CPC: #29: Unexpected Physics in Biology is MUSIC to cells.

Circadian cycles allow for self organizing features and functions in cells.  Effectively these cycles are the musics your cells are addicted too. Every AM you are designed to retune the system with the AM sunlight so the music of life contains to reverberate in you cells continuously without interruption.

Dr. Franz Halberg coined the term “Circadian Rhythm” in the 1950’s, as a result of his studies in what became Chronobiology.  He found our bodies have a repeating cycle, a rhythm lasting about (circa) a day (dian).  He measured these rhythms using the body’s core temperature and levels of activity and referred to the shorter daily waking and sleeping cycles as Ultradian Rhythms.  Sleep centers use EEGs (ElectroEncephaloGraphy) to record brainwave activity during our sleeping ultradian rhythms.  Dr. Halberg discovered the biological processes for producing essential proteins, which are the building blocks of our bodies, are only produced at the start of each ultradian cycle.  The most important ones are ubiquitin, methionine cycles, and proteins made from tryptophan.  Sunlight tunes them all in unique ways with photoentrainment.

The sun directly via its electromagnetic waves to tightly coil DNA/RNA while all versions nnEMF seem to uncoil DNA to affect its energy and information status.  We gained this idea in data on bacteriophages.  They pack their heads with DNA tightly under great force as the bottom left slide shows. 

The area under curve in bottom right graph is a measure of the energy required to pack DNA inside the head of the phage.
Notice the energy increases greatly as more DNA is packed. High energy is due to DNA stiffness and its negative charge.

It appears circadian disruption uncoils DNA for transcription and this induces an electrical status change.  DNA becomes more positive in charge because electrons are lost to aqueous proteins that the ultradian cycles produce to change physiologic function of cells.  This appears to be the basic mechanisms of how things should operate to structure tissues and organize cells.    

A priori optimum development in organisms, from single cell to multicellular organisms, or from skeletal cells to a skeleton or limbs exemplify Fibonacci patterns. These developmental patterns consist of two primary characteristics: (1) a number of the organisms structural arrangements may fall into the series 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8,...or (2) logarithmic growth based on the ratio of consecutive Fibonacci numbers (1.618033988..., also known as the golden ratio or φ). The growth patterns observed occur throughout nature in the arrangement of skin pores in tetrapods, the spiral shape of snails and sea shells, and the overall structure of plants. Fibonacci numbers occur in atoms and electrons (Huntley, 1969), the DNA molecule (Wahl, 1988), biological cell division (Spears & Bicknell-Johnson, 1998), models of growth and death (Hoggatt & Lind, 1969), bronchial airway segment bifurcations (Goldenberger, West, Dresselhaus, & Bhargava, 1985), experimental growth of tumor nodules (Prokopchuk, 1981), and many other aspects of human biology (e.g., position of facial features, body proportions).

Does musical composition exhibit this organizing pattern too?  Good music does. 

Can we use it to help fine tune us when the melanopsin system is de-tuned by poor light choices?  It turns out we can.

Have you ever heard a smart phone interfere with audio equipment at a party or in your car?  This often happens with incoming calls in a car using satellite radio or music apps.  It sounds like bursts of noise when an active cell phone is near a radio or even an MP3 player or Public Address system. Now ask yourself, “How is it possible for something that doesn’t even have  a radio antenna in them to translate cellular signals into these audible bursts?” The answer is simple and central to understanding our current health problems in our electropolluted environments. 

Cell phones, like nearly all wireless devices, use some form of frequency hopping to better utilize available radio spectrum, reduce interference and use lower power. The wireless carrier frequency is usually in the hundreds of megahertz to gigahertz range and at the low power emitted by cell phones the radio waves should pass harmlessly through us.  This is going to change and get substantially worse in most cities when 5G networks that are already built are allowed to broadcast.

So why does epidemiological evidence show a higher risk associated with exposure to these radio waves? The fact you can hear audible bursts with an audio amplifier that isn’t a radio receiver, or a receiver not even tuned to the same carrier frequency, gets to the crux of the electromagnetic problem mankind is facing now. 

The culprit is the interval at which the frequency hopping occurs, and not the megahertz to gigahertz carrier frequency of the transmitted bursts. The frequency hopping interval, I am using ‘interval’ instead of ‘frequency’ to avoid confusion with the carrier frequencies, is in the audible range. Our bodies are sensitive to frequencies we can hear, there are frequencies that heal us by working with our circadian cycles and frequencies that make us ill before they kill us because we decouple these cycles from the proteins they make. 

It’s as basic as how music affects us. When musical instruments are out of tune or out of harmony with each other the result is agitating noise. And when we hear such a cacophony of dissonance, we turn the music off or leave the performance.

Today, light waves are disrupting the circadian cycles most, but it appears that we might be able to use music to heal.

Self-organized criticality is also a way of understanding complex systems in nature. A power law is a mathematical relationship often referred to as the 1/f law (after the 1/f electronic noise of transistors) in which the distribution of power density at different frequencies (power spectral density) is inversely proportioned to the frequency. Before venturing further, let’s see what the 1/f distribution can tell us about music. This song happens to be one that entrances me when I write about quantum biology.

Fractal musical time is built around power laws buried in nature and sunlight. It is even in the human heartbeat and EEG.

Why do we love music? Have you ever asked yourself this? One reason we enjoy music lies in its balance of predictability and surprise, so researchers claim. They found a musical pitch (frequency) spectrum following a 1/f power law, which achieves this balance of predictability and surprise; but what about musical rhythm? Musical rhythms, especially those of Western classical music, are highly regular and predictable; are they? Daniel Levitin at McGill University Canada, Parag Chordia at Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta and Vinod Menon at Stanford University California in the United States decided to put that to the test by analyzing the rhythm spectra in 1 788 movements from 558 compositions of Western classical music in their papers.

The rhythmic content of the compositions was systematically measured by noting the duration of the notes and of the rests, transforming the durations into Hz (cycle per second), plotting the data and finding the spectral exponent in the slope of the line obtained. They went through the works of 40 composers in 16 subgenres and found an overwhelming majority of rhythms following the 1/fa power law with a ranging from ~0.5 to ~1. An exponent of 0 would be pure white noise, completely unpredictable, whereas an exponent of 2 and above would be highly predictable. Notably, classical composers whose compositions are known to exhibit nearly identical 1/f pitch spectra demonstrated distinctive 1/f rhythm spectra: Beethoven’s rhythms were among the most predictable, and Mozart’s among the least, with Haydn in between. This song by Tool, above, was built around nature's key frequency law. The difference in rhythmic predictability is such as to allow composers to identify their compositions uniquely and to distinguish them from works of their contemporaries. No one has made a song like a cadence in this modern piece. What does it say to you as you listen to it? For me the take home is simple: It is not the melody or voice that commands the story;

it is the ear that deciphers the code contained within. It is very similar to how a mitochondria deciphers the light waves that collide with it.  

CITES:

1. Mathematical Models in Biology  By Leah Edelstein-Keshet 1988.