840 PERIODIC FUNCTIONS IN MAMMALS 



Accordingly, a physiologic mechanism [a neural phase compara- 

 tor(s)(?)] is now confronted with a new CEPI and an old COPI. It 

 will compare the two, of course, and if the phase relations of COPI 

 and CEPI are found to be altered, an appropriate message will be 

 sent to various bodily rhythms to speed up or to slow down, as need 

 be. Moreover, the phase comparator will continue to send messages 

 until the rhythms are again in step with the environment, i.e., until 

 the abnormal relations between CEPI and COPI have been corrected. 



The medical researcher in viewing the above processes poses, of 

 course, the question of diseases of "synchronization." Psychoses are 

 often defined as illnesses that separate the individual from the realities 

 of the environment. Can some of them result from abnormal phase 

 relations of COPI and CEPI? Can the psychogenic component of 

 the former and/ or the latter, arrive at the wrong time, e.g., because 

 of some delay underway? Rigorously analyzed evidence for the 

 possibility that a failure of synchronization, if chronic, can characterize 

 a disease remains to be accumulated, and the question whether the 

 same failure of synchronization may, in addition, underlie disease also 

 awaits study. Defects, e.g., in the transducer or in the "phase compar- 

 ing," come to mind in this connection. In this connection, also, in the 

 mouse (Halberg, 1954b) and perhaps in human beings as well 

 (Landau and Feldman, 1954), we have an example at least of 

 "transducer-disease" (blinding). Such an alteration of synchroniza- 

 tion is not a clinically important aspect of blindness, since sync signals 

 are of more than one modality, and thus the loss of one transducer is 

 eventually compensated by another, as far as the phase of 24-hr 

 rhythms is concerned. The data after blinding are of value, however, 

 since they reveal the occurrence of free-running periods in an illness. 

 The same data also demonstrate a methodologic point of import 

 (Ingle, 1951a). Since in this case, a change in period is not neces- 

 sarily associated with changes in amplitude or level (Fig. 3, data on 

 individuals), we are here dealing with an alteration which periodicity 

 analysis can describe but the study of gross deviations from a normal 

 range may not detect. 



From the undefined physiologic equivalents of a neural "phase 

 comparator" and/or "oscillator" we now turn to their endocrine 

 counterparts, the pituitary and its target glands. "Information" from 



