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Right from its first, unsteady steps 4 million years ago, the evolution of mankind has been marked by the rhythmic, incessant ticking of a silent, internal clock. A repetitive synchronised pendulum swing forcing any living organism to obey the rules of an ancestral, supreme biorhythm. A measure to preserve the especially precious state called homeostasis that each individual tissue within a multicellular organism is forced to maintain within its own biological equilibrium. Life or death, growth or decline, acceleration or hindrance are among the messages carried across every second from each individual cell to another by signalling molecules like hormones, a precious molecular link between the surrounding environment, ruled by changes in daylight, seasons and eras, and the human body, troubled by the challenges of health and illness.
It has never been a mystery to mankind that such balanced synchrony did not just result from passive adaptation, but rather stemmed from the complex active interplay between human beings and their environment. And, it is perhaps unsurprising to discover that efforts aimed at deciphering the wheelwork that operates the human inner clock have constituted an invigorating challenge that has kept the most prolific minds in science and philosophy occupied for centuries.
In the mid-17th century, when mankind had just started unraveling the mysteries of human anatomy and physiology, the French philosopher René Descartes identified the pineal gland as the principal seat of the soul, which governed the destiny of man like “a very lively and pure flame”. It took several hundred years though, before the properties of the “third eye”, a pea-sized structure tucked right in the middle of the brain, emerged from the world of metaphysics into that of scientific medicine.
It wasn't in fact until 1958 when the careful processing...