MORT GALE'S BIORHYTHM THEORY

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BIORHYTHMS

Biorhythms are not new - Biorhythms were the rage from the mid 1960s to mid 1970s, purporting to tell you when your Physical, Emotional or Mental cycles would be at the "Critical Days" of their 23, 28 and 33 day periods. Critical days signified an increased likelihood of accidents, emotional upsets, or mental confusion, respectively.

Biorhythms were introduced to the public by George Thommen in his 1964 book, "Is This Your Day?" (Crown Publishers, Inc. NY). He described the turn-of-the-century discovery of biorhythms by physicians who analyzed medical records, seeking to confirm their observations that physical illness and emotional difficulties recurred in 23-day and 28-day rhythms.

Thommen offered examples of how biorhythms had since been used to reduce occupational accidents, anticipate the outcome of athletic events, and chess matches. His objective was to provide simple tables and charts so that anyone could use them to determine the validity of biorhythms in their own lives.

Biorhythms are not science (yet) - The study of biorhythms has been limited to collecting data on human performance, and comparing that performance with what might have been predicted from biorhythm calculations. Unfortunately there was no biological theory for explaining those empirical predictions. Without a theory to test there is no science.

Today, biorhythms are considered akin to astrology in the sense that they offer to predict a person's behavior on the basis of calculations based on a date of birth. The absence of a plausible and testable theory means that biorhythms will remain as a fringe interest.

The conventional explanation of biorhythms -

The conventional explanations of biorhythms are based on the metaphor that our bodies produce and store energies which are used ("discharged") during the Active Phase of a biorhythm, and then stored up again ("recharged") during the Passive Phase of the biorhythm cycle.

The active and passive phases of biorhythms were arbitrarily represented as sine curves that rise above a mid-line during the active phase, and fall below the mid-line during the passive Phase (see below).

[Figure adapted from Thommen's representation of a biorhythm.]

Biorhythm interpretations predict that human performance will be better during the periods above the mid-line line, while periods below the mid-line are accompanied by reduced performance (as the person recoups their energies).

Critical Days occur when the sine curve crosses the mid-line (shown by the large dots in the figure). Critical Days occur at the start of the Active Phase (discharge), and again when the Active Phase switches over to the Passive Phase (recharge). Each biorhythm period contains two Critical Days.

Critical Days are said to introduce instability in the person's performance, so that accidents happen, emotions flare, or mental confusion reins. Critical Days do not "cause" external circumstances to appear, but rather may cause an inappropriate reaction to those circumstances, because of the instabilities arising at the time of the energy switchover.

SEEKING A SCIENTIFIC BASIS

I became interested in emotional energy cycles after reading a US Army paperback book "Cycles, Key To The Future," by Edward R. Dewey in 1944. Dewey had described the work of Professor Rex Hersey of the University of Pennsylvania who found that people's moods varied in a cyclical manner. Hersey suggested that people should plot their changing moods on a grid by assigning a +3 to days of elation, a -3 to days of depression. Intermediate moods would be assigned plus or minus 1, 2, or 0. Hersey said that, after a period of time, the plot would reveal their cyclical mood patterns that could then be used to prepare for upcoming unpleasant periods.

When Thommen's book came out in 1964 I began using his tables and charts. I collected data on family, friends and people at work, noticing the correlations between their behavior and chart predictions, as well as the failures of those predictions. I also looked for deeper patterns within the biorhythms, seeking clues to more meaningful interpretations beyond the simple Active Phase, Passive Phase and Critical Day considerations.

After a decade of observations and testing alternative speculations, I summarized my beliefs about biorhythms in a book, "Biorhythm Compatibility," (Warner Books, Inc., 1978). I suggested an alternative plotting format, and offered an interpretation of biorhythms based on Jungian concepts of human functions. Those concepts led me to consider a possible biological basis for biorhythms arising from the activities of the primitive cells in the earliest egg layers. It also led me to propose a fourth biorhythm that I called the Intuitional cycle.

These then are the key points of my biorhythm theory:

• A straight-line format for plotting biorhythms
• A Jungian viewpoint for interpreting pairs of biorhythms
• Introduction of a fourth biorhythm for Intuitional function
• A possible biological basis for biorhythms

Each of these is described briefly in the following sections.

Using straight lines for biorhythm plots

The pioneers of biorhythms never suggested that biorhythm cycles looked like sine waves. They simply argued that energy was being used (discharged) from the beginning of an active phase, until the critical day, when it switched to a passive phase during which energy was being stored (recharged). I therefore decided to represent those active and passive phases as straight lines to represent those biorhythm phases (see figure below).

In each of these biorhythm plots, the critical days occur when the biorhythms change from their active to passive phases, and vice versa. The upward sloping straight line represents the active period, corresponding with the active period represented by the portion of the sine curve that lies above the mid-line. Similarly, the downward sloping straight line represents the passive period, corresponding with the time that the sine curve falls below the mid-line.

Besides being simpler to draw, the straight-line format provides an easy distinction between two kinds of critical days. The critical days appear on the straight-line plots at the top and bottom of the charts, while critical days all appear on the mid-line of sine curve charts.

The distinction between top and bottom critical days is that a top critical day marks the switch from active to passive phases, while bottom critical days mark the switch from a passive phase into an active phase. It should be expected that the consequences would be different when you pass from active to passive, than when you pass from passive to active phases. These are more easily identified on straight-line plots.

A Jungian perspective for biorhythms (...and a fourth biorhythm!)

During the time that I was looking for ways to reconcile the differences between observed behaviors and the biorhythm plots, I came across Dr. Carl Jung's psychology of human behavior. He identified two primary functions, each being performed by a pair of bodily activities. The first function is PERCEPTION, which reports on what's going on around us. The second function is DECISION, which helps us to determine what actions we should take.

