How do people keep their circadian rhythms without a natural day/night cycle?

[Orion283]

I'm diddling with an rpg setting that takes place entirely underground and I've gotten to pondering how people deal with lack of a day/night cycle. Anyone know what it's like in Alaska during the stretched out days and nights?

[MelancholyBliss]

I've only known a handful of people who've lived in Alaska and all of them said it wasn't hard. It was the same as anywhere else. But what helped was that while in doors, lighting helped.

They just had to get used to it and it didn't take long.

[Gene]

Al Pacino had a pretty damn rough time of it. Did the Alaskan tourist board absolutely no favours.

[MichaelB]

Actually, frommwhat I've read, circadian rhythms have very little to do with the light. You go to sleep when your body temperature drops enough (by aboiut 1/2 a degree or something), and wake up when your body heat rises back up.

The fact that night and day happen to coincide with cold and warm is a weird quirk of our evolution.

[Dwiesel McAllister]

If they're entirely underground, and have never been aboveground or had any exposure to light ever EVER, then they might have evolved some kind of alarm system, you know, like what they used to use in the Middle Ages to tell people what time it was. Maybe these people have figured out how long they need to sleep. Maybe they do have circadian rhythms that are affected by the earth's temperature rather than by light. Geothermal. Yeah!!!! *thinks she is so smart...*

[Null]

If they've lived entirely underground, I would suspect that their sleep rhythms wouldn't follow any set pattern. They'd probably just take cat-naps so as to avoid presenting extended opportunites for predators...

[butterfly]

I was on a camp recently where a leader was a sleep technician (ie he makes his money watching people sleep and diagnosing sleep disorders). He said that when taken out of a traditional day/night light/dark setting, people naturally fall into a 25 hour sleeping pattern, not 24.


Just a quirk, I guess...

[Dwiesel McAllister]

If they've lived entirely underground, I would suspect that their sleep rhythms wouldn't follow any set pattern. They'd probably just take cat-naps so as to avoid presenting extended opportunites for predators...

They'd have to develop some kind of pattern, though, if they were going to have a functional society. It's hard to get stuff done when half the community is asleep. It wouldn't have to be a rigid pattern, but I think they'd at least need one.

[MelancholyBliss]

^^ I think cat naps sans natural pattern would be more beneficial to the productivity as a society. If it's hard to get stuff done when half the community is alseep, how would a patter fix of a naturally developed cycle help that? Theoretically, more than half the population would be sleeping anyway during their version of "night time", for several hours no less. A society run with people taking short naps throughout the day would allow for a lot more people to be awake during every second of a given day.

[Orion283]

I suppose it may be about the same as on ships in Star Trek. Because a ship so massive needs a lot of crew there's 'day shift' and 'night shift' people, or possibly even 3-4 shifts. If it's a tightly regulated community you may have to talk to the city council about moving to a different shift, since people may depend on your work output. This could even lead to some kind of class struggle if some shifts are more desirable than others.

[Tundra]

There's a cool sleep system my friend wants to try, where you pretty much sleep for half an hour every however many hours. You end up with a lot more time. If a society wanted to do that, I think it'd be cool. You wouldn't do it all to the same schedule, you'd just understand that you go off and have naps.

[Thuriel]

^ Except I don't think half an hour is long enough for the body to really go through the cycles of sleep it has to? It's been a while since I looked at that kind of thing, but from memory it would be more reasonable to take, like, hour-and-a-half or two-hour naps a little less often.

[Tundra]

The system my friend goes on about works. I wish I could remember what it's called.

[Tundra]

It's called Polyphasic sleep.

[butterfly]

I don't think, in a half hour, you'd have enough time to even fall into a deep sleep. Eventually, I expect, you'd burn out.

[LadyAbby]

I just read the Wiki article about that sleep cycle which mentioned several other similar sleep cycles and in general, the article repeatedly gave the impression that science doesn't think this is actually an optimal way to go, that the body needs a continuous block but that this type of cycle (and similar) are better suited for when you're going to be in a cycle of serious sleep deprevation over a period of time (like, it shouldn't be used if you're going to have a couple all-nighters over a two week period, but rather if you're going to be in a job or situation where sleep deprevation starts to occur). The problem is that society functions strictly on a Night-sleep, Day-awake pattern and adapting a different sleep schedule makes it harder to function normally in society.

[Tundra]

butterfly- it's possible. My friend knows of a guy who did it for two months and he was fine and had more time in the day. The only reason he stopped was because he had to get a proper job where they wouldn't let him randomly have half hour naps.

[KeinesV]

My extensive experience in the dungeon delving has taught me that a sense of circadian rhythm totally disappears, and one ends up defining their own (X hours of activity, X hours of sleep, X hours activity again, ad infinitum). Either that, or when a spider poisons them and there are no more potions.