Mysterious Universe - 36.08 - MU Podcast - Free-Running | The Human Clock

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Welcome back to MU! This week we take a look at Why Time Flies by Alan Burdick and find out that even “official” time is a negotiated average built from clocks around the world. Then we move into the story of Michel Siffre, who removed himself from daylight, clocks, calendars, and ordinary human routine, and his cave experiments reveal just how quickly the body's internal rhythms can drift when they're cut loose from the outside world. Welcome to your Plus+ Extension, and thank you all for joining us on Plus+! Animals, along with all living things, are affected by cosmic rhythms and celestial cycles. Snails and crabs live by the tides, even in laboratories nowhere near the ocean. Cats with internal clocks that can be adjusted on command. Disappearing dogs that return without fail every Christmas. Biological clocks are nature's timing systems here to help regulate the behavior of all forms of life. From the simplest organism to man himself, and do so quite efficiently. Today we enjoy the 1970 book The Strange World of Animals and Pets by Vincent and Margaret Gaddis. Dedicated to all the pets, who rule us with an iron paw. Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation Mysteries of the Unexplained The Strange World of Animals and Pets Vincent and Margaret Gaddis as Forteans LinksPlus+ ExtensionThe extension of the show is EXCLUSIVE to Plus+ Members. To join. click HERE.Links Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Your playlist might get you through the workday, but have you ever wondered how your ancestors spent theirs? What work helped them build a life? How did they adapt as the world around them changed? With Ancestry, you can search Select Historical Occupational Records for free for a limited time and discover the stories behind the jobs in your family tree. You've got questions. We've got ancestors.

Search free until August 31st. Visit Ancestry.ca for details. Terms apply. This universe, season 36, episode 8. Today we're going to be talking about why time flies. And this is Alan Burdick from 2017. The subtitle is a mostly scientific investigation, and there is a lot of kind of dense scientific stuff in it. But I do want to leave some of it in there because it pertains to his theories on why time flies or doesn't fly.

So we'll start out with that. And then there's a couple cool stories in there, too, that you might have heard before, but maybe not. I'm Joe Hodgson. Joining me is Brandon Thomas. Yo, yo. How are you, sir? Yo, yo, yo. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Great. I did want to thank listener, Amber, also plus member, shout out. For sending in her stories about, well, today it was prophetic dreams. But also, do you want to tell the weird synchro that you had when you emailed her back? We have a huge synchro, and this is so cool. So, Amber, first of all, shout out. Again, thank you, Joe, for bringing this up.

Yes. So the synchro is that she reached out. She has an email that she wrote about maybe a possible, almost potential spontaneous combustion event that she had, which we are going to read in the extension. So sign up in the links below, guys, if you'd like to join us for more than one third of the content we put out in the links below, check it out. Because we were going to read her email in full, and it's an incredible story. So yes, I call her yesterday on the phone. We have an incredible conversation. She's eloquent.

She's a great writer, too. And that's what I love about the folks who read into us. I don't know if you've noticed this with most folks that read in. They're incredible writers. So a complimented her in a writing. We hit it off immediately. More of a nice to see you again, not a nice to meet you thing. And she talks about this incredible story about how this book called Mysteries of the Unexplained by Reader's Digest.

This thing came out in 1982. Everybody go check your bookshelves for it right now. It's an interestingly ubiquitous book for some reason. So she had this book since she was a kid. It was her mom's on her mom's bookshelf. She read all that stuff instead of NAPE, Drew, she's reading this Mysteries of the Unexplained, which has Bigfoot and spontaneous human combustion and all that kind of stuff in it. And that's what put it on a radar.

So she's been kind of interested or aware of spontaneous human combustion at a deep level. And then that, of course, carried over into a personal story, which we will share in the extension. And then in our conversation, find out that that exact book that she had, her mom ends up selling it a yard. yard cell, her and her husband meet, they move in together. He brings and adds to their book collect, you know, because now they have a combined book collection now that they live together, that book, not another one like it. The book, the very book his mom bought at her mom's yard sale, he now owns because they bought the same exact book. I had marker in it and everything from her. So this incredibly cool book, I then, of course, as I'm on the phone with her, walk over to the

Magic Library, knowing it's there, dude. I knew this fucking thing was there. I'd never seen it or heard about it in my life looked it up while we were talking walk over very bottom shelf very far end couldn't miss it it was it was that in a book end right boom pull it out there it is page 80 spontaneous human combustion i get off the phone with amber i tell her about you of course i go dude you know i'm calling joe right now she loved it so she said shout out so i called joe immediately and he then sends me a picture of mysteries of the unexplained that he found in his library as well tagged up from the guys. Immediately.

Like he walked, and how was your search for it? Was it a search? So it was weird because I was like, I got to look in a different spot when I don't normally look on it or look at. So I look up to the right upper shelf of my library and you said it was a bigger book, so I'm kind of scanning. Boom, it's right there. I go to take it out.

