krl@jujeh.mlb.semi.harris.com (Ken Lyons) (07/14/90)
One area of study which is similar to these are the experiments where someone lives in a cave to avoid external stimulus. While these experiments are usually designed to study the effects of isolation, they may also reveal something of the mechanism of biological clocks. One interesting bit of information from these experiments is usually a bar graph of the length of periods of wakefullness and sleep. The times may average about 25 hours, but the actual day-to-day times vary eratically. This resembles the chaotic behavior of many non-linear systems. One such system is the human heart, which may function eratically if stimulated at certain frequencies. To see whether there is the same type of behavior in wake-sleep cycles, it might be useful to check for a sleep-time to awake-time ratio as a function of some stimulus, such as an artifically induced length-of-day. If, for some values of the stimulus, you alternate between two values of sleep-time to awake-time ratios (that is the graph of the sleep-time to awake-time ratio vs. the magnitude of the stimulus is a bifurcation diagram), this may be a similar mechanism to that which governs the functioning of the heart. This may be something for a chaos guru in the fractals newsgroup to answer. K.Lyons