Rancho Mirage Writers Festival, Part 1

The first part of a festival talk written for a general reading audience rather than a scientific one. Dr Panda introduces circadian rhythm from the ground up: the inbuilt daily timetable shared by plants, animals, insects and people, designed to stay in step with the twenty four hour cycle of light and dark.

The argument he builds is that the body is simply not the same between morning and night. Different hormones, different enzymes, different capacities, which means the same behaviour can be beneficial or harmful depending on when it occurs. He covers how the clock is set, including his own discovery of melanopsin, the blue light sensor in a small population of retinal cells that aligns the brain's clock to ambient light, and why modern indoor lighting and evening screens reach that sensor at precisely the wrong hour.

The tone is closer to his book The Circadian Code, which has been translated into more than a dozen languages, than to a conference presentation. A good option if you would rather watch than read.