Artificial Light and the Biological Clock
Many of the things that we do to babies and young children have been called into question in recent years.
The debate about doing an excessive number of fetal ultrasounds and high tone deafness seems to have gone away for now. Though not disappeared: there is a paper in the week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that revisits this important issue. Then there was the realization that doctors were not good at recognizing and dealing with pain in very young children.
And now there is another one that has worried me for years: what happens to babies who are exposed to constant high levels of light? Doesn’t it damage the development of normal circadian rhythms?
I have just seen a study that seems to confirm some of those fears.
Investigators from Vanderbilt University in Nashville examined the impact of exposing babt mice to constant light. The main biological clock is in the brain, and is located in a region called the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN). It is responsible for orchestrating an orderly internal physiological and behavioral cycle. It influences the activity of virtually all our organs, including the brain, heart, liver and lungs. It egulates the daily activity cycles that we call circadian rhythms.
When the mice are exposed to normal variations in light the cells of the SCN quickly become synchronized, and a normal circadian rhythm is established. Constant exposure to light disrupted the development of the SCN and prevented the animals from developing normal circadian rhythms.
This is far from being an academic exercise: each year around 14 million premature babies are born worldwide, and many are exposed to artificial lighting in hospitals. If their biological clocks are not allowed to develop normally, we would anticipate that they would, in later life, have less psychological resilience, and to be prediposed to sleep and mood disorders.
I could conceive of a way to test that experimentally by looking at records of people wth those problems. Secondly, we need to see if reducing unnecessary light exposure would have a real benefit for babies, and for the children and audlts that they will become. I would be astonished if exposing babies to a natural spectrum of light and a natural light cycle did not have enormous benefits for them as they grow up.
Happy Summer Solstice!
The Summer Solstice is supposed to the day that summer begins. Of course, from an astronomical perspective is doesn’t. Yet the day has been celebrated for millennia.
In some Slavic countries it is known as St. John’s Night, and all over Northern Europe there have been traditional holidays to mark the day. I well remember the old times when Druid priests celebrated the day at Stonehenge on Salisbury plain: it was a sight to behold. That was in the days before English Heritage and the National Trust had to try and control the site to prevent damage by thousands of Midsummer’s Eve visitors, some of whom did not respect the ancient stone circle. Within the last couple of months I have seen reports of a site in Northern Brazil called Calcoene, which is being called the Amazon Stonehenge, for it too seems to be a solar observatory.
From a purely objective scientific perspective, the day is just like any other except that it is usually the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
So is all this discussion about a Summer Solstice just magical thinking? No more than some kind of recapitulation of the Purple Meme of psychosocial development? Not necessarily. I often spoken of my admiration for the evolving work of the writer and philosopher Ken Wilber. Nobody agrees with everything that he says, and neither would he want us to: he is creating a map and a story to help us find our place in the world. But there is one thing about which I am certain he is correct: A complete understanding of our world and of our place in it means acknowledging the subjective and mythical aspects of our lives. Is it wise to dismiss ancient ceremonies that move millions of people? Can we afford to ignore the deep cycles, currents and rhythms that propel us and the whole of our society and planet? If we do, it means ignoring a fundamentally important part of all of us.
If you have just one single minute today, sit quietly and see if you can feel anything in the atmosphere around you. Then carry on with your day. But promise yourself that you will do the same thing again, in seven days from now, and I would be surprised if you fail to notice a difference. Try it and seefor yourself: many have been amazed by the difference. Most of the time we just do not notice such things.
“It has been said that a complete understanding of the Law of Cycles would bring man to a high degree of initiation. This Law of Periodicity underlies all the processes of nature and its study would lead a man out of the world of objective effects into that of subjective causes.”
–Alice A. Bailey (English Writer, Spiritual Teacher and Founder of the Arcane School, 1880-1949)
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