title: Circadian-Time Sickness: Time-of-Day Cue-Conflicts Directly Affect Health.
abstract: A daily rhythm that is not in synchrony with the environmental light-dark cycle (as in jetlag and shift work) is known to affect mood and health through an as yet unresolved neural mechanism. Here, we combine Bayesian probabilistic 'cue-conflict' theory with known physiology of the biological clock of the brain, entailing the insight that, for a functional pacemaker, it is sufficient to have two interacting units (reflecting environmental and internal time-of-day cues), without the need for an extra homuncular directing unit. Unnatural light-dark cycles cause a time-of-day cue-conflict that is reflected by a desynchronization between the ventral (environmental) and dorsal (internal) pacemaking signals of the pacemaker. We argue that this desynchronization, in-and-of-itself, produces health issues that we designate as 'circadian-time sickness', analogous to 'motion sickness'.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Philips Research, Department Brain, Behavior and Cognition, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Electronic address: R.vanEe@donders.ru.nl.
authors.forename: Raymond
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: van Ee
authors.affiliation: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Sander
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Van de Cruys
authors.affiliation: Philips Lighting Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Luc J M
authors.initials: LJM
authors.lastname: Schlangen
authors.affiliation: Philips Research, Department Brain, Behavior and Cognition, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Björn N S
authors.initials: BNS
authors.lastname: Vlaskamp
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D001683:Biological Clocks / Q000502:physiology*; D002940:Circadian Rhythm / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D004777:Environment; D006801:Humans; D008027:Light
keywords: circadian rhythm; circadian sickness; cue-conflict theory; normative principles; probability theory