Instant Genius - What happens to you after 40 days with no natural light?

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

Around two months ago, a group of 15 people – scientists, explorers and medics – travelled deep into a cave in the south of France. The expedition descended to a point so deep that natural light could not reach them, and there the team stayed for 40 days and 40 nights without clocks, phones or anyway of telling the time. The project’s goal was to understand what happens to our brains and bodies when we’re deprived of an external measure of time and they hoped to discover how a group of people could adapt to such an extreme situation. Just two weeks ago, that team emerged from the cave, and Christian Clot, the expedition’s leader and the designer of the DEEP TIME mission, joins editor Daniel Bennett on this week's episode of the Science Focus Podcast to talk about what the experiment discovered, how the expedition changed him and what ultimately happened when the team returned to the surface. Let us know what you think of the Science Focus Podcast by filling out our survey. By submitting it, you enter the prize draw to win one of seven £100 Voucher Express Gift Cards. It should take no more than five minutes. UK residents only. Full T&Cs. Take part in the survey Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Sticher, RSS, Overcast Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Why realistic humanoid robots need to learn to lip-sync The psychology of the sea shanty: Why work songs are such earworms Mental health and your brain: What happens when it goes wrong Why you can’t multitask (and why that’s a good thing) How to maximise your motivation, according to a neuroscientist Prof John Drury: The psychology of lockdowns Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This podcast is sponsored by name, audio, and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as

the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Dan Bennett, the editor of BBC Science Focus magazine. Around two months ago, a group of 15 people travelled deep into a cave in the south of France.

The expedition descended to a point so deep that natural light could not reach them. And there they stayed for 40 days and 40 nights about clocks, phones or any way of telling the time. The project's goal was to understand what happens to our brains and our bodies when we're deprived of an external measure of time, and they hoped to discover how a group of people could adapt to such an extreme situation. Well, just two weeks ago, that team emerged from the cave. In Christian Clow, the expedition's leader and the designer of the Deep Time Mission joins me today to talk about what the experiment discovered,

how the expedition changed him, and what ultimately happen when the team returned to the surface. But just before we get into that, I quickly want to bring your attention to our listener survey. We want your feedback so we can make a better podcast for you. To take part, head to bit.ly, that's bit.l-y-focus survey. There's a chance you could win a £100 gift card for taking part. Now, on with the podcast. First, here's Christian explaining why he thought spending over a month in a cave with no natural light or clocks would be a good idea.

Firstly, our main aim is to study adaptation, how human can adapt themselves to new kind of situations, a new environment. All things that suddenly hit us and we have to find solutions in a way. unfortunately or fortunately i don't know anyway we will have more on more of these situations when things will completely change and mainly for us as european being in uk or france as because we are used to have an easy life in a way for most of us and we less we have less knowledge about how we can suddenly change completely our way of doing things when suddenly things change and we saw that with the COVID-19, of course. Suddenly, we had to change a lot of things.

We were locked down on how we live and we were. It was a bit hard for a lot of people, and we saw that during the last year, and we had a study about it called COVID-A-Dapt, where we saw that a lot of people were completely lost in this situation and lost the track of time, in fact. And people were telling us, I don't remember if I have to eat,

if I have already eaten what I have to do for tomorrow. So they were a bit lost in the situation. So mainly I figure that because we were specialized about that attention, we had this time issue situations, that we had to try to build an experimentation about this idea of time, specifically time. And the deep time project is a bit the idea of that. I mean, putting some people in a cave without anything to go outside and no, no light, sunlight, no sunlight, no clock, as you said, no watches, no, all these kind of things.

And yeah, it was pretty amazing. So, so before you went in, did you have any hypotheses? Did you have any ideas as to what might happen if you sent it this, you know, was it 15 people? people. Did you have any theories about what you might see? Yeah, we had. Firstly, because we, of course, had some information from other kind of experiences, mainly the French Michel Sifre, who did some experiences in the 60s and 70s in France and other people in Germany also. And they tried to live in cave without time, but they were alone. And so they had

nice experiences and they saw two things. Some of them had a rhythm a bit different like 25 hours per day mainly. Others had 48 hours. They lived like in 48 hours instead of 24.

So we knew that we will explain some change of time, some change of rhythm. But we had other information like we've the experimentation Mars 500.

Yeah, you know that. But again, all that wasn't really interesting because the new one thing is that it was experimentation, it was just to try to test things.

