Around 15 volunteers are spending 40 days in a cave in Ariège in the south of France. They are studying the effects of long-term isolation on the human brain.
Without phones, watches, or any device that could tell time, eight men and seven women will be spending 40 days isolated in a large cave. Named ‘Deep Time’, the experiment is the brainchild of Franco-Swiss explorer, Christian Clot who is even one of the volunteers to stay in the cave.
Clot is the founder of the Human Adaptation Institute. The Covid-19 pandemic and the way it impacted people’s lives inspired him. People forced to spend long periods of time in isolation. We have no idea of how this would affect our lives in the short or long-term.
All of the volunteers are equipped with sensors allowing a dozen scientists to follow them from the surface.
“This experiment is the world’s first,” said Professor Etienne Koechlin, director of the Cognitive and Computational Neurosciences Laboratory at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.
“Until now, all missions of this type focused on the study of the physiological rhythms of the body, but never on the impact of this type of temporal rupture on the cognitive and emotional functions of the human being.”
Participants will need to adapt to the lack of natural lights and the constant 12-degree Celsius temperature. Plus, the 95% humidity of the cave. Furthermore, they also have to generate their own electricity using a pedal boat system and draw the water they need from 45 meters deep.
“Losing time is the greatest disorientation there is, and it is this aspect that the Deep Time mission wants to better understand,” the Deep Time official website reads.
One of the volunteers, Arnaud Burel, a 29-year-old biologist agreed to participate out of a curiosity. He wishes to experience a complete ‘phone off’ and disconnect himself from worldly obligations. Burel agreed that spending 40 days in a cave with 14 strangers will require a lot of communication.
The Deep Time mission began on March 14 until April 22nd, if everything goes according to plan. For more information on the project, check out the official website of the project.
Source: Oddity Central, Christian Clot