Out-of-sync body clock causes more woes than sleepiness
Bayesian math describes conflicts leading to maladies labeled ‘circadian-time sickness’
TIME TROUBLES Timekeeping conflicts arise when internal cues don’t match external ones, such as late-night light.
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When the body’s internal sense of time doesn’t match up with outside cues, people can suffer, and not just from a lack of sleep.
Such ailments are similar in a way to motion sickness — the queasiness caused when body sensations of movement don’t match the external world. So scientists propose calling time-related troubles, which can afflict time-zone hoppers and people who work at night, “circadian-time sickness.” This malady can be described, these scientists say, with a certain type of math.
The idea, to be published in Trends in Neurosciences, is “intriguing and thought-provoking,” says neuroscientist Samer Hattar of Johns Hopkins University. “They really came up with an interesting idea of how to explain the mismatch.”
Neuroscientist Raymond van Ee of Radboud University in the Netherlands and colleagues knew
