vasoactive intestinal polypeptide
Tick Tock, Your Brain is Keeping Time
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
The neurons in the SCN are coupled oscillators, like these metronomes on a moveable table that has enough wiggle that each metronome’s motion affects the others’. Like the metronomes the neurons keep time individually and, because the VIP network couples them, they synchronize their beats.Video by the Ikeguchi Laboratory, in the graduate school of science and engineering at Saitama University in Japan. |
Did you know you have a biological clock in your brain that drives your sleep patterns and metabolism?
The clock is mostly in a brain region called the suprachiasmatic nucleus—a collection of about 20,000 brain cells, or neurons. Each one of these neurons can keep time, just like a metronome sitting on a piano. Together, these 20,000 biological clocks are kept perfectly synchronized, and they are accurate to about a few minutes within a 1440-minute day. A brain signaling chemical called VIP (vasoactive intestinal polypeptide) plays an important role in keeping all of the neurons ticking in unrelenting lock step. But VIP doesn’t work alone.
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