Like 10 books fall off the shelf. Yeah, I heard it. I haven't touched them, yeah, because I'm going to go look at what my shelf knocked off so I can find another interesting book. But yeah, we both have copies. she's got a copy. I mean, yeah, the whole thing was crazy. Insane. And that her husband brings this thing over that her mom bought, that her aunt or mom bought it her mom's yard sale. That was hers, that she poured over and remembered so fondly. And then they both then have this semi-spontaneous combustion event, which again, guys, check it out in the extension.

Sign up in the link. We're going to do that. So Amber's shout out. This has been such a cool thing, such a cool synchro. And that book's amazing. It's got tons of stuff in it. It was a crazy way to start off the day with Brandon's phone call for sure. But that book is great. It's a thicken. Yeah, it's got tons of shit. Yeah. I told my wife, I'm going to put it in my back pocket for, you know, those days when I'm like, what am I going to do for the show today? Yes, definitely. And I'll go in link a copy of it down in the show description. So we'll do that. Yes, why not? But yeah, before we get going on the story of time here, what do you have coming up in plus? Dude, so another freaking synchro.

So I'm looking around. I had a book pulled by Jenny Randles and Peter Howe, same as you, right? So I was grabbing one of the ones from the collection I found because you had one. Now, what I ended up doing was looking back there for some more books about, from Eric Norton, which was the Warren Smith pseudonym, but ended up finding this amazing book by this couple titled The Strange World of Animals and Pets. And chapter 8, which is what we're going to talk about in the extension, is titled Cosmic Cycles and Bioclox. So this is literally about time flying because it's talking about migratory patterns of birds and why those cycles exist, how birds starting in completely different places on the world know to migrate to one spot

and do it all within two days of each other no matter where they leave from. Turtles that migrate undersea river currents that hit an island in the middle of the Pacific that's only five miles wide. and they all nailed this thing. Insane cyclical stories having to do with nature and then also animals that have found patterns. There's a dog in here who knows when it's Saturday. And we're going to talk about that story. There's cats that know when specific times occur and she can account for a daylight savings time when her owner lets her know that it's daylight savings time. She gets up like an alarm clock every single time and she will change it.

The only time she misses because the owner forgot to tell her that daylight savings time changed. Oh, wow. It's fascinating. Just to reiterate, we do not plan our segments around each other. They just happen to sink up for whatever reason. I had this completely different book. I have a story pulled from it because it's this scary stories, which we'll go into because I already have it pulled.

But something said, don't do that right now. And I was just looking, happened to grab it. Boom, there it is. And there it is. And the one that most interests me is this one on cycles, because it's all about migratory patterns, dude. Crazy shit. Eels born in cold water.

Head on up to Europe. Eels born in warm water. go on out to the Caribbean. Like they just, these cycles are, no matter what type of eel they come from. It's a bizarre thing when you really start looking at how this planet and realm functions. They had birds that they put in a planetarium

and showed them the sky, and if they augment the sky, the bird will always go. So that showed him that they navigate by the stars. But then this cyclical thing occurs to where they have to adjust for the rotation of the stars and they do this during different parts along the route. Guys, this, it's a fascinating.

tale with a bunch of little animals as well who have these really cool little attributes to them. Just fascinating. Interesting. Well, I can't wait for that. So, yeah, if you're not on Plus, head over in the links and sign up there and join all the fun we have. And again, I think I mentioned it on the last show. But if you're looking for a specific episode from the archive, MU Max is where you'll find all of it, all 20 years of Ben and Aaron's in the last coming up on a year of our stuff. So, yeah.

Yeah, again, if you're looking for a specific episode, the website is the place to go for that and you can find everything. So, with that in mind, yeah, so again, this is from 2017, so a relatively new book compared to what we've covered in the past. Yeah. He basically starts out, Alan Burdick here with just waking up in the middle of the night and listen to the TikTok, tick-tock of the clock. And he's like, man, that's so loud and kind of annoying, you know, and the only thing he can notice is, that and everybody's woken up and had something that wakes you up and it's annoying right but he has kind of these these shower thoughts as he's laying there he's like it's so weird that this thing we call time only seems to move you know in one direction or one way and the problem

is that when you try to explain what time actually is you it's all this borrowed language from everything else like we spend time we save it we waste it we lose it it flies it drags ass you know And even this idea of the future is ahead of us in our childhood is behind us, even though those things aren't physically located anywhere. And a couple of philosophers were kind of pointing out how hard it is to talk about time without using these metaphors like motion or money or, you know, you take away all that and you don't have a whole lot of vocabulary left for time. And this old-ass philosopher, Augustine, in around 397, he was. writing about that and he you know the famous question about uh what god was doing before he created the universe and he mentions this old-timey joke that apparently uh people used even back then you know oh god was preparing hell for people who asked questions like that

yeah he's like all right i'm going to create this cool ass place but i gotta have somewhere for all the shitheads we got to let's set that up first because it's inevitable it's been an an enormous amount of time on that. Very elaborate. But Augustine actually has a serious answer to it, and it's better than that. But he says, if time itself begins with creation, then asking what happened before time might be like asking what's south of the South Pole. Like the grammar makes sense, even though the question might not. But Burdick's not trying to write a book about the Big Bang, though, which is great.

