Airplane travels carry with them the convenience of getting around the world in less than a day. But, they also bypass a basic function of the human brain, which is to keep accurate accounts of the time of day and to regulate basic physiological processes accordingly. The disturbances that occur when time zone differences overwhelm the body are known collectively as jet lag. It manifests itself through sleepiness, irritation, and the inability to “connect” to the surrounding reality until the body gets accustomed to the new time frame. Now, scientists believe that they may have found a new way of approaching the condition.

Scientists at the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom, are currently conducting research into a new group of cells, which they say play an important part in regulating the body's inner clock. Previous investigations had shown that these cells are inactive during daytime, but the study showed that this is not true. In fact, the British research group says, the exact opposite is true. This line of research, the scientists say, may also be important for developing new courses of treatment for people suffering from sleep disorders caused by inner clock malfunctions.

Professors Hugh Piggins, the leader of the new efforts, say that the find may help researchers to one day gain the ability to fine tune the human bodily clock to specifications, so that a large number of conditions related to its malfunctions can be eradicated. “The traditional model said the clock and the brain communicated to the rest of the brain via the number of electrical impulses that the brain cells were producing. These impulses would travel around the brain, telling it what time of day it is. What we've found is in fact that there are at least two types of cells in this part of the brain,” Piggins told the BBC World Service Health Check program.

“There's a lot of interest in the pharmaceutical industry, obviously, to try to develop chemical treatments to reset your daily clock to help counteract things like jet lag. Or, perhaps more importantly, different kind of sleep disorders for which dysfunctions in this clock are often involved. [The new study] may mean that elsewhere in the brain there are cells like this that can also survive these very unusual conditions,” the expert added. The team discovered that the cells which had been shown previously to be inactive were in fact in such an excited state that they appeared to be still. When they calmed down, they resumed basic functions, the group reports.