On April 24, the fifteen volunteers of the Deep Time experiment, an initiative of the Institute for Human Adaptation (France), came out of a cave, which aims to learn how humans adapt to conditions in which spatial and temporal references are lost.
For forty days, the participants in this unusual experiment were totally isolated from the world in a cave in the French Pyrenees under extreme conditions: at an average temperature of 10 ° C, with a relative humidity of 100%, without receiving sunlight and, of course , in the total absence of contact with friends and family. The volunteers, seven men and seven women led by the explorer Christian Clot, had to extract the water from a depth of 45 meters and generate electricity through a pedal system.
After the voluntary confinement, many of the members of the expedition claim to have lost track of time, an especially relevant fact since it is one of the objectives of the research: to understand the difference between the perception of time and reality . “During certain events, our perception of time is altered: it can pass very quickly or very slowly, and this does not depend on reality or on every second that passes,” they explain on the web. “What happens then? How to find the sense of time? What are the connections between cognitive and biological time? And between perceived time and normative time, that of our clocks? ”.
In addition to this more basic knowledge, the researchers hope to be able to offer better conditions to submarine crews, miners, drilling machine operators or even future explorers of the Moon and Mars, who would also experience interruptions in a 24-hour day.
A useful experiment?
During the confinement, the scientists monitored data such as sleep patterns, body temperature or the behavior of the participants, who have also been subjected to cognitive tests before and after entering the cave.
Some researchers outside the project are skeptical of it, since, for example, the absence of a control group with which to compare the data obtained can lead to biases.