He's just talking about the time we experience. and for years he used to wear a watch and or no he refused to sorry he just absolutely refused to wear a watch because he didn't like the idea of having time wrapped around his wrist you know like

clocks were this like external system of appointments and deadlines and everybody hates that and with my old job I can relate to that my old job was ruled by the clock and if you've ever watched Castaway they kind of make that point in that movie too but So the end effect of him refusing to wear a watch is that he just mostly was late for everything.

Which, hey, that's not so bad, right? But then he started thinking about it. He's like, okay, so not wearing a watch didn't really free me from time because it's already something that's kind of inside of us. I mean, you sleep according to it. Your body changes. Your memories definitely depend on it. And he says his cells kept rhythm, whether or not he checked the actual. hour and we'll get into a little bit of that.

Huh. So he's just, the basic questions are like, why does five minutes sometimes feel forever, but you can like three hours just go like that? Yelp. And why do, you know, people in accidents remember a few seconds like it was frozen in time? Or I'm sure you've related to this. Why do you sometimes wake up right before the alarm rings? Yeah, that's a weird one. That's a weird one.

So he's like, so there's got to be some kind of clock inside your brain, right? And if there is, can it kind of drift away from the standard clock everybody else is using? And so that, but before he even started getting into that, he's like, okay, so we got to, we got to figure out what actual, you know, the gold standard external time really is. Because if your internal clock is wrong, then there's probably some perfect clock somewhere telling us what the correct time actually is. right? We would hope. Where is it? Where do you think that is?

I would say it's the stars, probably. Well, yeah, nature-wise. Yes, yeah. But he heads to the International Bureau of Wights and Measures, which is outside Paris. And this is the organization that's involved in maintaining the world's, like, measurement standards. And this whole thing is there because they thought civilization needs everybody using the same units, which is funny because we don't anyway. We don't.

We don't. But as far as the metric system, the meter is the same meaning to somebody in France as it is in Japan. You know, a kilogram doesn't change depending on where you're from. Unless you're from the U.S., of course. Yes. But yeah, he gets into that about how most of human history, the Earth itself was a clock. And it starts with what? One cycle of day and night gives you a day.

Yeah. But then, you know, they start dividing it into 20. 24 hours, 60 minutes per hour, 60 seconds per minute. And then a second is, was roughly like 186,400th of a day. Didn't know that. Then we started inventing, you know, better clocks, pendulum quartz clocks, and then eventually atomic clocks. And by the 20th century clocks were so precise that the Earth's cycle was kind of the sloppy part. It's not always the same.

Right. But so the modern second is. second is defined by the behavior of CCM 133 atoms, which is a big ass numbers, nine billion something. Okay. And that's cycles of radiation associated with particular atomic transition. So that was the new standard that we went by, which is really weird. That's why it's called an atomic clock?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, by this, I don't know, kind of like radioactive decay that happens with this particular atom. How they measure that? I don't know. That's for a different show. Yeah. That gets dense really quick.

So, but that led him to an even weirder question. So if atomic clocks are this accurate, then which atomic clock gives us the official time. Yeah. Yeah. And the answer is none of them. There's not this like one master clock in a vault somewhere telling the planet what time it is. There's a bunch of them. And even the best ones disagree a little bit. And when I say a little bit, it's like billions of a second.

But billions of a second matter for things like GPS or communications, finance, you know, science. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so laboratories around the world are constantly comparing their clocks. So there's the faster ones, slower ones, stable ones, the weird ones. And from all of that becomes UTC. The coordinated universal time, which is kind of funny. because English speakers wanted to be called cut.

Yes. United universal time. French speakers wanted TUC, which I imagine is something that sounds super gay. But everybody settled on UTC, which nobody liked, which is totally appropriate. Unit time correction. Unit time correction or something. But then he meets Dr. Aureus is an Argentinian astronomer. Argentine?

Argentinian, I believe. Yeah. Perhaps, maybe. who at the time, at least when he met her, was directing the Bureau's time department. Weird thing I didn't know existed either. A time department. Sounds like the adjustment bureau to me.

It does. That's what I was getting vibes from. The hats, the suits, everything, yeah. But she basically says, because he's like, where's the clock, like the world clock? And it's got to be this lady, if anybody. But she's like, no, it's basically just this really sophisticated average, you know, assembled from dozens of these national timing laboratories.

And they're actually compared through satellites and things like that, too, or transmission delays. All these different things that come together to say, this is the official time. And, I mean, you fast forward to now and all of our phones run on this basic UTC time, adjusted for your time zone, right? Mm-hmm. But she says the most accurate version of UTC doesn't exist in real time. It has to be calculated afterwards. So laboratories gather all this data and they send it in. And her group, this time bureau, compares everything and produces the final result.

And then they published a document called Circular T showing how far each contributing clock differed from the eventual UTC value. So in other words, the world's most accurate clock tells you exactly what time it was. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So the perfect answer comes later. So the physical clocks around the world then get adjusted toward that calculated standard. And it's called steering, I guess. Okay.

Again, so right now your phone is showing basically an extremely good approximation of UTC. Wow. So he's thinking about all this. And he's like, okay, so before he leaves, this Dr. Arias, before he leaves, he's like, what's your, what's your personal relationship with timeline? because that's got to be weird for somebody in that position, right? Yeah. And she says, very bad. Oh, yeah.

