Chronobiology
Author: Laura Trebucq | Email: trebucql@udesa.edu.ar
Laura L Trebucq1°, Ignacio Spiousas1°2°,Maria Florencia Coldeira1°2°, Camila R. Godoy Peirone2°, Diego A. Golombek1°2°, Horacio de la Iglesia3°, Leando P. Casiraghi1°2°
1° Laboratorio Interdisciplinario del Tiempo y la Experiencia, Universidad de San Andres, Buenos Aires, Argentina
2° CONICET, Argentina
3° Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, W
In the pre-electricity era, human activities adhered to the safety of daylight, with sleep predominantly confined to the night. The advent of artificial lighting allowed humans to extend wakefulness into the late hours. Our research is focused on isolated Toba/Qom native communities in northern Argentina and helps understanding this complex phenomenon.
Since 2012, our longitudinal wrist-actimetric studies reveal that Toba/Qom individuals in rural areas lacking electricity have earlier sleep onsets and more extended sleep duration compared to their urban counterparts (de la Iglesia et al. 2015). Also, we found a delay in the Dim-Light Melatonin Onset (DLMO) during winter (Casiraghi et al. 2020).
We have monitored these communities as their living conditions improved slowly. Currently, all rural settlements we study have varying degrees of access to electricity and internet, with some residents even owning smartphones. Our recent results show a delay in the average times of sleep in these communities. In addition, thanks to the longitudinal nature of our studies (which adds up to about 10 thousand night of sleep recorded through actigraphy), we are able to monitor changes in the habits of these communities, like detecting and quantifying “social jet-lag”, or studying how ownership of a smartphone affects sleep, while also being able to consider season and gender variables, helping us to describe more profoundly how access to electric light shapes sleep habits in humans.