Word: pineal
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...Persuading a teenager to go to bed and get up on a reasonable schedule is another matter entirely. This kind of decision making has less to do with the frontal lobe than with the pineal gland at the base of the brain. As nighttime approaches and daylight recedes, the pineal gland produces melatonin, a chemical that signals the body to begin shutting down for sleep. Studies by Mary Carskadon at Brown University have shown that it takes longer for melatonin levels to rise in teenagers than in younger kids or in adults, regardless of exposure to light or stimulating activities...
...With age, the cells in the hypothalamus become less active. It's a situation that is made worse by the fact that the elderly tend to spend less time outdoors in the sunlight, which increases melatonin production in the pineal gland, causing sleep and mood disturbances. In earlier studies, Van Someren showed that Alzheimer's patients living in homes who preferred darker rooms were the most restless during the night. Combined with this study's findings, he now believes that the inactivity of these biological-clock cells can be reversed...
...that the body produces less melatonin as it grows older to make extravagant claims about its antiaging properties. They write that ingesting small amounts of melatonin will allow people to turn back the clock and live 120 years or more. Their evidence? An experiment in which Pierpaoli transplanted the pineal glands of old mice into young ones, and vice versa. The glands of the younger animals seemed to rejuvenate the older ones. The younger mice who had received the old glands, by contrast, aged rapidly and died prematurely...
...WANTS TO BELIEVE IN THE health benefits of melatonin more than Fred Turek. A neurobiologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, Turek has devoted two decades of his life to studying this naturally occurring substance produced by the pineal gland. He feels certain that it functions as the body's own safe and highly effective sleeping potion. But lately Turek can't shake the feeling that the world has gone melatonin mad. Based on the flimsiest scientific evidence, the subject of his research is now being trumpeted in books and magazines and on television as a cure for everything from...
Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcification or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent, Asians 15 to 25 percent and Europeans 60 to 80 percent. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between Blacks and whites...