Kind of like if he studies the shit out of something, it's just awful. Like the dudes that think being a gynecologist is cool, but it ends up not being. It wouldn't. For like probably 99% of the time it would be terrible. Mm-hmm. So there's a clock on her desk and it says 115. And he checks his watch and it's 1255. So her desk clock is 22 minutes or 20 minutes fast.

And she's at home, she doesn't have two clocks showing the same time. Her alarm clock is on purposely 15 minutes ahead. And she's frequently late. And he's like, oh, all right, me too. Same, same, bro. And there's also a term for a clock that is no longer being corrected by these outside signals. And he calls it free running. I don't know if he calls it that or if that's a term he found.

but we'll get into what that means. Okay. Basically, uh, raw dog in life or, uh, you know, it's like time parkour. You're just kind of outside the system with it. These clocks just go absolutely rogue and just on their own and just, I'll decide what time it is. Pretty much. And most of that is, you know, based on the human clock that's inside of all of us. Oh.

Does, does an external clock adjust to sink its time to the human one? Not at all from what I've read. No. Okay. So that brings us to the first story in the book here, and this is Michel Sifre. Guess what? He's French. French.

He's a 23-year-old French geologist, and this is from 1962. So he had this idea to do this experiment, and it was kind of more for the geology of it, but he's also like, while I'm in there, we'll see how weird. time moves for somebody who's in this cave for, you know, days on end. Oh, yeah. And so this French dude, he found an underground glacier called the Scarasan. And this is inside a cavern down in southern France. And it was a, this is in 1962, right? It's the middle of the Cold War, space race, all that stuff.

All the good stuff. And so the main thing on people's minds back then was like, how do we live in a fallout shelter? or even maybe in submarines or spacecraft or whatever, just things that completely cut people off from ordinary life. Yeah. And so Sifrey was wondering like what prolonged isolation would do to somebody who had no access to the sun and no idea what time it was. And this first experiment was pretty modest. He's like, okay, so I'll go underground for two weeks and study the glacier.

And then he's like, okay, so why I'm down there, though, let's make it two months. And I'm not going to bring any watches or clocks or calendars. I'm just going to live according to whatever schedule happens. And I guess years later, he said the goal is he just wanted to live like an animal in darkness without knowing the time. So let's go back to our roots as cavemen animals, right? How fun. Pattern interruption, sure. To the max, yeah. So he starts this in July, July 16, 1962, and he climbs down in this cave.

And all he had was a tent and a sleeping bag and a little lamp powered by a small generator, some books. know, equipment for studying the glacier. And he also had a phone that connected him to his surface dweller colleagues. And it was pretty rough for him. I mean, it was cold in there. His feet were always wet. And there obviously no natural light or anything around him. And there was literally no morning unless he just decided it was, right?

He woke up and he's like, guess it's morning now. Damn. So the people on top were allowed to talk to him, but he only had one rule that they could never tell him what time it was or what the date was. don't slip and tell me it's morning or evening or anything. So every day or day according to Sifrey, he would wake up and give him a call and do simple things like report his pulse and whatever else he was measuring, tell him what he was doing and then just go about his day. And he basically lived like an animal.

He just ate when he was hungry and he slept when he was tired. He also read Plato, very apropos for living in a cave, right? Yes, yes. Brilliant. And he did his geological surveys or whatever and wrote in his journal. And then when he woke up again, he counted that as the beginning of another day. Okay. So as far as he was concerned in his mind, he still had kind of a calendar.

It just was made up entirely out of himself. Yeah. So he planned to stay underground until September 14th. Remember, he started July 16th. Then on what he thought, according to his calculations of his own calendar, what he thought was August 20th. So just a little over a month later, his phone rings and his colleagues say, oh, it's over now you can come out. And he's like, what? Only 35 days had passed.

But it was actually 60 days. What? He lost an entire month living like this. What? Yeah. And nobody had like messed with him or anything or drugged him or anything like that. He just lived, slept, eat, all that stuff according to his own internal needs or experience. Yeah.

And again, this whole experiment wasn't to figure out this human like circadian clock, but that's basically what happened. And even before this, the scientists, you know, those people, they already had this idea that living organisms had some kind of internal daily rhythm. And one of the earliest examples back in the 1700s, there's a French astronomer Jean-Jacques de Otis de Muen. You notice something strange about heliotrope plants. And it's the plants that, you know, their leaves open up during the day and then fold up at night. Yes. He figured, oh, that's easy enough to explain. It's sunlight.

Do you think so? I don't know. Do we have any French people out there? Yeah, it was full send. You committed and you nailed it. Well done. But yes, those little firm things. You touch them and they, yeah, we go.

we show the nieces and nephews in the backyard. In springtime they grow all over the place. I think it's Yaro, the young Yaro that'll do it. And you can go to these ferns and you rub them and they close up. It's pretty neat. Well, he's talking about the ones that specifically seem to adapt to daylight. Do you have mimosa trees out there? We do.

