A 23-year-old French geologist decided to enter a cave alone for two months: he took books, a small lamp and his journal to record his observations. When he came back up to the surface, he was surprised because time had not passed as he thought.
What would you do if you couldn’t tell when it was day and when it was night? Can you imagine life without a watch or cell phone to tell you the time? A young man voluntarily submitted to such an experiment. scientist called Michel Siffre : He locked himself in a cave to figure out how humans could survive this situation.
It was in the 1960s, when Siffre, a French geologist, observed with curiosity the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and was surprised when Soviet Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space.
This is how at 23 years old, The young man wondered what would happen to humans if they had to spend more time in space.
And since traveling outside the atmosphere is not as simple as simply buying a ticket, Stiffre decided to lock himself in a cave to “pretend” he was in space, an experiment that became one of the most famous in history.
This is what happened next.
Michel Siffre, the man who locked himself in a cave without a clock
Michel Siffre was a speleologist, that is to say a scientist who studied caves.
It was in 1962 that, after seeing the progress of man reaching space, his curiosity for human chronobiology was aroused: I wanted to know how human beings and their biological rhythms can react to extreme situations, like not knowing whether it is day or night.
“I decided to live like an animal, without a watch, in the dark, without knowing the time.”
As saved BBC World , the young geologist of the time He decides to go to a cave located in an underground glacier in the Alps, 130 meters deep, with no other company than his miner’s lamp – which was to be his only source of light -, enough food, a few books and his journal.
There, in these conditions, He stayed for a total of two months.
At the entrance to the cave there was a team of people attentive to the scientist’s actions. As he himself explained in an interview with Cabinet Review , The young man would call his companions when he woke up, at mealtimes and just before going to sleep to help him with the notes in order to check whether we really had a “biological clock” and did not need to have the time to hand.
“My team wasn’t allowed to call me, so I had no idea what time it was outside.”
What did you discover after the two months of experimentation?
To understand this, we must remember that Humans follow a 24-hour schedule. : We typically use alarms to wake us up, although sunlight is also usually our best indicator when it’s time to get out of bed.
The scientist wanted to know if humans have a biological clock that, without alarms or sunlight, allows us to wake up and fall asleep at a specific time.
Inside the cave, Siffre only ate and slept when his body told him to. He also announced to his team every time he performed these activities, so that they could take note of them, comparing his actions with the “normal” times outside.
In addition, The geologist measured his pulse from time to time and also counted from 1 to 120.
What was surprising was that When he counted to 120 (which could take two minutes), Siffre took a total of five minutes. In other words, the recording of time inside the cave was much slower than outside.
Even, When he left the cave after two months, he swore he had only been there a month: “My psychological time had been cut in half,” he said.
But the big discovery is that In fact, humans have an internal biological clock, independent of the external mechanisms that we have been creating for years.
However, this internal clock, in total darkness, is not governed by a 24-hour day. Without the circadian rhythms generated by sunrise and sunset, our body cycle appears to last 48 hours.
After leaving the cave for the first time, the scientist wanted to verify his theory again and He conducted five similar experiments with volunteers – including one woman. Instead of lasting two months, this time he determined that people would stay in the caves for between three and six months.
And everyone who underwent this experiment started having a 48 hour cycle instead of 24 hours. : 36 hours of continuous activity and between 12 and 14 hours of sleep.
The cave experiment that sparked interest from governments and NASA
As the same interview revealed, Michel Siffre began receiving endless offers after his impressive discovery at the exit of the cave.
For example, the French army gave him “significant funding” to analyze how to reproduce the activity of a soldier in a waking state.
The French Ministry of Defense also contacted him, because it had launched a nuclear submarine program and wanted to study how the health of passengers could be affected during long submarine missions.
Even the JAR wanted to collaborate with Siffre, to continue to analyze the effects on astronauts who go on long-term space missions.
This is how he was able to carry out his second major project: The Frenchman entered a cave again, but this time in the United States, in the Midnight Cave in Texas. The idea was to spend six months inside and study “the effects of aging on psychological time.”
“My plan was to do an experiment every ten or fifteen years to see if there were any changes in the way my brain perceived time.” said.
The man remained a total of 205 days in the dark and without a watch . There he had 36 hours of continuous wakefulness and 12 hours of sleep.
“I couldn’t tell the difference between those long days and days that were only twenty-four hours long. “Sometimes I would sleep two hours or eighteen hours, and I couldn’t tell the difference.”
Continuous: “I think it’s an experience we can all appreciate. It’s the problem of psychological time. It’s the problem of humans. What is time? “We don’t know.”
Source: Latercera
I’m Rose Brown , a journalist and writer with over 10 years of experience in the news industry. I specialize in covering tennis-related news for Athletistic, a leading sports media website. My writing is highly regarded for its quick turnaround and accuracy, as well as my ability to tell compelling stories about the sport.
