My Opinion
Spring is here: Welcoming back our biological rhythms

I wonder if Thomas Edison was aware of the impact the light bulb would have? I wonder if he was aware that in the future it would contribute to depression and stress?

According to researchers at The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Md., artificial light is wreaking havoc with our biological clocks. Until recently, people thought that we humans were immune to large seasonal changes in our behavior, unlike other animals which hibernate or migrate during the cold months. The researchers found that people have the same natural hormonal fluctuations common in other animals.

The changing amounts of daylight during different seasons affects the release of a hormone called melatonin. This is the same hormone that, among other things, tells birds to fly south in the winter and tells bears that it's time to hibernate.

No one knows exactly what melatonin does in humans, but recent sleep research has shown that it has roles in insomnia and a depression that strikes many people in the winter months called Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

In their study, the researchers from NIMH measured hormone levels in a group of men that were plucked from their daily routine and placed into a dark room for 14 hours each night. This simulates approximately how much darkness we should be receiving in the dead of winter. After a couple of days, the researchers found significant shifts in several key hormones that affect the brain, including melatonin. Essentially, we fool our bodies by keeping the lights on all the time and only getting eight hours or less of sleep every night.

It is true that we now control much of our environment around us. Another article that appeared in the New York Times stated that we have essentially stopped human evolution. Natural selection no longer has much of an effect on us due to our life-saving technologies.

I wonder if we really control as much as we think. Engineers are very wary about changing anything in a complex system. One change may have unknown repercussions. Our bodies are one of the most complex interrelated systems around. When our bodies' functions evolved, the complex modern world did not exist.

The effects of hormonal shifts due to artificial lights could have behavioral effects that would be very difficult to measure, as they have occurred over the last hundred years or so. When we read our history books about people and events that took place several centuries ago, we place these events in a modern context. These people may not have even had minds that work the same way as our 20th century brains do.

In modern society it is both virtuous and necessary to wrestle with and beat our biology. We work late and get up early. Sleep is often a luxury. We take a reactionary approach to problems looking at what we need to fix and not at what other problems we may be creating.

Although we have reduced the number of physical illnesses that we must suffer, I wonder what has happened to the number of mental illnesses during the course of human history.

As I watch the evening news, I am bombarded with visions of unhappy people. Despite measures of material success, people are feeling unfulfilled. They turn to drugs or religion for solace or to fill in the gaps in their lives.

Our celebrities who seem to have it all are capable of drug abuse and possibly even murder. Angry voices on talk radio tell us why women, liberals or teen-age mothers are the cause of all our problems. We reach out to these people wondering if they are right, hoping that they have the answers that will make us feel good and happy. For a nation that was founded on the pursuit of happiness, it is too bad that neither the haves nor the have nots seem happy.

It is almost April now, and no one can be totally blue in the spring. We are on our way from the winter schedule of 10- to 12-hour nights to our summer schedule of around eight hours of darkness. There must be some semblance of our seasonal patterns left in us.

It is time for me to shut my computer down now. I will push the off switch on the monitor to stop its fluorescent glow that baths my eyes most of the day. I will turn off the lights that Edison gave us and crawl into bed. In about seven hours I will wake up and turn them on again and go for another 16 to 17 hours. My body must think that I have lived in perpetual summer since the day I was born, and I will until the day I die.