Because those do that. They have these little smaller leaves and they kind of close up when it gets dark and they open up during the day. Yeah, it's the same type of leaf. Yeah, this fern type leaf, yeah. Yeah, very cool. Furnish. Furny

Furn-esque But they noticed A lot of other patterns In nature too Not just plants Fiddler crabs Change coloration Over the course of the day

If they're kept away From ordinary sunlight What did I just No this is in our Some of this is in our extension This is so crazy Nothing is dovetailed this close To where they're similar accounts

But go ahead, please This is just awesome So cool Other things like fruit flies kind of come out of their pupil cases around dawn when humidity's higher, just little like cycles that they noticed. And they kind of came to this conclusion that most life seems to anticipate the day instead of just reacting to it.

They know it ahead of time somehow. Yeah. And the weird thing is that these internal days aren't exactly 24 hours long. Some organisms, you know, run a little faster than that. Others run a little slow. and that's where the that word the circadian word comes from circadium right about a day close to a day not necessarily 24 hours but sifrey's first experiment in his little cave uh was like oh okay humans do this too so his waking wake sleep periods were all over the place uh apparently sometimes

he'd be awake for six hours and then other times he could stay awake for 40 and it it apparently you know, was from the sun or from, you know, no light source, I guess. So you know, the mole people have an erratic circadian rhythm for sure. That's what I was thinking about is people who live underground and have no, they don't ever come to the surface if this exists. Because what's the thing about Agartha, right? They always talk about this sort of internal sun that's down there that's, you know, and that's what excuses it for being livable is because there's sort of a hot sun that's suspended in the middle of this fucking thing and then there's that. But what if that's not there? like you're talking about.

Is there a complete adjustment? And we talked about this on the visitors from within things. They had to reticulize. They had to go underground. And they lost all this pigment. Their eyes got fucking huge. And that's what that is, a full pupil that covers that entire eye to take in more light.

They started like sucking in glow from plants. It's wild, dude. Yes. This would change you completely. Yeah. Yeah. Probably make you a bit of an asshole. Comparatively.

Yeah. You know, a lack of sunshine. I would think would cause a lack of disposition. Look what happens in the... like Seattle or something, this highest suicide rate because it's cloudy all the time, right? So it is, there is a direct correlation to your environment and you and how you function and your disposition and God, how you survive. I mean, it's totally environment dependent.

It's fascinating. Yeah. And you could bring the nature versus nurture into it, but I think it's a combination of everything like usual. Yeah, yeah. But Sifrey's experiment, he averaged about 24 hours and 30 minutes, so just a little over 24 hours. and this is again only 60 days and we'll get into his longer experiment later.

Okay. That's only, you know, a half hour longer than your average, you know, top side day, which sounds like a little tiny bit, but if you start stacking that, you know, after 10 days, you're ahead by five hours or behind, I guess. Like they say on the ship, right, one degree on, off on course over time, man, and you're miles, miles, miles off, yeah. Mm-hmm. I mean, after a month, it's more than half a day.

See? So you can see over a long. period of time that this would have quite an impact on not just disposition but everything else. But what a fascinating study that if left to a different environment and you don't have something over your head telling you what time it is and when to go to bed, when to wake up, then you'll just sort of decide your own and almost double your time. Is that what we're talking about here? At least the perception of it. That's fascinating to me. So you're actually, your experience to this cycle shortens your life because of your interaction with it because you're training yourself

well, it's dark. How many times have you said this, man, I can't go to sleep? But it's dark now I should be going to sleep. It's like this forced action because of a rhythm and because of a cycle. But if you just went all natural, did it whenever, would this, you know, make a different individual? I would think so. I would think it would make a pretty different person. Again, everything's perception, right?

So it, I don't know how much it would, I mean, it would definitely change you. And it does. We'll get into his second experiment. Okay. Yeah, definitely would change you, but it's, whether that's good or bad is, subjective. I wonder if you get out of that cave and everything's super loud and like it's very noisy out here because then you don't have all the insects and all that kind of stuff like your sensory input

would be altered because your senses would be so adjusted to the new environment. Oh yeah. Yeah. Photophobia. All of it. Yeah. Because I know he wouldn't live in in pitch blackness, but there's still an absence of ambient sound going on in there. There's echo from his noise, but not necessarily street noise and fucking, you know, chatter and other people and shit, right?

Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, he had a little lamp, but it was on whenever he needed it, not in a definite cycle. Yeah, yeah. Right. So he said that, well, I mean, he went in, you know, a geologist, but apparently he was one of the accidental pioneers of human chronobiology. I didn't know it was a field, but here we are. I didn't either. He says he came out like a half-crazed disjointed marionette.

Okay. Yeah. And that was only, again, for 60. days. So after verdict, you know, goes into this experience, he's like, okay, so there's another basic question here, though. When we say somebody lost track of time, what did

they lose? Because time, as it turns out, several different abilities packed into one word. So we can judge duration, you know, like how long something lasted in the temporal order like this happened before that. And, you know, yesterday is in one direction, tomorrow's in another.

