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In vertebrates, the master circadian clock is contained within the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a bilateral nerve cluster of about 20,000 neurons. [10] [11] The SCN itself is located in the hypothalamus, a small region of the brain situated directly above the optic chiasm, where it receives input from specialized photosensitive ganglion cells in the retina via the retinohypothalamic tract.
A circadian rhythm (/ s ər ˈ k eɪ d i ə n /), or circadian cycle, is a natural oscillation that repeats roughly every 24 hours.Circadian rhythms can refer to any process that originates within an organism (i.e., endogenous) and responds to the environment (is entrained by the environment).
When an individual experiences significant changes in zeitgebers, such as being irregularly scheduled for the night shift, those changes can have a variety of negative effects. One example of this phenomenon is jetlag, in which traveling to another time zone causes desynchronization in sleep-wake cycles, appetite, and emotions. Such zeitgeber ...
In the auditory domain, chronostasis and duration overestimation occur when observing auditory stimuli. One common example is a frequent occurrence when making telephone calls. If, while listening to the phone's dial tone, research subjects move the phone from one ear to the other, the length of time between rings appears longer. [65]
Human preferences toward things in nature, while refined through experience and culture, are hypothetically the product of biological evolution. For example, adult mammals (especially humans) are generally attracted to baby mammal faces and find them appealing across species. The large eyes and small features of any young mammal face are far ...
While in unihemispheric slow-wave sleep, birds will sleep with one open eye towards the direction from which predators are more likely to approach. When birds do this in a flock, it's called the "group edge effect". [2] The mallard is one bird that has been used experimentally to illustrate the "group edge effect". Birds positioned at the edge ...
Humans and animals are able to understand those actions through experience, identification, and higher level neural processing. [1] Humans use biological motion to identify and understand familiar actions, which is involved in the neural processes for empathy , communication , and understanding other's intentions .
Bimodal sleep in humans was more common before the Industrial Revolution. [34] Different characteristic sleep patterns, such as the familiarly so-called "early bird" and "night owl", are called chronotypes. Genetics and sex have some influence on chronotype, but so do habits. Chronotype is also liable to change over the course of a person's ...