BUS 17 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Biorhythm, Eye Movement, Brainstem
Document Summary
Humans and other animals perform a remarkable number of behaviors to adapt to daily and seasonal cycles. Our daily rhythms of sleeping and waking, feeding, exercising, and social interaction vary through the year. Other animals share these daily activities and also migrate, hibernate, and shed or grow feathers or hair as the seasons change. We humans are diurnal animals, we are active during daylight, and we sleep when it is dark. Biorhythms are the inherent timing mechanisms that control or initiate various biological processes and they are linked to the cycles of days and seasons. The time required to complete a cycle of activity is called period. Biological rhythms: circannual-yearly-migratory cycles of birds, circadian- daily-human sleep-wake cycle, ultradian-less than a day-human eating cycles, infradian- more than a day-human menstrual cycle. Free-running rhythms are rhythms of the body s own devising in the absence of all external cues.
