The biological clock.

Benj96

Something I find quite amazing is the human brains capacity to keep time with incredible accuracy on a subconscious level. It seems that our brain chemistry is so dependent on rhythms that we can establish a stable bio-clock that can function just like a real alarm clock.

This comes from experience and anecdotal evidence from others. When I was working and had an early start at 6am I set my alarm clock for 05:15am. I did this for some weeks before I began to wake up exactly 1 minute before the alarm was due to wake me up. I eventually stopped using my alarm altogether because I would always wake up at the correct time morning after morning.

It’s worth noting that this was during the winter so no sunlight was there to determine when to wake up. This begs the question of time perception in the brain. Why is it that even asleep we have an innate recognition of time passing. What purpose did it serve in the past when we did not have such precise yet ultimately arbitrary units of time (seconds minutes and hours) which are not actually fundamental to physics but merely artificially invented human instruments to partition events in a standardised way? Does this mean that unconscious states can measure time without external cues? And if so how?

Does someone in a coma for example know innately how long they have been comatosed on some unconscious level.
It also suggests very material or mechanical inner working at play underpinning consciousness. That is to say that consciousness seems to be firmly grounded in - at the very least - a temporal/ metronomic form. Perhaps a frequency of some kind.

What would be the minds best biological mode of time keeping; heartbeat? Breaths? Hormone concentration? For example if the mind is trained to understand that approximately 720 breaths are taken every hour at rest and that after a certain sum of breathes each night the body must wake up then one would imagine it a likely scenario however I did not go to bed at the exact same time each night yet I still woke up at the correct time. I was also likely more tired some nights than others, and perhaps my diet varied both in when I ate and how much I ate so I don’t understand how the mind still knew when to wake up with all of these variables.

Furthermore if we have such a precise measure of time instilled into perception then why do we have periods when “time flys” faster than we expected or drones much slower than it ought to. What rule do you think is involved in biological time keeping?

LuckyR

There are interesting French cave experiments where folks live away from time cues. Turns out that the natural biological clock runs on a slightly longer than 24 hour day. That is folks will choose to go to sleep later and later until they are sleeping during the external "day" and choosing to be awake at "night".

VagabondSpectre

Interesting questions.

I was also likely more tired some nights than others, and perhaps my diet varied both in when I ate and how much I ate so I don’t understand how the mind still knew when to wake up with all of these variables. — Benj96

But if you are consciously or subconsciously aware that you are more fatigued than normal, then you could take this into account when making a time estimation.

Furthermore if we have such a precise measure of time instilled into perception then why do we have periods when “time flys” faster than we expected or drones much slower than it ought to. What rule do you think is involved in biological time keeping? — Benj96

What if time seems to pass by at the same rate, but depending on how quickly or often we are forming new memories during a given time-frame, it seems like a greater or fewer number of moments have taken place?

In an extreme case, losing memories entirely can have the effect of making people feel like they have "lost time". In situations where we are very excited/aroused, and therefore forming new memories very quickly, a short period of time might feel much longer than it really is (especially stressful events).

Regarding your body's circadian rhythms themselves (rather than your conscious experience of time), your body knows when to wake up because of a combination of cues and baselines that emerged out of your daily habits (your body learned), but also evolution itself (your body is designed for a 24 hour repeating cycle).

There are interesting French cave experiments where folks live away from time cues. Turns out that the natural biological clock runs on a slightly longer than 24 hour day. That is folks will choose to go to sleep later and later until they are sleeping during the external "day" and choosing to be awake at "night". — LuckyR

There could be a lot of reasons for this, but one benefit might be that it gives us some wiggle room if we miss sleep or have to keep getting up earlier than normal or going to bed later (like when the days get long at the summer solstice)...

khaled

↪LuckyR

If I remember correctly, a similar experiment found that the effect is pronounced in teenagers. They seem to always sleep one hour later each day. Can't for the life of me find the experiment though.

BC

↪Benj96

Other animals also have built-in clocks. Dogs, for instance start looking out the window for their favorite person to arrive home from work at about the same time every day. I suspect that any built in biological feature (like built in clocks) that we have, other animals also have.

Here's another time feature: as people get older, they report that time (seems to) pass by faster. I'm 75 and can attest that time seems to pass quite a bit faster for me now than it did when I was 50. I did not experience this acceleration of time when I was in college or in my late 20s and 30s.

Faster passing time isn't unpleasant or troublesome.

Wayfarer

Something I find quite amazing is the human brains capacity to keep time with incredible accuracy on a subconscious level. — Benj96

I learned from Lyall Watson's book Super Nature, that oysters kept in tanks in the midwest of the USA in old mines and in still water, still opened and closed in time with the oceanic tides, which of course in those conditions they had no exposure to. Figure that out.

Pop

Figure that out. — Wayfarer

There is quite a good explanation here for anybody caring to read about it.

