Sleep patterns. Nature or Nurture?

[TheRealJoeFish]

My understanding was that, in studies where they basically didn't let people look at the time for a week or two there was a tendency to drift towards longer day cycles of something like 27 hours. I'll see if I can find anything on that.

Another thing to note: have any of you seen those commercials for... I forget what it's called, Natural24 or something like that? They bring up a good point: a number of blind people have trouble syncing their waking/sleep schedules with the solar cycle in the absence of visual light/dark cues.

Still, when the pair of rovers were sent to Mars some years ago, the project scientists went on 'Mars Time' to maximize science return from the mission.  Staying synchronized to the day/night pattern on Mars, while controlling their rovers from earth was anticipated to be 'doable' and very efficient use of the rovers (assumed) limited lifespans. The mission personnel even had special wrist watches made that ticked out 'Martian' seconds, minutes and hours'.

Guess what ?

It turned out to be VERY difficult for them, even though the Martian day is less than an hour longer than an earth day, and everyone thinking it would be a snap to both stay up later every 'night' and get up 'later' every 'day', being so relentlessly out of sync with 'earth' time turned out to be a really taxing ordeal.

I hadn't updated my post when you quoted this, but see above; I guess I would argue that the research suggests if they were *on mars*, where the sun actually did come up every 25 hours, it would've been the most natural thing in the world. But on earth, with the sun on the 24-hour cycle, the only ways to get off of that are *seriously* mess up your brain, or not observe the sun at all.