Could You Cope Without Natural Light For 40 Days?

The Deep Time project saw 15 volunteers sign up to spend over month in a cave beneath the Pyrenees with no access to natural light or clocks. Most of them want to go back…

- Christian Clot

FIRST OFF, WHY DID YOU WANT TO DO THIS?

Our main aim is to study adaptation – how we adapt to new situations, new environments or events. Being in the UK or France, we’re used to having an easy life, in a way. We have less knowledge about how we can suddenly change our way of doing things. We saw that with COVID-19, of course – suddenly we had to change a lot of things. It was hard for a lot of people. Many people were completely lost in this situation and some even lost track of time. People were telling us, “I don’t remember if I have to eat or if I’ve already eaten, or what I have to do tomorrow.”

I figured that we had to build an experiment to study this sense of time. the Deep Time project is the result – putting some people in a cave with no outside contact. No sunlight, no clocks.

DID YOU KNOW WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN?

Yeah, we had some information from similar experiments, mainly by Michel Siffre in the 1960s and 1970s in France. We knew that we’d experience some change of time.

But we also had information from experiments like Mars-500 [an experiment that simulated the isolation of a long-term space mission]. But the participants in that knew it was a simulation, so it became like a game – a puzzle you try to solve and not something that makes you think, “Okay, if I had to live here for my whole life, what would I do?” That’s why we came up with the idea of going into a cave.

WHAT WERE THE FIRST FEW DAYS LIKE?