The Time of Our Lives
Prof. Benjamin Smarr
Prof. Benjamin Smarr works at the intersection of wearable sensors, time-series data science, and neurobiology, to discover new ways for individuals to know themselves, to recognize the deep diversity inherent in humanity, and to collectively contribute to more precise and inclusive state of public health. He focuses on women’s health and student well-being, but contributes broadly, from circadian ecology to human seasonality. He is also an advocate for the “Information Reformation” and “Democratized Discovery” as positive metaphors for transforming biomedical science in our age of distributed data generation. His activities have garnered global attention, from the BBC to Forbes.
Physiology changes in structured ways across time. Understanding the timescales of change to expect in data, and the relationships across systems and timescales within individuals, can be useful for reducing feature selection and more quickly getting to important signal when looking for change over time. But the way rhythms manifest in different people are different, and represent an under-explored frontier in biodiversity. We know less than you might think about even simple examples, like early birds and night owls, or ovulating-or-not. More subtle differences – like ultradian rhythm period and cross-system coherence – are only now possible to explore, but hold great promise for enabling more effective personalized wellness, diagnoses, and progression monitoring. However, the depth to which we can explore our more nuanced differences depends on societal trust and data security; two pillars that are currently not up to the task.
Biohackers put discipline and time into honing their bodies and minds. They’re not just doing it for themselves; they’re doing this because they want to effect change for the good in the people around them.
Summary
- The timing of supplements, food, and health measurements is crucial because physiological systems are constantly moving in time across various circadian and ultradian biological rhythms.
- Continuous data from wearables provides vital context that single-point medical tests miss, allowing for the identification of rhythm disruptions linked to chronic diseases and ill health.
- Every cell in the body contains a genetic clock; maintaining health requires the orchestration of these internal clocks to ensure organs function in sync with one another.
- Establishing strict routines for meals and sleep improves blood glucose regulation and synchronizes internal rhythms, reducing friction between organs and promoting physiological coherence.
- Advanced sensors reveal previously unknown internal patterns, such as the stomach having sleep cycles similar to deep brain sleep, highlighting the complexity of organ-level biological timing.
Article
The Time Of Our Lives
At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, Prof. Benjamin Smarr Argued That Health Was Not Just About What We Do, But When We Do It
In a field often crowded with miracle claims and metallic certainty, Prof. Benjamin Smarr brought something rarer to the stage at Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki: humility, evidence and a quietly radical idea. Health, he suggested, was not merely a matter of nutrients, supplements, sleep scores or blood panels. It was, more fundamentally, a matter of time.
Speaking on Friday, 1 November 2019 in Helsinki, Finland, during his presentation *The Time Of Our Lives*, Smarr asked the audience to reconsider the body not as a machine with static settings, but as an orchestra of clocks. Every cell, he said, kept time. Every organ moved in rhythm. And illness often began when those rhythms fell out of sync.
“Timing is extremely important for the context of whatever it is you are doing because your body is moving in time,” Smarr told the audience. “Every single cell in your body has genetic clockwork, and health is about keeping all of those clocks in line.”
The Hidden Music Of The Body
Smarr’s work sat at the intersection of wearable sensors, time-series data science and neurobiology, and his argument was as elegant as it was unsettling. Conventional medicine, he implied, often captured only still photographs of systems that should have been understood as motion pictures.
A single blood test might reveal whether a measurement fell within a normal range. But it could miss the deeper truth entirely: whether the body was coherent, orderly and responsive, or disordered and drifting. Continuous wearable data, by contrast, could show the arcs and ripples of human physiology as they unfolded across the day.
Smarr focused not only on circadian rhythms, the familiar roughly 24-hour cycles tied to light and sleep, but also on ultradian rhythms, shorter biological cycles that recur throughout the day, often around every 90 minutes. These rhythms, long neglected because technology had not made them easy to observe, appeared to be central to how the body regulated itself.
The implications were profound. When those rhythms became disrupted over time, he said, the risk of chronic illness rose with them: metabolic disease, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular problems, even neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s.
Order, Disorder And The Limits Of A Snapshot
To illustrate the point, Smarr contrasted orderly and disordered physiological data collected from continuous temperature monitoring. The difference, he suggested, could be obvious to the eye. One pattern was stable and repeatable. The other was irregular, jagged and misaligned.
Yet if those same data were reduced to the kind of isolated readings often used in clinical settings, the distinction all but disappeared. Both individuals could appear “normal” on paper.
That was one of the central tensions of the talk: normality, as medicine often measured it, could conceal dysfunction. A body could remain within range while still losing synchrony.
Smarr’s argument was not anti-medical. It was a plea for richer context. Without timing, he suggested, physiology became unreadable. Numbers divorced from rhythm were often numbers stripped of meaning.
The Orchestra Metaphor Became Biology
The body, in Smarr’s telling, was not governed by a single master clock in the brain, though the brain mattered. Blue light, for instance, helped set central circadian timing. But it was only one part of the story.
