Timing your life

Date:

MATHEW EDLUND
Contributing Columnist
edlund@lbknews.com

Time rules life, how it’s lived and performed. Time and our inner clocks make most of our lives possible.
Consider the monarch butterflies that unerringly cross Canada, the United States, and as good citizens of these NAFTA states, direct themselves to the same valley in central Mexico. How do they do navigate so brilliantly?
They use inner time. The look at the sun, and time its flight.
Now a group believes it has figured out how the monarchs actually do it. They use one set of nerves cells in the eyes that correctly positions the azimuth of the sun, and a second set in the brain which tells them very precisely where they are in the 24 hour day. Using a relatively simple model which mathematically connects the two inputs, they were able to demonstrate how closely the monarchs can follow a simulated flight path in a lab. Small insects routinely fly thousands of miles to the correct spot, constantly corrected by their inner sense of time.
People are capable of similar fates. It’s better if we use our extraordinary abilities.

Human Performance
There is a hundred years of research on body clocks and human performance. That’s how we know why sports records are set inordinately commonly at 5 o