Wayfarer

↪Pop

that's a great article. I didn't finish it all yet, but it seems that it still remains a mystery, does it not? The book it is abstracted from also interesting, by the look of it. And both right on target to the OP.

Pop

↪Wayfarer

It tells the oyster story, and specifically how the scientist was initially shunned, and then goes into how today there is better understanding about how enmashed living organisms are with the earths magnetic field and sun and moon cycles, etc. It is very relevant to this thread.

Wayfarer

↪Pop

I’ve used ‘Circadian’ as a forum name in the past. It’s a lovely word.

TheMadFool

Viewing rhythmic biological processes like sleep-wake cycles, oyster opening-closing behavior, etc. as awareness of time is a grave mistake in my humble opinion. These processes are cyclical or rhythmic as other posters have commented and that's all there is to it. They can be used as crude clocks, no doubts about that, but their existence doesn't imply that living organisms have an innate awareness of time no more than a mechanical clock's ticks imply that clocks are, somehow, aware of time.

Wayfarer

↪TheMadFool

Our bodies perform the most amazingly intricate things every moment without our awareness. I don’t think that oysters opening and closing in time with the tides even when isolated from them is a consequence of any awareness on their part. I don’t think oysters are aware in any sense but in the metaphorical sense that characterises organic life generally, but it’s nothing like sentient awareness in the higher animals.

TheMadFool

Our bodies perform the most amazingly intricate things every moment without our awareness. I don’t think that oysters opening and closing in time with the tides even when isolated from them is a consequence of any awareness on their part. I don’t think oysters are aware in any sense but in the metaphorical sense that characterises organic life generally, but it’s nothing like sentient awareness in the higher animals. — Wayfarer

The OP seems to be amazed, erroneously so, by what he assumes/infers is some kind of temporal awareness on the part of living organisms. He mentions sleep-wake cycles and is frankly awestruck by how the body manages to keep time fairly precisely.

If the OP is under the impression that living organisms have an innate understanding of or a sense of time, fae is mistaken or, at the very least, is unjustified to come to that conclusion. Some processes are naturally rhythmic or cyclical, like the earth's rotation for instance but anyone who asserts that the earth has a sense of time would be wrong. What say you?

Wayfarer

↪TheMadFool

Everything that lives on the Earth - so far as we know, that’s everything - is obviously conditioned by the natural cycles of days, years and seasons, which are what constitute the passing of time. It is obviously deeply embedded in all living processes, but science still only has a vague idea of how. The Wired magazine article that Pop linked to is worth the read.

IN FEBRUARY 1954, a US biologist named Frank Brown discovered something so remarkable, so inexplicable, that his peers essentially wrote it out of history. Brown had dredged a batch of Atlantic oysters from the seabed off New Haven, Connecticut, and shipped them hundreds of miles inland to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Then he put them into pans of brine inside a sealed darkroom, shielded from any changes in temperature, pressure, water currents, or light. Normally, these oysters feed with the tides. They open their shells to filter plankton and algae from the seawater, with rest periods in between when their shells are closed. Brown had already established that they are most active at high tide, which arrives roughly twice a day. He was interested in how the mollusks time this behavior, so he devised the experiment to test what they would do when kept far from the sea and deprived of any information about the tides. Would their normal feeding rhythm persist?

For the first two weeks, it did. Their feeding activity continued to peak 50 minutes later each day, in time with the tides on the oysters’ home beach in New Haven. That in itself was an impressive result, suggesting that the shellfish could keep accurate time. But then something unexpected happened, which changed Brown’s life forever.

The oysters gradually shifted their feeding times later and later. After two more weeks, a stable cycle reappeared, but it now lagged three hours behind the New Haven tides. Brown was mystified, until he checked an astronomical almanac. High tides occur each day when the moon is highest in the sky or lowest below the horizon. Brown realized that the oysters had corrected their activity according to the local state of the moon; they were feeding when Evanston—if it had been by the sea—would experience high tide. He had isolated these organisms from every obvious environmental cue. And yet, somehow, they were following the moon.

https://www.wired.com/story/oysters-that-knew-what-time-it-was/

TheMadFool

↪Wayfarer

Thank you very much for the link. Very informative but...I still feel there's something off about considering rhythmic/cyclical behavior "remarkable" or that it is "inexplicable". As you said, if I catch your drift, living organisms have evolved to maximize their chances of survival and I suspect this would require them to be in sync with natural oscillations that have an effect on their food supply. Thus, I presume, over many generations those organisms who behaviors were synchronized with natural cycles would survive and end up in a lab somewhere. There's the explanation for the "inexplicable" and it isn't "remarkable" any more.

Coming to the matter of time, rhythm/cycles/oscillations are not time. They can be used to measure time and hence the term biological "clock" I guess but this, in no way, implies that organisms, other than humans of course, have a temporal sense the likes a spatial sense. In other words, though their behavior is suggestive, the matter is not as cut-and-dried as some of us think.

