A LESSON PLAN ON THE BIOLOGY EXPERIMENT

CARRIED OUT AT DAUGAVPILS SECONDARY SCHOOL NO. 3 IN LATVIA

MEASURING OUR BIORHYTHM CYCLES

1. Introduction

Day and night biorhythms – periodic fluctuations in the body’s functions – have been seriously studied in both physiological and psychological aspects. Along with the periodic changes of day and night, there are longer periodic cycles of bodily functions:

1) a 23-day cycle describes a person’s physical condition, energy, and receptivity;

2) a  28-day cycle is the emotional cycle, which determines the intensity of a person’s creative potential in the emotional, and spiritual life;

3) a 33-day cycle manages spiritual intellectual forces and high concentration.

It is believed that the three periodic biorhythms are programmed at birth and their further development can be represented as a sinus curve with a corresponding period of days. The highest abilities concerning the field of life and activity of the person are manifested at higher curve values, the lower, even negative ones – curves in negative areas. At the transition points – critical days – it is necessary to be especially careful. Potentially high capacity are in cases where the positive areas of the curves coincide, low ones – if the negative areas coincide.

Plotting these curves on the calendar day axis will give Figure 1. The image starts on the first day, but if you want to create your own biorhythm image, you need to determine how many days have passed since the birth and start creating the biorhythm curve for the time you want to embed it.

Let’s look at a specific example. The student was born on July 20, 1987. He wants to portray the biorhythm scene from October 1, 2002. 2002 – 1987 = 15 (years) have passed since the birth of the student. Of these, the long years are 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004. In full years the number of days is 365 * 15 + 5 = 5480 days. Add the difference from July 20 to October 1 – 72 days. Then a total of 5,552 days have passed since the birth.
Divide this number by 23. Let’s get 241 full periods and 9 days left. This means that when constructing the 23-day biorhythm from October 1, the 23-day sinusoid has already passed 9 days. We calculate the situation for the 28-day rhythm and the 33-day rhythm analogously. The 28-day rhythm has 198 full periods and 8 days since the start of the rhythm. 168 full periods have elapsed for the 33-day rhythm and also 8 days since the beginning of the rhythm.
Figure 2 shows the biorhythm curves (for a child born on July 20, 1987) from October 1, 2002.

Scientists dispute the dependence of these rhythms on the date of birth because there are very serious crises in a person’s life, equivalent to a new rebirth, such as waking up from general anesthesia after a major operation, from a coma, severe mental trauma, and so on.

However, the periodicity of 23-day, 28-day, and 33-day biorhythms exists in human life. Maybe not everyone starts from the date of birth. You can observe yourself on a daily basis and periodically note the maximum influx of your physical strength and energy. You can also mark the periodic cyclical ups and downs of emotional days, and it is especially convenient to mark the peaks of spiritual intellect because everyone knows that there are days when spiritual work is not going at all, but there is also an influx of spiritual faculties. You can construct biorhythms from your own personal observations.

One should not believe them unequivocally, just as one should not believe rather contradictory published horoscopes in the mass media.

2. Objectives

Students determine their biorhythms.

3. Materials

Calendar (if students independently count the number of days lived) or Internet connection with “Eternal calendar” (if it is done online), calculator.

4. Products

Students will create personal biorhythms for themselves.

5. Experimental procedure

1. Students count the number of days they have lived.

2. Calculate the current day for each cycle.

3. Create cycle curves.

6. Expected results

Students will be able to predict their abilities in the near future using the obtained curves.