A three-oscillator model of the human circadian system controlling the core temperature rhythm and the sleep-wake cycle

Abstract

Even during “free-running” experiments, in which subjects lived in caves or cellars without any time cues, various circadian rhythms such as core body temperature and the sleep-wake cycle remained for a long time mutually synchronized in one group of subjects. In another group of subjects, or later in the same subjects, a number of unusually long sleep-wake cycles occurred while body temperature persisted in a near-24 hr rhythm. This has been termed “internal desynchronization” by Aschoff & Wever (1962) to emphasize the uncoupling of rhythms. Zulley (1980) and Czeisler et al. (1980) found that the duration of sleep depends regularly on the phase of the sleep onset in the body temperature rhythm, even in the apparently “random and irregular” sleep-wake pattern. The graph which plots, the sleep duration against the sleep onset phase is called sleep duration in this paper. We develop a quantitative, multi-oscillator model of human circadian system following Wever (1979) and Kronauer et al. (1982). Because the simplest model, which describes the state of each component oscillator by only one variable (ptlase) was adopted for each component oscillator, we can determine the intFraction between oscillators using sleep duration. It is found that a three-oscillator model can simulate several qualitative features of human circadian rhythms, such as an irregular free-running pattern and sleep duration. Moreover we find that the model reproduces the mysterious phenomenon of “forbidden wake up”, although we do not incorporate a priori any mechanism to explain it.