But then he goes in to the subjective sensation that he calls the feeling of nowness, you know, the sense that you're occupying this moving little window called right now. Yeah. And adults are great at doing that, mostly under duress and by force, but... Get a dog. That's what I call my dog. She's a present moment attenuator. If I'm on my phone, she goes nuts. If I'm reading a book or playing with her outside, we're great. Everything's happy. She's calm. It's very interesting. Dogs are Zen masters when it comes to being in the now.

They really are. They bring you right back to that moment. That's why I don't think they don't have a concept of time. It's like they don't necessarily have momentum disease. They kind of remember things and pattern and all that. But yeah, but they are truly focused in the moment. Right, right. It's fascinating.

Yeah, very, very Buddhist of them. Right. How's then? So, again, adults do all of this easily. We have clocks. We have places we got to be, things we got to do, right? But babies kind of gradually learn this difference between now and not now.

So they don't actually, like kids don't actually understand before and after until about four years old, which is interestingly around the same time they come online to the Matrix, right, and forget their past lives and all that stuff. Oh, yeah. But this adult experience of time that we all have is something that takes years to kind of really wrap your head around. And that's what makes the Sifery Cave thing so interesting because he's not forgetting what before and after mean.

and he hasn't like lost his memory like he knows who he is his family all that stuff what burdick is saying is that he's missing the synchronization of all of those things right so it's getting all out of sorts right yes so yes and we'll get in again to a little bit more of the all the things that synchronized to make us have this feeling of time but on a very personal level here you and i have a trifective synchronization if you and i don't synchronize three things together it this show doesn't work because you send me you send me your main audio. I then have a tracked audio that I'm tracking on my side.

Then I have a third source or Zoom then I'm matching it with to compare and then deleting the Zoom. So if we didn't have that third source, we couldn't sync. I get this. I get this like you need multiple things to come together for an experience to be had. Yeah. Yeah. And it's

that's kind of how everything works anyway. Yes. It's a beautiful chaotic synchronization of things that makes this happen. Yes. And you're here making music out of the noise. You know, because it is just a bunch of noise and chaos. But you find pattern and symphony and music and rhythm in this thing. Yeah.

You give it music. You give it purpose. It's fascinating. It's just another great example of as above so below, right? It's this cosmic clock all the way down to our cellular clock. Swedenborg's in there somewhere. I wonder what babies would be like, though. So mold people babies, right, is what you're talking about.

People born underground that never see the sun and never sink to this rhythm. Like what is their rhythm like? What is their sleep cycle like? Like a animal, probably. Maybe that's why animals go so crazy sometimes. Maybe. And then the full moon. I mean, would they feel patterns?

Does astrology affect them, even though they're underground and don't know it's happening, do the planetary impacts still affect them that deep? Good question. Man. Like, did they go through their midlife crisis, you know? They're Pluto square, is what I'm saying. Weird. So yeah, Sifre's lost this synchronization.

And he knows he's living through days, according to him. But what he's lost is this, you know, he doesn't know. he doesn't know what a day is relative to the rest of the world anymore. Yeah. And yes. You know, you say your body clock is off or, you know, my body clock gets me up in the morning or whatever. Oh, yeah. As though there's like this Rolex behind your forehead that just is like TikTok, time to get up.

Even though for some people it is like that. There is and we're going to go into it in the extension. I'm telling you, this is the thing with this cat. This cat has this thing. He wakes up at the same exact time every single morning. She will let him know that it's going to be adjusted for daylight savings and he'll adjust it. It's fascinating. It's fucking nuts.

It's clockwork, dude. Yes, and other people do do this. You could set a mental alarm and then just be on that time. You are capable of amazing things. Cats just get cooler and cooler. They do, yes. So I guess one of the most, well, the easiest circadian rhythm to measure is just body temperature. So I didn't know this either, but I mean, I guess you could infer it.

But human body temperature isn't just fixed all day long. It moves in a roughly 24-hour wave. So it generally rises during the day and peaks sometime in the afternoon or early evening and then falls overnight and it hits its low point in the hours before dawn. And temperature is just one example. I mean, you have resting heart rate, blood pressure, kidney function, hormone releases, all these things follow a cycle. And he runs through the whole gamut of these examples because it just really shows how thoroughly timed every person's biology is. and so things like physical coordination reaction tend to peak in the afternoon. Didn't know that either.

Your heart and muscles are usually strongest around five or six in the evening. So if you're going to work out in the morning, you should try five or six in the evening. Yeah. And I guess pain tolerance is also highest early in the morning. Didn't know this either. Alcohol is metabolized more slowly at night. So the same drink could remain in your system long. longer depending on when you consume it.

So if you, you know, grab a shot or a beer at 7 a.m., it'll probably be out of your system in an hour. Yeah, day drinkers, huh? Yeah, yeah. That's why brunch is so fun, hey, ladies, am I right? Hey, mimosas. But he did a couple, well, he cites a couple animal studies. And we really are monsters to lab rats and shit, I'm telling you.

