Pace Johnson, the fact that everything that exists is made of less than 100 elements ought to be of general interest. It's a devastating put-down and one every would-be science populariser should bear in mind. we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance".
Dr Johnson sternly put his finger on the problem: "The truth is that the knowledge of external nature and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or frequent business of the human mind. Far from being sunshine in a pill, then, lithium acts as “anti-sunlight.” Neurologically, it undoes sunlight and thereby compresses the circadian clock back to twenty-four hours-preventing both the mania bubble from forming and the Black Tuesday crash into depression.Why are the 92 natural chemical elements not more iconic? The Periodic Table, which graphically illustrates their relationships, has a certain cachet and hangs on many walls Tom Lehrer wrote a song, "The Elements", which demonstrates that the names scan well. Notice that sunlight still trumps lithium during the day and resets the proteins it’s only when the sunlight goes away at night that lithium helps DNA shake free. Lithium helps cleave the proteins from DNA so people can wind down.
Their brains don’t realize they should stop revving. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls-at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants.
Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off.
This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. “Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock.
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