{"id":11401,"date":"2024-05-01T20:06:36","date_gmt":"2024-05-01T20:06:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/used82.com\/?p=11401"},"modified":"2024-05-01T20:06:36","modified_gmt":"2024-05-01T20:06:36","slug":"man-who-lived-in-cave-with-no-concept-of-time-ended-up-experiencing-unbelievable-effect-on-his-body-clock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/used82.com\/?p=11401","title":{"rendered":"Man who lived in cave with no concept of time ended up experiencing unbelievable effect on his body clock"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Michel Siffre is a man who NASA were taking notes from, so listen up<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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If NASA are taking notes of your wacky experiment, you know you\u2019ve made it in the science world.<\/p>\n

Michel Siffre, 85, really managed to make a name for himself among other boffins after conducting a groundbreaking investigation into how humans experience time by cutting himself off from the entire\u00a0world<\/a>\u00a0for two months in 1962.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s dedication to the cause, then there is this guy.<\/p>\n

Inspired by the\u00a0space race<\/a>, the French explorer, adventurer and scientist removed his wrist watch and confined himself 130 metres below the surface in the abyss of Scarasson, a\u00a0mountain<\/a>\u00a0in the Ligurian Alps, over six decades ago.<\/p>\n

Why Siffre did it<\/h2>\n

Armed with only a torch, the then-23-year-old set up camp as best he could next to a glacier in a bid to find out how the absence of external cues reminding us it\u2019s night and day could affect\u00a0biological rhythms<\/a>.<\/p>\n

With a particular interest in how the lack of light would affect him, Siffre\u00a0slept<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0ate<\/a>\u00a0only when his body told him to rather than keeping to the rigid timings the rest of the world follow because society says so.<\/p>\n

The now-85-year-old lived below the surface completely alone for a whopping 63 days in the name of science \u2013 and he emerged, albeit with severe sensitivity to daylight, victorious.<\/p>\n

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Michel Siffre emerging from the cave after two months in 1962. (Keystone\/Getty Images)<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

That\u2019s because when Siffre became something of a cave dweller, he made a series of incredible findings regarding how humans respond to living with zero information about time \u2013 with no clocks, calendars or sunshine to remind him.<\/p>\n

He discovered that our bodies have their own clocks, which is now known as chronobiology.<\/p>\n

All at the age of 23 \u2013 a phase in our lives which most people reserve for binge drinking and\u00a0one night stands<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What living without time was like<\/h2>\n

Speaking of his landmark expedition, Siffre\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0Cabinet Magazine in 2008: \u201cThis idea came to me\u2014this idea that became the idea of my life. I decided to live like an\u00a0animal<\/a>, without a watch, in the dark, without knowing the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of studying caves, you ended up studying time. Yes, I invented a simple scientific protocol.<\/p>\n

\u201cI put a team at the entrance of the cave. I decided I would call them when I woke up, when I ate, and just before I went to sleep. My team didn\u2019t have the right to call me, so that I wouldn\u2019t have any idea what time it was on the outside.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout knowing it, I had created the field of human chronobiology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite having \u2018bad equipment\u2019, only a \u2018small camp\u2019 to live in, dealing with\u00a0below freezing temperatures<\/a>\u00a0and extremely high humidity, Siffre managed to keep his head in the game \u2013 or so he thought.<\/p>\n

The scientist says he passed the time over the two months by \u2018reading<\/a>, writing and doing research\u2019 in the cave, while also daydreaming about his future often.<\/p>\n

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The scientist explained the landmark discovery he made during his first underground expedition. (PHILIPPE DESMAZES\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The effects<\/h2>\n

He explained that he kept tabs on himself by conducting two tests each time he called to his team on the surface, which were\u00a0taking his pulse<\/a>\u00a0and carrying out his own \u2018psychological test<\/a>\u2018.<\/p>\n

Siffre explained: \u201cI had to count from 1 to 120, at the rate of one digit per second. With that 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 though they were two.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although you may think this is probably an easy mistake to make while living in a cave for two months, it was in fact an extraordinary discovery about the effect of living without time prompts.<\/p>\n

Siffre was essentially experiencing everything twice as slow as they actually were \u2013 so if all you people who wish \u2018time would slow down\u2019 really want to experience it, it sounds like you just need to move into a cave for a couple of months.<\/p>\n

The Frenchman only came to this stark realisation when his colleagues informed him that the day had finally arrived for him to finish the experiment \u2013 which came as quite a shock, as he believed he had an entire month left of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy psychological time had compressed by a factor of two,\u201d Siffre said.<\/p>\n

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\"The<\/div>\n

The Frenchman incredibly went back to cave dwelling for a six-month period in the US in 1972. (Patrick Durand\/Sygma via Getty Images)<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Siffre\u2019s theories<\/h2>\n

He explained that he had been investigating the disconnect between psychological time and an actual clock for forty years and had came up with his own theory about the reason why this happened to him.<\/p>\n

Siffre continued: \u201cI believe that when you are surrounded by night\u2014the cave was completely dark, with just a\u00a0light bulb<\/a>\u2014your memory does not capture the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou forget. After one or two days, you don\u2019t remember what you have done a day or two before. The only things that change are when you wake up and when you go to bed. Besides that, it\u2019s entirely black. It\u2019s like one long day.\u201d<\/p>\n

But even after all that, the 63-day streak holed up inside a cave wasn\u2019t enough for Siffre and he decided to head back into the darkness a decade later, but this time, he\u2019d be having a six-month stay in a cave in\u00a0Texas<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After organising dozens of other underground time isolation experiments in the ten years in between, the Nice-born adventurer decided to isolate himself for half of a year to see what happened to his internal clock.<\/p>\n

He again made another incredible discovery, as he found that without time cues, people adjusted to a 48-hour cycle rather than the 24-hour one we\u2019re all used to.<\/p>\n

NASA<\/a>\u00a0used the findings from Siffre\u2019s experiments to help astronauts who had reported experiencing similar short-term memory problems after being isolated from external time references.<\/p>\n

Like I said \u2013 he\u2019s a bit of a legend in the scientific world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michel Siffre is a man who NASA were taking notes from, so listen up If…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"views":60,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11401\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/used82.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}