Oh, dude, you don't even want to know. And I've got stories about what we do. do to pigeons to screw with these things to see if they can still find their way home and it's insane it's insane it's insane okay they're dumb spin around on pedestals and then like a whip them around and then launch them into the air to see if they can write themselves so they get them all dizzy and then

just throw them up in the air like it's insane what they do we're going to go into it sign up in the links below guys this extension's bang out of some of these scientists are the same guys that would torture frog and shit when they were kids dude I think this like the bullies are the ones that become the cops right because they have this complex and they've got to like boss people run and be under

control I gotta go tell people what to do They become the HOA captains and the cops and the military. Thank you for your service. And then, yeah, you're absolutely right. These others, man, they will find their way. Absolutely. You got to find your niche, right? Your niche.

So one of them was these scientists gave rats what would potentially be like a lethal dose of adrenaline, but at different times of the day. And apparently depending on when they got this shot, they would die ranging from about 6% to 78%. Yes. That's an insane spread. same species, same exact, you know, shot they're giving them, same dose, just a different hour. Different time of day affects mice differently. Yes, one thing will kill them, one thing won't. And that's in the work, too.

Fascinating. Oh, my God. This is insane. No, no, no, not at all, because you're breezing over the, you're going into depth on the things that I'm not, and you're breezing over the things that I'm going into depth on. This is amazing, really. Dubtailing. Dovet fucking tailing. There's another study, and we torture humans, too, by the way, but they give people the absolutely riveting job of crossing out.

out every letter E they could find in a magazine for 30 minutes. And apparently their performance, again, varied depending on what time the test was given. Who comes up with this shit? Evil scientist, dude, I'm telling you. We're the worst. There's another thing. I mean, I could have told you this. I didn't know there's a term for it, but it's called the zombie zone.

We're about three to five in the morning. Your reaction time just tanks and people are more likely to read something wrong or miswarning signals or whatever. and he says that there's actually a lot of major disasters that were at least partly associated with that or like human error that happened during that three to five period including Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Exxon Valdez. So there's there's some at least anecdotal evidence that time of day has a lot to do with a lot of these things. But I mean, you could, I guess you could make an argument that, you know, 3.30 in the morning is a perfectly reasonable time to run a chemical plant. but your cellular biology might disagree a little bit. So where is this timetable coming from? And that's where we get to the cellular level.

And again, I'm not going to spend too much time on the rough science of it all. But it was interesting. I learned a lot from this. Okay. So inside cells, right, these certain genes are there that produce proteins and they accumulate and eventually enough of them build up that they travel back toward the gene that produce them and say, hey, turn it off, we're done. And then those proteins that told it to turn off, degrade.

And then once the suppressive effect of the gene disappears, the genes go, oh, we need to start up again. And so they start making the proteins again and rinse and repeat. So this cycle of activation, the protein buildup to shut down to degradation takes roughly one day. Huh. Which is probably why every seven years, every seven years, every. cell has gone through that and you're basically a new person every seven years is what I've heard. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How interesting. But he says it's basically this biological process sending a message to its future self. Like, hey, do something, keep it going. All right, stop, wait, start again. And it's a, yeah, it's an interval. So he's basically saying a cell manufactures a day.

Yes, yes, because this keeps time. Yeah. Because it happens on a, man, that is so interesting. It's wild how many things have a 24-hour cycle according to our, you know, measurement of a second all the way up to an hour, 24 hours, all that. So wild. But he goes back to the fruit fly thing, and their activity naturally rises and falls on a daily cycle. And so by breeding certain flies with abnormal rhythms and, like, fucking with their genetics and things, they eventually isolated this, key clock genes, which they called per and Tim, which is short for period and timeless. But these genes produce these proteins that they called per and Tim,

and the proteins, again, accumulate, joined together and eventually feed back into the system that produced them. And they, again, found it later in mice and then in human cells. And this biological clock, they found it across like animals, plants, fungi, all forms of life, basically. even you know cabbages and blueberries and mold all these different things he says that you know when you start messing with the natural cycles of things like think uh produce that's under supermarket lighting all day or maybe in a refrigerator darkness and those rhythms that they

have gradually deteriorate and then he gets into kind of a correction to the idea of your body clock. There's actually a thing that functions like a circadian coordinator called the supra, supracalifragal. No, okay, it's supercalia.

I tried to pronounce this earlier like five times. It's just called the SCN. Okay. We're going to go with SCN. SCN. So this SCN thing is a pair of tiny clusters in your hypothalamus that has around 20,000 neurons and it sits where the optic nerves cross. Which is really convenient because one of its main jobs is gathering this information about light gathered by your eyes and using it to keep the body synchronized with the external day.

And that, again, you know, has to do with hormone production. But what's weird is the SCN, if you leave it alone, it runs a little bit longer than 24 hours, an average of about 24.2 hours, which is pretty close to Sifrey's thing that he did. Yes. Yeah. But sunlight regularly corrects it. Oh. So, you know, every morning you get light in your eyes. These specialized pathways carry that information towards the SCN.

Your central clock adjusts. And then signals from the SCN help coordinate your body temperature and hormones and cell division and a bunch of other things. Melanin production, that's what they say about sunglasses, not to necessarily maybe not wear sunglasses because it screws with your body's ability to detect the sunlight and what time of day it is. It screws with your circadian rhythm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Or, you know, all the blue light you get from screens. I was thinking that.

