It could be a (light) episode of Black Mirror, but Michel Siffre in fact isolated himself in a cave, 130 meters below the surface, without light, and without contact with the outside world. The curious man tried to understand how the lack of light and sense of time would affect his body.
Humans are beings of routine, guided by the hours of the day and oriented by the common fluctuations of sunlight. For these reasons, Michel Siffre sought to understand how we truly feel time, isolating himself from the entire world for two months. The year was 1962.
Now 85 years old, the then French geologist got rid of his wristwatch, equipped himself with a flashlight and lived, for 63 days, 130 meters below the surface, in the Scarasson trench, in the French Alps.
The objective of the adventure was to study the glacier, but it ended up becoming something more curious, at least for ordinary mortals: understanding how the absence of external signs that reminded us that it was night and day could affect biological rhythms. The curious man ate and slept only when his body told him to, instead of following the schedules that the world normally follows.
In fact, Michel Siffre managed to experience a series of very interesting discoveries about how humans react to the fact of living without any information about time – without clocks, calendars or sunlight. In 1962, the French geologist realized that the body has its own clock, a science currently called “chronobiology”.
An idea came to me – an idea that became the idea of my life. I decided to live like an animal, without a watch, in the dark, without knowing the time.
Instead of studying the caves, I ended up studying time. Yes, I invented a simple scientific protocol. I placed a team at the entrance to the cave. I decided that I would call them when I woke up, when I ate and before I went to sleep. My team had no right to call me, so I would have no idea what time it was outside.
Michel Siffre shared, in 2008, with Cabinet Magazine, revealing that, “without knowing it”, he created the field of human chronobiology.
What are the conclusions of this “study”?
As New Scientist recalled in 2018, this “study” would never be allowed today. However, it revealed some interesting conclusions about how we perceive time.
Under negative temperatures and extremely high humidity, Siffre spent two months “reading, writing and doing research” in the cave, while daydreaming about his future, as read in LADBible, which recently recalled this story.
As shared by himself, the geologist studied himself, carrying out two tests each time he called his team to the surface. These consisted of measuring the pulse and doing a “psychological test”.
I had to count from 1 to 120, at a rate of one digit per second. With this test we made a great discovery: it took me five minutes to count to 120. In other words, I psychologically experienced five real minutes as if it were two.
Explained Michel Siffre, pointing out a surprising discovery about the result of living without temporal cues: “My psychological time had been compressed by a factor of two.”
Michel Siffre in the cave, where he experienced the lack of awareness of time, weighing himself down. Source: Cabinet Magazine (2008)
Corroborating the feeling of “slowing down” of time he experienced, the Frenchman only realized this reality when his colleagues informed him that the day had finally arrived to end the experience. At this point, he believed he still had an entire month left.
The geologist had already delved, for several decades, into the disconnect between psychological time and a real clock, and created his own theory about why this had happened to him in the cave.
I believe that when we are surrounded by night – the cave was completely dark, with only one lamp – our memory does not capture time. We forget. After a day or two, we don't remember what we did a day or two before.
The only things that change are when you wake up and when you go to bed. Plus, it's all black. It's like a long day.
Shared.
Underground adventures helped NASA
Since the 63 days he spent below the surface were not enough, Michel subsequently isolated himself for half a year. In this experiment, he found that, without time signals, people adapted to a 48-hour cycle instead of the 24-hour cycle we are used to.
These conclusions were so relevant that NASA used the results of Siffre's experiments to help astronauts. After all, they had already reported similar short-term memory problems after being isolated from external temporal references.
