Andrew Huberman· PhD
These cells, retinal ganglion cells, communicate to areas of the brain when particular qualities of light are present in your environment and signal to the brain, therefore, that it's early day or late in the day.
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The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
These cells, retinal ganglion cells, communicate to areas of the brain when particular qualities of light are present in your environment and signal to the brain, therefore, that it's early day or late in the day.
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There is a particular category of retinal ganglion cell, remember the neurons that connect the retina to the brain, that is involved in a special kind of vision that has nothing to do with conscious perception of what's around you, and it's happening right now, it's happening all the time. These are so-called melanopsin retinal ganglion cells, named after the opsin that they contain within them.
there's a set of cells in the neural retina which aligns the back of your eye they're sometimes called intrinsically photosensitive retinal gangan cells they're sometimes called melanopsin retinal gangion cells we'll talk about those in a bit of detail in a moment it's well known that those cells are the ones that respond to two different types of light input not one but two different types of light input and send information to the hypothalamus where your master circadian clock resides
And here you've got a case where actually some of the output neurons that we didn't think had any business being directly sensitive to light were actually making this photopigment, absorbing light and converting that to neural signals and sending to the brain. That's your circadian system. is keeping time and it's all built into our biology.