The larger truth was more distributed. Gene networks in cells across the liver, heart, pancreas and other tissues rose and fell according to time of day. Biological function was rhythmic at the level of gene expression itself. The challenge of health, then, was orchestration.
“Your body is healthy when you do not have friction between your organs,” Smarr said. “When they know what each other are doing and are lined up with each other, you become synchronized as an orchestra.”
It was a striking phrase because it translated molecular biology into lived experience. Fatigue, inflammation, metabolic instability, poor recovery, bad sleep, even the vague feeling of being “off” could be understood not as isolated failures but as temporal friction, organs missing each other’s cues, systems no longer arriving on beat.
What The Stomach Revealed
Among the most intriguing parts of the presentation was Smarr’s discussion of electrogastrograms, or EGGs, a technology adapted to measure the electrical signals of the stomach and intestines much as an ECG measures the heart.
Working with collaborators including Armin Gharabegian and Todd Coleman, Smarr explored what happened when those signals were tracked continuously over 24 hours. What emerged was not just digestive noise, but a hidden choreography.
The stomach, they found, appeared to have sleep-like cycles of its own. During sleep, its activity rose and fell in patterns that echoed deeper systemic rhythms. More startling still, stomach activity seemed to increase before meals, not just after them, suggesting that digestive physiology was anticipating food rather than merely reacting to it. Ghrelin signalling and gastric activity appeared to prepare the body in advance.
The finding hinted at a body that was predictive rather than passive. Organs were not waiting to be instructed by events. They were making plans.
The Case For Meal Timing
Smarr then turned to a self-experiment involving temperature sensors and a continuous glucose monitor. For one week, he ate on an unstructured schedule. For the next, he kept meals at the same times each day.
The result, he said, was visible almost immediately. Glucose regulation improved when meals became regular. Spikes tightened. Prolonged elevations diminished. The body seemed to respond not only to the content of food, but to the reliability of its arrival.
Even during a subsequent fasting day, his body still appeared to anticipate meals at the usual times, adjusting blood glucose as if following a remembered appointment. The rhythm persisted after the input disappeared.
That persistence mattered. Smarr described it as physiological momentum. Once the system became synchronized, it tended to stay synchronized, at least for a time. Rhythm, in other words, could be trained.
For anyone looking for a practical lesson in biohacking, this may have been the clearest one. Regular meals and regular sleep were not boring foundations beneath more exciting interventions. They were powerful interventions in themselves.
The Promise Of Continuous Data
Smarr’s broader point was that wearable technology could make these dynamics visible at scale. Smart rings, thermal sensors, glucose monitors and future devices capable of tracking organ-specific rhythms could reveal what one-off clinic visits could not: how life was actually being lived, and how the body was actually responding.
This was where his work widened into philosophy. Smarr, whose research has drawn attention from outlets including the BBC and Forbes, spoke not only as a scientist but as an advocate for what he has called the “Information Reformation” and “Democratized Discovery.” The future, he argued, would not be built solely in laboratories. It would also be built in communities.
“Biohacking is how we are going to do science in the future,” he said. “As individuals generate data, we will get communities sharing what real life looks like, and that is how we will actually learn how to help each other more.”
It was an appeal to a different model of knowledge: less proprietary, less paternal, more participatory. Not data extracted from people, but data shared by them.
A Plea For Openness
That vision came with a challenge to industry as well as academia. Smarr urged companies developing health hardware to resist the temptation to hoard information behind closed systems and subscription walls. There was, he argued, both moral and commercial value in openness.
“There is an opportunity to make a stable business by being open, sharing data, and encouraging people to democratize biohacking much more widely than it currently is,” he said.
This was not utopianism so much as a practical ethic. If biology was diverse, dynamic and deeply individual, then broad-based discovery required broad-based participation. Precision medicine would not emerge from secrecy. It would emerge from shared observation, careful experimentation and a culture willing to admit how much remained unknown.
What Remained After The Applause
By the end of *The Time Of Our Lives*, the most resonant idea was also the simplest. Human beings had spent years trying to optimize inputs while neglecting timing itself. We asked what to eat, what to take, what to track, what to fix. Smarr asked a prior question: when?
At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, Prof. Benjamin Smarr did not offer a silver bullet. He offered something more durable: a framework. The body was not failing us because it lacked enough interventions. It was often struggling because its internal clocks had been pushed into conflict.
The remedy, at least in part, was not glamorous. Sleep consistently. Eat predictably. Gather better data. Respect the rhythms already written into the body.
And perhaps, above all, remain humble before a system more intricate than modern health culture often allowed.
“Until we have a culture that celebrates shared learning and shared experimentation, we will not get there,” Smarr said. “There is an opportunity to do better if we are willing to stay humble, keep learning, and accept what we do not know.”
In a summit devoted to hacking the body, it was a reminder that the deepest breakthrough might not be domination at all, but listening.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki