechanical watch, keeping time everywhere internally. These "clock genes" work together the same way in each cell and dictate other processes in other parts of the body. There's a skin clock and a liver clock and an immune-system clock; there's a clock for the kidney, heart, lungs, muscles and reproductive system. Each of those clocks syncs itself to the central clock in the brain like an orchestra section following its conductor. But those sections also adjust how and when they perform based on guidance they receive both from the environment and from one another, and their timing can provide feedback to the central clock and cause it to adjust the time it keeps too.

Now scientists possess the technology to see how circadian rhythms oscillate at a molecular level based on behavior and time of day in both mice and people. Scientists hope that figuring out how the clocks in us work will enable us to control them in ways that improve our health — keeping us vigorous longer. At the moment, they tick relentlessly toward one end. Conceptually speaking, at least, if you could slow them down or pause them at will, you would be altering humanity's relationship with time itself.

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Concept by Pablo Delcan. Photo Illustration by Bobby Doherty for The New York Times.

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