The tick tock of the biological clock

From when we go to sleep and wake up, to the time during the day when we are best at solving crosswords or at sports, our behaviour and the way our bodies function is determined by our internal biological clocks, the master of which sits in a small region of the brain. So what happens when we become ill or when our clocks go wrong? And importantly, how can we use what we know about clocks to our advantage? From young children to the aged and from dementia to mental health, knowing about our body clocks can be a helpful tool to have.

Do you know if you are a morning or evening person? Your chronotype is your propensity for sleep at certain times of the day. We will discuss how to discover your chronotype, the factors that influence it and its wider implications for life in the modern world.

Evolution has favoured those that can predict the periodic variation in our environment such as the day:night cycle and time their behaviours and physiological processes accordingly. Hence many organisms have developed a biological clock with a period of ~24hours. This clock needs constant fine tuning to time behaviours/physiological processes to the appropriate time of day. One of the main sources of information is light variation. Whilst much is known about how brightness effect the clock, little is known about how daily variation in spectral composition (‘colour’) may effect it.