Ode to my doggie
Every morning we take out the water hose to fill the cooler and after that, we clean the whole place with water instead of going through the 2 regular cycles of sweeping and mopping. Every morn, my doggie (Boozy is his name n u bet he stays true to it 🙂 ), makes himself unavailable the moment he sees the water hose. He knows what’s coming and like all animals of his species, hates getting wet. He does something else with even more regularity. He turns up right there after about an hour (give n take a few minutes) with such accuracy that it’s amazing! He has observed that after about an hour, the place would be clean and the floor not too wet and just cool enuff to plonk on. His sense of timing *amazes* me, to say the least.
We all have an inbuilt clock inside. The body clock dictates a lotta bodily mundane (but nevertheless essential) functions. Many of the body’s responses to large changes in environmental light are controlled by a light detection system in the eye. Jet-lag is the classic example – where body time and local time get confused. It is only after a few days of exposure to the local light environment that body time and local time become synchronised once again.
There’s a long-standing fascination with biological clocks about understanding the molecular mechanisms that regulate them. The circadian pacemaker, or control center, in humans is located in the brain’s hypothalamus. A cluster of only several thousand neurons govern a wide range of 24-hour physiological variations in our body, ranging from changes in hormonal levels and body temperature to susceptibility to disease. Understanding the detailed workings of the circadian clock may explain why heart attacks occur more often in the morning and why the incidence of asthma is more common at night, for example.
But to have an idea of how much time has elapsed since a certain event, one definitely needs a more advanced clock. So my dog ain’t no dumb mutt 🙂