Wayfarer

I still feel there's something off about considering rhythmic/cyclical behavior "remarkable" or that it is "inexplicable". — TheMadFool

Note that in the article, that the original experimenter, Frank Brown, was shunned by the scientific community and it was declared that his findings must have been mistaken. Why was that?

Wayfarer

Thus, I presume, over many generations those organisms who behaviors were synchronized with natural cycles would survive and end up in a lab somewhere. There's the explanation for the "inexplicable" and it isn't "remarkable" any more. — TheMadFool

The issue is that scientists can't identify the cellular mechanism that provides the timings - the internal clock. Nobody would dispute that all these organisms evolved in response to cyclical changes, but the question is how something as basic as an oyster can synchronize its opening and closing with the tides, when it is in a still water tank at the bottom of a mine 1000 miles from the sea. It's like the biological equivalent of 'spooky action at a distance'.

The article says that Frank Brown, who discovered this effect, was more or less ostracised ('oystracized' :-) ) by the scientific community for suggesting that there might be a magnetic field effect which oysters respond to. But as the article goes on to show, the notion that organisms might respond to magnetic fields subsequently became more acceptable, although there's no mention that Brown was later accepted back into the fold.

The article points out that the Earth's magnetic field is extremely weak, less than 1/100th the strength of a fridge magnet. So how critters can use this to navigate or to maintain their internal clocks is still an open question today.

Benj96

But if you are consciously or subconsciously aware that you are more fatigued than normal, then you could take this into account when making a time estimation — VagabondSpectre

Perhaps but it doesn’t negate the incredible Automatic calculating ability of the Mind without conscious intention

Benj96

Here's another time feature: as people get older, they report that time (seems to) pass by faster. I'm 75 and can attest that time seems to pass quite a bit faster for me now than it did when I was 50. I did not experience this acceleration of time when I was in college or in my late 20s and 30s — Bitter Crank

I believe this is the “fractional effect” of lifespan - each year becomes a smaller fraction of the whole as time progresses. For a one year old one year is there entire life so far whilst for a twenty year old it is only one twentieth and so on. So there seems to be an acceleration in the passage of time as well as a reduction in the temporal significance of a “year” for example to total experience. I remember as a child waiting for Santa to come at Christmas felt like an eternity even just a week before the date whilst now christmases seem to come and go very quickly as I can clearly recall each years event as they happen. Perhaps it has to do with the “learning: recall ratio” - by this I mean that as a child we are learning a large amount of new information - behaviours, culture, educational materials and languages without a large database from which to recall (little life experience) whilst when we are elderly we are learning much less in general and life begins to become more reflective than anticipatory.

Benj96

learned from Lyall Watson's book Super Nature, that oysters kept in tanks in the midwest of the USA in old mines and in still water, still opened and closed in time with the oceanic tides, which of course in those conditions they had no exposure to. Figure that out. — Wayfarer

Wow how peculiar... genetic predisposition perhaps? Like “reflexes” That developed over many generations of inheritance of the relevant genes?

Benj96

iewing rhythmic biological processes like sleep-wake cycles, oyster opening-closing behavior, etc. as awareness of time is a grave mistake in my humble opinion. These processes are cyclical or rhythmic as other posters have commented and that's all there is to it. They can be used as crude clocks, no doubts about that, but their existence doesn't imply that living organisms have an innate awareness of time no more than a mechanical clock's ticks imply that clocks are, somehow, aware of time. — TheMadFool

This is a very clever point and I’m inclined to agree that perhaps it’s illusory to associate it with time keeping. The real question would then be why are rhythms and cycles such an integral part of nature and why are they so effective at translating into chronology/ horology -or the measure/ study and significance of time. Perhaps when looking for clues as to the link between the physical world and the living organism or the theory of “abiogenesis” - time as a principle of physics is clearly maintained or followed by living systems in their biological composition and function... perhaps the origin of life is within some cycle that links life to the physical world - like tides or day and night temperature fluctuations etc

Benj96

Wayfarer Thank you very much for the link. Very informative but...I still feel there's something off about considering rhythmic/cyclical behavior "remarkable" or that it is "inexplicable — TheMadFool

Hold up haha. I don’t think it’s fair to say you cannot be in awe of something without it being explicable. That itself is erroneous. I’m frequently amazed by things when they are fully explained to me in a logical fashion. Logic is not apathetic it’s coveted, desired etc because it has a pleasurable effect on the mind. I never stated that it couldn’t be explained to me in a truer sense then the sentiments I wrote of.

A geneticist can still be in awe of DNA even when they have spent years studying it, and have established one of the highest appreciations of its mechanism/ functions etc. Perhaps how I phrased my post could have paid more attention to this but whether it is just a mere cycle or something more complex I draw my awe from its utility and my experience of it

The biological clock.

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Categories

More Discussions