And they didn't really live a real environment, which is really important because when you are in a building, in a you know it's experimentation on your brain, know that it's just a game in a way. When you go to normal environment,

in a real environment, you suddenly try to find solution to live there and to install yourself, and to think, okay, if I had to live there for my whole life, what would I do? And that's the idea of a cave. So we mixed the Michel Sifre experimentation and mass 500 different kind of experimentation

to try and to build a new kind of project in real environment, but without time. So to give people an idea of what you were stepping into, so you had these, I've seen some of the photos, there are these kind of cathedral-like caves, huge, beautiful, beautiful for a day, maybe, but I tell you out for 40 days, these beautiful caves.

So what were your living? conditions like? Well, the Long Reef Cave is a huge cave. I mean, it's really amazing. How big is it? And we were able to walk inside and to visit the cave. And it was really, really beautiful. We'll talk maybe a bit about that. So mainly we had three spaces, three different places in the cave. One was the base camp. And we had a nice place with a cooking stove and enough food and all to have some fun and nice time in a way. So it was really our rest area and the place we were living mostly during the day. Other space, 500 meters far from here, was a place where we were sleeping with tent. We each have a tent and sleeping bag and all facilities.

So it was our space. We were alone. Each of us were alone in the tent. So it was really the place where we had some time for ourselves and to sleep. Other places were for science. So we had a little building built inside the cave to run some science experimentation. And the fourth places was, of course, the cave itself. I mean, all the space we had in the cave, it's a two-level cave.

The first level is where we're living. And second level, 90 meters down inside the earth. We had a nice other places where we had some... exploration time. So all these species were places we were living in and walking in and expanse. It was really amazing about that. So I want to get to some of the things you learn. But first, I just wonder, how did you feel when you were kind of, you know, you thought this experiment, I presume you thought, well, if I'm going to send 14 other people, I better go in there myself. What was it like when you were walking in and going to go and going?

in for the first few days. Really amazing and disturbing experience. I mean, the first night was really disturbing. I mean, you wake up in the middle of, I don't know, in the middle of the night, but the night or not, we didn't know that.

It was just fully dark because in the cave you don't have any light. So, you wake up and first thing I want to do is just to check your smartphone to see you know what time is it. And, whoa, I don't have this. So did I did I slept enough? How many times did I slept? It's impossible to know that. So you just

have suddenly to accept that you don't have to try to understand time, but you just try to understand your own feeling. Did I feel good? Did I feel sleepy or not not sleepy anymore? Or can I wake up? And so for the first few nights, we need to adjust and to try to accept that, okay, I have just one information. It's my feeling, my emotion, and I have to listen to them. And it's really disturbing because we're not used to do that in a normal life. It was amazing. And we were 15, so each of us was feeling the same

and trying to adjust to this kind of conditions. And we talk a lot. Oh, what time is it for you? I don't know, I just slept enough and I want to go to sleep again. I want to eat. And everyone of us was just trying to adjust. And finally, it took us at least five, six days, I mean, considering an outside time to adjust to this. Plus, we had a lot of things to do.

I mean, we had to learn all what about a game and to organize our camp and organize our system. And it was really, really huge what we had to do. And suddenly, after mainly 10 days, we were so tired. so nothing left, nothing more happened. We were just, wow, what are we doing here? And again, it took us five, six days where we didn't did anything, in fact. We were just trying to do something,

but nothing happened. And we were completely in different rhythm. And some were sleeping when some were awake, and we had all, every time, every single month, someone awake. And I completely crazy. And then again, after six, seven, eight days, we decided we had to change things. And we figure some goals and we decided to work together a bit more.

And then again, it changed. And we organized our time and it was much easier, in fact. That's really interesting. So you had these, like, you had these phases where you went from, you know, the initial excitement to that's disconnected and then

it started to sink back up again I just want so with the lights in your sleeping area were they sort of personal so you you could

there was no sort of system of artificial light you know set at a certain time you just had your own little lamps and this is that

how it work and then I suppose in your in your food area you would have an always on light so that people yeah we had a big light

in the food area, which we can light on or off. It was a decision we made altogether. And all the rest of the time, or in the rest of the cave, we had just our small personal light. No more. So it was really amazing for that.

And did you find, again, just to stress, obviously you're going to analyze all the data, but from your time in there, did you find that your cycles eventually really synced up? Because obviously, there's a good body of research about some people are larks, i.e., they like to wake up early in the morning, and that's their production. Some people are owls. They like to be at night.

