F rom wherever it is that you’re reading this, how many clocks are in sight? Are you wearing a watch? Is there a ticking face on the wall? Does the glowing digital display of your oven or microwave unwittingly tell you the time? As this book points out, the ubiquity of man-made clocks is easy to forget “until you want to avoid looking at them”. The Inner Clock begins with its author, the science journalist Lynne Peeples, trapping herself in a decommissioned (although luxuriously refurbished) underground nuclear missile complex in Arkansas. For ten days, she makes an effort to live entirely according to her body’s natural rhythm — completely “time blind” — avoiding clocks and sunlight while keeping close tabs on changes in her “mood, hunger,.