The DECISION function is supported by two activities, called Thinking and Feeling. You make a decision either by mentally thinking it out (using your head), or by how you feel about it emotionally (using your heart). Normally, most decisions involve combinations of head and heart.

The PERCEPTION function is also supported by two activities, called Sensation and Intuition. The sensation activity uses the physical body's sensory systems to report on the immediate environment, while the sources of our intuitions that invoke "inner perceptions" and hunches, remain unknown. My speculations lead me to suggest that they may be related to our endocrine system

It occurred to me that Jung's sensation, feeling and thinking activities might be related to our physical, emotional and mental biorhythms. It also occurred to me that another biorhythm may exist which supports the Intuition activity. I searched for an Intuitional cycle in the behavior of sensitive friends, some of whom were professional (and accurate) psychics. Based on those observations I began plotting a Fourth Biorhythm with a 38-day period, that I called the "Intuitional Cycle." The 38-day period was consistent with the five-day intervals between the other 23- 28- and 33-day biorhythm periods.

The following table summarizes Dr. Jung's characterization of primary human functions and their supporting bodily activities, along with my allocation of biorhythms to those bodily activities.

For those who might be interested in how Dr. Carl Jung presented his concept, I include the following figure that shows his representation of the opposing functions of Thinking, Feeling, Sensation and Intuition (and the finer intermediary combinations).

From Diagram 6: "The Psychology of C.G. Jung," Jolande Jacobi, Yale Univ.Press, 1962

A new interpretation of biorhythms, based on particular pairs 

The Jungian view of basic human functions suggested to me that biorhythms might be acting as opposing pairs in supporting our PERCEPTION and DECISION functions.

That led me to begin plotting biorhythms in pairs (physical vs. intuitional, and mental vs. emotional), looking for correlations between behavior and the patterns in the paired plots. It soon became apparent that crossings of opposing pairs were correlated with eventful behaviors. Crossing points may occur briefly, or extend for several weeks, as when two biorhythm plots seem to merge. Merges present much more stressful experiences than simple crossings simply because they last so much longer.

When biorhythms cross each other, they are at the same energy level, causing a delicate instability between their opposing functions. For example, when mental and emotional biorhythms are at equal strengths, it causes irritability because of the inability to come to a decision. Similarly, confusion seems to prevail when the physical and intuitional cycles are at equal strengths, providing conflicting perceptions to be evaluated by the decision function (i.e., emotional and mental systems).

The following charts show the crossings and merges of opposing pairs of biorhythms. After using the charts for a while, the patterns can provide useful warnings about difficult periods. The charts also make it easy to identify the top critical days and bottom critical days, which can also provide warnings of difficult days.

A biological (cellular) basis for biorhythms?

Starting from the metaphor that biorhythms represent cycles of human energies, I turned my attention to the primary sources of such energies, i.e., the cells that make up our bodies. There are billions of cells in your body, but they all grew from three layers of cells that first appeared during the third week of your life as a fertilized egg cell.

These three layers consist of primitive cells known as mesoderm, endoderm, and ectoderm cells. They ultimately develop into approximately 256 different cell types that make up the tissues and organs of your body. Among other things, primitive mesoderm cells evolve into the flesh and bones of your physical system. The primitive endoderm cells evolve into the linings of your viscera, the "guts" and glands that are involved with your emotions. Your brain and mental equipment evolved from the cells of the primitive ectoderm layer. And I believe that cells of the endocrine system may responsible for the activities of the intuitional system.

Based on these relations between primitive cell types and their evolution into physical, emotional and mental tissues and organs, I speculated that the physical, emotional and mental biorhythms might be related to the energy cycles associated with those primitive cell types. The energy cycles I refer to are their metabolic cycles, rather than their mitosis cycles.

The suggested links between these cells and their related biorhythms are shown below:

My biological speculations are just that! Speculations. It is my hope that some competent biologist will find the speculation interesting enough to consider conducting careful experiments that might determine if there are long term metabolic cycles in the primitive cells (or in their derivative functional tissues). Not an easy task! Especially since in vitro preparations are denied the normally available hormonal messengers that keep our biological systems coordinated.

A touch of future science (...still more speculations)

Biorhythm theory remains conjecture, based on subjective observations of behavior, matched to simple calculations of periodic cycles. However, newer scientific tools have arrived on the scene, offering to help describe periodic yet unpredictable behaviors.

The field of non-linear dynamics (chaos and complexity theory) deals with behavior that is driven by external influences interacting with internal feedback loops seeking to maintain a stable system. Such behavior initially seems to be random, yet, with appropriate observations, reveals overall periodicities and aggregate patterns called "strange attractors." Strange attractors are the idealized periodic patterns toward which the seemingly random behavioral systems tend to approach, as they travel on their inconstant trajectories of change.

Current research has detected the difference between a healthy and a diseased heart by observing differences between the strange attractors generated from recordings of their respective electrical activities.

Biorhythms may be candidates for investigation as another example of non-linear biological systems. It may turn out that we have four strange attractors with cycles of 23, 28, 33 and 38 day periods. Biorhythms qualify as non-linear systems since they reflect the influence of many outside influences, acting along with many internal feedback loops.

The absence of a precise periodicity in biorhythms is no longer evidence that they are therefore unscientific!

It remains now for a chaos and complexity student to explore the nature of the observables used for biorhythm analysis, and to then examine those observables in search of possible strange attractors. It may turn out that indeed cellular structures and their metabolic processes "resonate" in the range of biorhythm periods.

About biorhythms and the colors of light

If you care to go still further into biorhythms, you can check out my speculations about how the specific colors of light might contribute to the cellular energies associated with the four biorhythms.

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