Did you see any of that happen in the case? Yes, no way, yes. Well, of course, we all had our own rhythm, and some were sleeping a lot. Some were sleeping only some few hours. But I was, for example, feeling that my way was normal. I mean, after some adjustment, I was thinking, okay, it's mainly, roughly, it must be 24, 25 a day, and I sleep enough. Usually I sleep only four hour, four and a half, and it's enough for me. So I was feeling that I was in this kind of cycles, and the rest of the day I was working, and it was normal.

And I thought really in my head, okay, I have a normal reef now. But at the end of the experimentation, when people came and told us, hey, guys, it's finished, you spend 40 days in the cave. It was just so, oh, how possible is it? I just feel like 30 days, so 10 days less. So, obviously, we had a completely different van outside. And it's something that was never observed like that in any kind of other experiences until now. So we have not analyzed what happened for all of us and why we had these huge different.

between our time and normal time. And all 15 we were there finally adapt the rhythm to spend time all together. And that's the main, it's a more interesting thing here is that it's less our biology who finally dictates our rhythm, but the idea of being together on spending time together So we needed two things. We need it to follow our own rhythm and to spend enough time sleeping and spending time for us as human being, less to have time for the group on doing things together. So I think it's one of the reasons we spend the average of 32 hours per day.

So yeah, that's something we have to analyze now. It's really interesting to see that. So what I wanted to ask next then, just lastly on your experience of the cave itself, we're all very familiar with how time can be very fluid, especially when we have a sense of what they call flow, when we're busy doing something we love or a hobby or making some Lego or writing or something, you sense time passes differently.

Did that kind of amplify in the cave where also you have no context and you were doing work, you would say we were doing exploration, you were doing studies. Did you find that it was disoriented? That's amazing for that, because you're right. In the normal life, we always think, oh, it's a short time, it's a long time, when it's the same second in reality. In Dave, we didn't have this kind of sensation. We were more thinking we were always in the right time,

because we didn't have this clock time. normal clock time. We couldn't really compare the feeling we had as person and the reality of time. So we never thought that. We always thought, it's the right time. I spend the right time thing and to spend time to read and to chat with someone. And we never thought, is it one hour or two hours? It was just the right time.

That was an amazing sensation. And in fact, I feel, and I know a lot of my colleagues feel the same, much more free in the cave because I didn't have to follow a time. I had just follow my time and it's amazingly strong as a feeling. And yeah, I'm curious, how was your mood?

Because I think from what I read, everyone seemed very happy by the end and actually there were reports and there were some people saying, oh, I need to go back, finish my research. But how did you feel your mood being affected by, you know, there's a lot of factors,

but, you know, not having any contact with the world, not having a phone, always pinging at you, and also, like you say, being able to just immerse yourself in your own schedule, your own interests.

Well, it was in a way much easier. I mean, well, I had a, I was in charge of the group, so I had a lot of things to think and else, but I know that finally at the end of the day, I had much less things to, to think and to do each day than in the normal life. I mean, as you said, no email, no phone call, no recall,

you schedule telling you, hey, you have to go there, go quick, please, you're late. And all these kind of things was away and really far away. And it's amazing how fast you just feel nicely with this kind of situation. It's much more hard to go back to this idea and to have a game. I'm on phone corner less. And I think that each of us, but one maybe, but mainly each of us, feel much more free and much more peaceful inside the cave.

And it's why at the end, when we had this information, guys, it's finished now. You have to go outside. A lot of us were thinking, would I really go outside? Maybe it's better to stay here. And yeah, it's not a long-term thinking because just at the very second we went outside, for real, when we saw the sun and out and everything else, it was, yeah, it's okay, I like it also. Did you, have you taken anything with you from that time? You know, have you maybe, you know, kept your phone a bit further away? or have you tried to change how you schedule your time since you've left?

Yeah, in a way, yes. It's, well, you know, as a company manager, I had very quickly to go back to my normal schedule. It took me like more than one week before I was able again to open a newspaper, for example. I wasn't able to really read information. and I try to put my phone away as much as I can. I can't do as much as I would like. I try because I really feel that, I don't know,

I don't know for now, but for sure I know we have to change something in our life. I mean, I saw these people not prepared at all to leave without time and not prepared at all to live in a cave at 10 degrees Celsius, that's 100% humidity, which is quite hard. And I saw them and I think, wow. they're happy. And more happy than a lot of people I saw in my normal life. So I know it's not a way to live like that in the cave.

