The scientist who decided to live in a cave “in the dark without knowing time” and what it showed about our relationship with time

The mystery of Siffre arose in connection with the so-called space race, as there was a well-known competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to conquer space.

In 1961, Soviet Yuri Gagarin became the first person to travel into space, orbiting the Earth for 108 minutes.

What would happen if people spent more time in space? How would this affect our sleep cycle?

To answer this question, Instead of traveling outside the planet, it went inside.

Siffre, who died on August 25 at the age of 85 in Nice, was a speleologistas scientists who study caves are known.

In 1962, at the age of just 23, he performed one of the most famous experiments in history human chronobiologya field he helped to found that is devoted to understanding the mechanisms of biological rhythms.

camping two months in a cave 130 meters deep, alone and with a miner’s lamp as the only source of illumination, which he used sparingly to prepare food, read and write in his diary.

“I decided to live like an animal, without a watch, in the dark, without knowing the time“, he explained in a 2008 interview with Cabinet magazine’s Joshua Foer.

Siffre conducted his experiment on an underground glacier in the Alps that he had discovered a year earlier.

“I stationed the team at the entrance of the cave. I decided to call them when I woke up, after I ate, and just before I went to sleep. My team had no right to call me so I didn’t know what time it was outside,” he explained.

In this way he succeeded in proving that people have “biological clock“.

Although it was a surprise to find that the watch It didn’t follow a 24-hour day.as often happens in our daily life.

During the eight weeks he remained in the cave, Siffre He ate and slept only when his body asked him to.

In addition to informing the surface team each time he did this, the scientist also performed two checks: took his pulse and counted from 1 to 120.

It was the other who led one of them the most amazing discoveries experiment.

The goal was for Siffre to count to 120, with each digit lasting one second, while his collaborators recorded the actual time.

This is how they realized that the scientist It follows a much slower time.

“It took me five minutes to count to 120. In other words, psychologically I lived five real minutes as if they were two.

This sense of time slowing down was confirmed when Siffre finally emerged from the cave.

Two months passed, but the scientist I was convinced that only one got through.

“My psych time was cut in half,” he noted.

Siffre’s findings suggested that without circadian rhythms Our bodies are guided by nature during sunrise and sunset and seem to have internal clocks that run roughly at 48 hour cycle.

This theory was reinforced by other experiments the French speleologist conducted during his more than 50-year career, using himself and others as test subjects.

After his “separation” in 1962—as he called it—he conducted five more cave experiments with volunteers (including a woman), each lasting three to six months.

Siffre noted that everyone eventually enters this 48-hour cycle.

“They had 36 hours of continuous activity followed by 12 to 14 hours of sleephe said.

“After this discovery, the French army gave me a lot of funding. They wanted me to analyze how it would be possible for a soldier to double his activity while awake,” he revealed to Cabinet magazine.

The French Ministry of Defense was also interested in the experiments for another reason: they had just started their nuclear submarine program and wanted to know the effects on the health of sailors on long missions.

They weren’t the only ones interested. Also American space agency NASAwanted to understand the effects of long-duration space missions.

Both financed Siffre’s second personal project, which in 1972, ten years after his first stay in a cave in the Alps, went back undergroundbut this time in the US and for much longer.

His goal was to pass six months at Midnight Cave near Del Rio, Texas.

“I was interested in studying 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,” he explained.

He also admitted that he wanted to clarify the question of why “every other person he put underground had a 48-hour sleep/wake cycle, except me.”

Finally in this experiment that ended up permanent 205 days (about 7 months), also entered a 48-hour cycle, but not regularly.

“I had thirty-six hours of continuous wakefulness followed by twelve hours of sleep. I couldn’t tell the difference between those long days and days that were only twenty-four hours long,” he said.

“Sometimes I slept two hours or eighteen hours and I couldn’t tell the difference.”

“I think that’s an experience we can all appreciate,” he concluded.

“It’s a psychological time problem, it’s a people problem. what is the time we don’t know“.

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