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The editors at Best Masters in Psychology Degrees decided to research the topic of: The Human Body is a Well-Calibrated Timing Machine At least 3 internal clocks are running every waking second. Tapping your foot to music?

- Add at least two more clocks. Around the clock

- Environmental cues, like light, turn genes on or off to reset natural clocks.

- The "clock" is too small to be read.

- At only a portion of the hypothalamus it's smaller than an almond.

- These rhythms persist in the absence of external cues.

- (This is an INTERNAL clock)

- Circadian schedule

- 2:00 AM-Deepest Sleep

- 10:00 AM-Highest Alertness

- 2:30 PM-Best coordination

- 3:30 PM-Fastest Reaction Times

- 11:30 PM-Bowel movement suppressed

- A new man:

- The circadian rhythms of modern men in industrialized societies do not change for the seasons.

- Even if bathed in the same amount of artificial light as their male counterparts, the circadian rhythms of women adjust for the light outside.

- After decades of exposure to artificial light in the workplace male circadian rhythms have been hoodwinked into forgetting their natural path.

- Circadian rhythms are even at work in plant life, like algae. From minute to minute

- How time feels

- Sometimes a minute can last an eternity, and sometimes an afternoon will fly by.

- If our feeling for time is subjective, how are we able to estimate the length of tasks without looking at the clock?

- Pulses= how the brain measures time

- Pulses are archived in your memory and associated with the task at hand.

- Caffeine speeds up pulses

- Sleepiness slows down pulses

- Gaussian distribution

- Your brain randomly samples the number of pulses that it took to perform an action.

- Example: Pulse sample of crossing the street

- 49,53, 65, 47 pulses

- 25 pulses, when tired

- 90 pulses, when caffeinated

- Mean: 54 pulses

- 54 pulses could be the feeling of about 30, or 50, or 250 seconds. It all depends on your past memories of crossing the street.

- Your ability to juggle multiple clocks at once enables you to multitask.

- Worst case scenario: Imagine you are talking on the phone and driving. You stop at a stop sign and your internal clock does not alert you that you have spent long enough stopped. You remain stopped.

- Alzheimer's involves a chemical deficiency that disables the storing of pulses in a timely manner.

- This leads to difficulties estimating how long things should take.

- Sitting in your car waiting for the gas tank to fill up for an hour:

- You might have an acetylcholine deficiency

- Multiple clocks

- Through sampling the pulses of our memories, our brain provides one clock for when we should leave work, and another for how long we should spend jotting out a short email. Splitting seconds

- Your brain can't determine exactly how long it will take you to cross the street, but it can organize complex series of beeps and flashing lights.

- Takes well under a second to comprehend a sound or a light.

- We register what we see 38 milliseconds after what we hear.

- If a light blinks 20 milliseconds before a beep sounds we can put them in the correct order even if we register the sound first. Just can't seem to keep track of time?

- Drugs like marijuana, cocaine, and the antipsychotic haloperidol alter the way we experience time.

- With prolonged substance use the brain compensates, essentially overriding our faulty memories.

- Solitary confinement disrupts multiple internal clocks.

- The slamming of steel doors, rounds of guards, and lack of natural light disturb patients circadian rhythms.

- Daytime alertness and nighttime relaxation shifts to 24 hour in between stupor.

- The lack of external stimuli sends prisoners into a "mental fog."

- Solitary prisoners become hypersensitive to stimuli

- Often become confused as to the order of events.

- Slowing down of pulses leads to excruciatingly prolonged time

- And the feeling of extremely rapid-fire events.

- There is evidence:

- With therapy and chemical supplements these developments can be reversed. Citations

- http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/14/science/modern-life-suppresses-an-ancient-body-rhythm.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

- http://io9.com/5646561/how-do-you-really-know-what-time-it-is

- http://law.wustl.edu/journal/22/p325grassian.pdf