Of course not. And I know I like also being outside. Well, it's not a nice time for that with the COVID-19, but to go in a museum, theater, and to spend time with others and to have social life, all these kind of things we love, of course. But I think we need a mix. Now we need to think much more of what is our time, what is what we're doing each day.

We think we have some equipment, some devices. Normally here to help us to save time. But at the end of the day, we know that that took us a lot of time. So we need to adjust now. I feel really that. I don't know how. I don't have a solution right now, but I know we have to adjust that. That's really fascinating because, you know, like,

you were interested in overall, the most interesting thing you were interested, adaptability, how well people adapt. And it sounds like you adapted extraordinary quickly. It wasn't necessarily easy, but it didn't take a huge amount of time. And in the end, you know, perhaps with some exceptions altogether well,

were you surprised by how quickly a group were able to sort of just adapt to that new world? Yeah, fully. Yeah, really. I didn't, I didn't, forfeit, it would be so quick, really. I read, of course, everything was while all the experimentation in the 60s, and I saw that they experienced a lot of pain to adjust and to adapt themselves. But the experience also some trouble, mountain trouble. So I was really afraid, in fact, I was preparing myself a lot to help people and to think, well, maybe I would just fall down and my guys will fall down to

and I was really focused on if I see something, I have to immediately do something to help them and else. And no, obviously, after five, six days, everybody was fine. And of course

we had some little issues sometimes when people felt so that suddenly oh, it's a bit long, I want to change things. I don't want to be around or I don't want to again with the group and we had some things like that, like a normal, normal thing, but really small in fact. And I really think now, I'm pretty sure of two things.

The first thing is that the group is the best system to synchronize people together. I mean, it's amazing, how strong the group is. And much more than a group, the diversity inside the group is really, really important. I build a group with normal people in normal life, but with really different way of thinking, they're all different, and they came from all social systems and different places in France. So they are all really different.

And so that each time we had a problem or something happened, someone has a solution and offer a solution. And if everybody is ready to listen to others, and finally it's easier. really, it's the first time I see that. I mean, each time we had an argument, in just half an hour it was solved, much quicker than in the normal life.

So really, I saw that a group when he decided to cooperate and work together and had enough diversity to find different kinds of solutions, that's nothing that he can do. And that's really interesting, because I was wondering, so did you build this like an expedition? So did you sort of have applicants?

and you created a special group, maybe special, it's wrong way, but you created a group based on that kind of thing that you were trying to build the most successful, give the mission the most biggest chance of success. Is that how you selected? Yes, well, it's always the difficulty when you build a group like that.

I mean, it's, again, normal people from every side of society and else, but of course they are all volunteers and all prepared in a way to leave this kind of situation. It's not like people who suddenly hit by a tsunami or else where they don't have any preparation. I prepared them a bit. It's a month I talk to them and I chat to them.

So, of course, it's not just normal people. They are a bit prepared for this kind of situation. And they are mostly also. I chose for this experimentation, people, they were all ready to collaborate. I think that's something really important. It's not, there were nobody just thinking, oh, I'm better alone. I don't want you.

I don't want to help you. No, it's not like that. They were all ready to collaborate. Yet, you know that when you are tired, when things are difficult, when you didn't eat enough, you can love collaborate to other people sometimes to just bored and you're not really happy to help other people. So, of course, you always need to adjust. But anyway, of course, it's a bias. Everybody was ready to collaborate.

As a scientist experimentation, it's a bias. I thought for the first time we do that, I can't just put people ready to fight, you know. Yeah, yeah. That's really interesting. That's fascinating because that's similar, isn't it? I suppose, with the... That's a very sort of something we find at time and time.

I'm again, for instance, in Apollo, I was reading about the Apollo missions and how they recruited the astronauts. And it was very much about collectivist language, people who said, you know, when they said, how would you solve this problem? Their answer was, well, we would do this and we would look to this. And they particularly picked, I think, people from farming backgrounds, I think, because they had that sense of we move as once. That's really interesting that, you know, you see it time and time again. In fact, we learn, I learned a lot from polar expedition. And even for the selection, for example, I use a lot of what they do for polar expedition

and what they do for Antarctica. And of course, also for the moon expedition, they prepare enough for 2024 in the state. So we pick a lot of different kinds of things and I try to build a way to select my people in the same way. And it worked, in fact. It worked well. And I was amazed, really amazed.

how much we finally spend the time of 40 days without any strong arguments. And really, of course, it's some work. You need to be ready to discuss at the very moment you see something happen. Before even it happened, you have to go on to discuss and two separate people and to chat with them. And finally, it's occurrence work. But anyway, at the end of the day, we saw that we were happy inside. And that was really nice to see that.

