Inside your head, located somewhere between the eyes, is a tiny piece of brain tissue made up of no more than 20,000 cells. If the brain was the size of the UK, the body clock, or suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN for short), would be the size of a small village in Derbyshire. But don’t let its size fool you: this mysterious internal mechanism controls… well, pretty much everything. It regulates our sleep cycles, our hormones, the performance of our organs, and even our cognitive processes.
Professor Till Roenneberg, who works at the Institute of Medical Psychology at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, has dedicated himself to discovering how the body clock works. He found that it responds to the light of the sun. In his new book, Internal Time, Roenneberg describes experiments in which people are locked in underground bunkers, deprived of sunlight. Their body clocks go haywire; they begin to imagine that their days are much longer than they actually are; they stay awake several hours more than usual, and then sleep for ages. Interestingly, most blind people have functioning body clocks, because the eye can send information about light to the body clock, even if it can’t see it. As Roenneberg points out, people without eyes are in the same position as those locked in bunkers.
But Roenneberg, who might be the world’s foremost authority on body clocks, is very worried that a terrible thing is happening to them. The modern world is sending them out of whack. In fact, he explains, we are torn between two types of clocks – the real clocks in our brains, and the clocks we put on our wrists, on our walls, in our pockets, and on our bedside tables. These are not so real. Roenneberg calls them “social clocks”. And in the battle between the clocks, the fake clocks are winning.
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