External temporal organization in biological rhythms

Abstract

This paper is intended as a proposition of a new concept in the field of chronobiology, External Temporal Organization, a notion complementary to that of the Internal Temporal Organization. We will try to explain the possibility that a set of external elements, that occur in a particular order, can act together as a single synchronizing element of the circadian system. We will see that this is not a zeitgeber, in the classic sense, but a much more complex factor, consisting of several elements that appear in the real environment at different times (phases), constituting as a whole a powerful temporal frame, closer to the way the stimuli occur in the natural environment, in which the entrainment does not take place just in a specific time of the day.

Keywords:

• Biological rhythms
• chronobiology
• zeitgeber
• temporal organization
• temporal order
• synchronization

Acknowledgements

Part of this work was supported by CNPq (grant 305198/2010-6) to Luiz Menna-Barreto and Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (project: BFU2008-00199) to Antoni Díez-Noguera.