And then it's important to say, isn't it? You went, it wasn't just, you know, it wasn't just, you were, it wasn't about the quality to just, you took tons of data. So you tell you a bit about what sort of things you were measuring. I know there was lots of samples of different things. What were you, what data have you gathered to, to now study for the next? Well, we have mainly three kind of data, roughly. first group of data was biology.

So all obvious biology, inside temperature, heart tissue, symbols of blood, all these kind of things we usually do in this kind of situation. Of course, how you sleep with some EEG machine and else. So yeah, that was biology and normal biology. Second kind of item was cognition. And we had a lot of exercises about cognition, about decision-making. We were using EEG also to measure brain issue. And we did before just after going outside the cave, some MRI,

which of course we all have inside the cave. But we just, just the day before entering the cave on the day, just after getting outside, we were inside MRI to have the idea of what changed inside the brain, the plasticity we had in the brain. So this will be very, very interesting because I think it's the first time we had this kind of experimentation just after this kind of cave experimentation. Of course, we never know everything, so I don't know. I think it's the first time.

And yeah, and third kind of thing was mainly emotions. And we tried to really figure what were the emotions and the evolution. of all emotions, sensitivity, how I feel okay, or I feel other people, what I feel in the morning, in the evening, am I sad or happy? All these kind of small emotions that I think are really important when you have to take a decision because we are pretty sure that each kind of decisions

are made before by emotions because you feel an emotion, you take a decision. And so we need to understand much more emotions. which is really hard, in fact, because we don't have specific devices to measure emotions. So we have skin information to see if people are sweating or not, if you're heart beating, are accelerating on else. These are obvious idea of emotions, but of course it's not enough. So we had a lot of questionaries about feeling their head and how they feel the situation

and all these kind of things. And the fourth maybe leverage of information was, of course, all information about the cave itself, temperature, humidity. We chose also a cave, I chose a cave because of the wonderfulness you have inside the cave and in a normal environment. And I'm pretty sure about wonderfulness, the feeling you're happy with seeing your environment and interacting with your environment is really important when we talk about adopt. Yeah, yeah, I suppose because like Mars 500, they put you, obviously it will be similar to what Mars is like, but they do just put you in a capsule. So you're not, you're not on an adventure. So there's not that, you know, if you look at the polar explorers, you know, they were going somewhere and there's the wonder. And that's interesting. You know, I saw the eyes of each of them. We had this second level. So we had to go down, we were open and special equipment and we go down or you have some lake. We have. We have. We have some little oats inside the lake, and it was really, really beautiful. And I saw the eyes of each of them coming back to this exploration. And I think, okay, this is real.

It's a reality. I mean, because they are so happy, they feel something so strong, they want to go back again. So they have a reason to be here. They have a reason to focus on the next day and after. So this idea of wonderfulness, I saw that in a lot of my expeditions and different kind of situations. because you have something that please you, that make you happy. It's a strong reason to fight again and to pursue on your life, on the situation, even if the situation is hard.

That's really true. I never considered it with these expeditions before. And then just quickly moving on. So you've got this data. What's next now? What's the next phase? Now you've gathered all that huge amount of data. where we have thousands of data we have to analyze.

So we have a different scientific group who took all the information. They began to be analyzed. We have at least 12 different team working on the data right now. So it will be a hope. We will have some information, I hope, in some months in autumn. I hope we have. And of course, we need to go again in the field.

So we have free project now. Of course, we have to do a deep time again, so a second one at least, to just check if we have the same thing happening or if it will be competitive difference, which will be. And I hope some other teams will work also on this kind of situation. So I'm really fully open to help other team to work on this kind of experimentation. This will be for other groups of people. And with the same group of people, the very same group of people who were in the cave, we will go in some different kind of environments until the end of the year and in 2022. We will go in the rainforest, desert, polar area to check if it's the environment

or is the strongest system to synchronize or if it's the people. and they have the same way of adapting themselves, whatever the environment is, or if for each environment, you have a different way of adapting yourself. So it will be very interesting because it's the first time the same group of people will go in different kind of environment, and it will be really interesting about the brain issue.

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Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music just as the artist intended discover more at name audio.com did you know if your windows are bare indoor temperatures can go up 20 degrees

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