At the end of the day, yeah. Yeah, to go with something like a blue blocker or something like that. Yeah. And that's been an old thing. Even before LED screens and all that, people would say, you know, don't watch TV before bed. But there's some people that fall asleep to the TV and it's on all night, which is crazy. I need it to be dark and silent at night or I'm not sleeping. Dark with a fan on, actually.

I'm a fan on guy. Uh-huh. Especially during the summer, it's got to be on. Just a year round. dude, that's fine. That white noise, bro. Oh, God. A little moving air too.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So nice. Mm-hmm. So all these things, you know, hormonal activity, temperature metabolism, and sleep, importantly, they, they start falling apart when that internal rhythm is disrupted, right? So hamsters without a working SCN thing can become diabetic and just super disorder.

disorganized. And then, so the scientists would remove it from them and then put another one back in from like a different animal or a different hamster, whatever they were working on. Uh-huh. And they can start getting characteristics of the donor's clock. Yes. Just like, you know, when you get a kidney transplant and you start having memories of the other, you know, whatever, it's just, it's crazy. They'll do this with mice. They'll take a piece of its brain out.

Put in another one. The mice will run the maze that the other one already knew how to do. Crazy. Like how do you? Yeah, we do fucked up things to animals, dude. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, but he says that almost every cell in the body has this type of circadian machinery from muscle to fat liver, pancreatic, all of these. They're all keeping time, but kind of on, on their own schedule. And this SCN is what they're thinking is kind of keeps all of them recalibrated and working together

so that you're not, uh, having to shit at 3 a.m. You know. which does happen. Absolutely. This is interesting about eclipses and things too, where the sun is altered for a time. Like, animals disappear. All silence happens.

Like, it's a very noticed thing by everyone around. And it screws with your circadian for a minute. It shuts everything down and then brings you back up like Dark City. When they shut it down at midnight, turn everything off and then wake you back up. Then you think of the stories of like the sun being dead for three days and three days of darkness and stuff. What would that do to the human, you know, or anything?

Yeah. With this trigger for this SC. CN? S-C-N, yeah. S-C-N. Yeah, he actually mentions a study about 25 kidney transplant patients where some of these transplanted kidneys continued acting, you know, according to the rhythm with their donor, rather than immediately matching the recipient. What?

So some of the other ones synchronized pretty immediately, but strangely enough, some did it in an opposing phase. So they'd become most active when the recipient. its original kidney was least active. What? And maybe that's how they have, maybe that's why they have to take these anti-rejection meds. Right. Because it's literally going against you.

How weird would that be, though? You give one of your brothers your kidney, right? One of your kidneys. You still have the other one. But whenever you need to go pee or something like that, he now has to go pee every time. Yeah. That would be weird. So, like in theory, well, in practice, I guess, too.

You can literally have two organs that are disagreeing about what time of day it is. Whoa. Like a Gemini. Yeah. He kind of compares it to an orchestra, though. Like your whole body is an orchestra. And I think we've heard that before. Definitely. Basically, all these different clocks in your cells and everything are just playing different parts in the orchestra. And the SCN's like the conductor, right?

Maybe light is the metronome. But what keeps you healthy is in every clock producing the exact same rhythm, it's all coordination. It's like a, I don't know, the workings of a clock, all of these little gears moving at different speeds, different times, but they present the time to you, right? And this is interesting, too, to think of altered states because they alter every clock in your body. And maybe some clocks continue to run on time, but then others slow down dramatically. So then everything's out of whack. It's like all trains, no trains are running on time within your body. If you're doing coke or something, all trains are running ahead of time.

And that's not good. it's interesting though to think about you augmenting your body clock by these altered states like that and then also just your experience of reality when you're having a lot of fun time fucking flies man I mean we all know that yeah yeah three hours playing video games can zip by while three hours at work just drags ass yeah drags ass but he takes it back to the uTC thing where he's like okay all of these things are working through synchronization through this basically combining of not necessarily opposites, but difference. Yes.

All this variety that comes together to make the thing work. Like we've talked about with, you know, polarities and things like that. Like, it's not one thing or the other that's making it work or one thing or the other that's bad. It's the combination of them that makes the thing work, like a battery. And harmony is the goal. Right. And that's kind of what it is. It's kind of chaotic harmony, right?

Mm-hmm. And then he actually, verdict shares a personal story, which I know a lot of parents out there will appreciate. he had twin sons, Leo and Joshua, and he brings them in because he's, Bertic's like, okay, so a baby develops the cells that will eventually become the SCN pretty early. It's around the 40 to 60 days after conception, those SCN cells start appearing. And then about 16 weeks in, they settle right into the, you know, developing hypothalamus. And around 20 weeks, they have this measurable process in the baby that includes heart rate and, you know, hormone levels, they're already showing this daily rhythm,

which is kind of a problem because the baby is in what? Darkness, man. Yeah, he's not getting the, you know, the dawn or the sunset or anything like that. But he's still receiving that information from his mother because of the melanin. Wow, how interesting. So he's getting it chemically through the mother, he or she, whatever. It's like in the mummy. Whenever they had to shine the mirror, they had to grab all the mirrors to reflect the light down the hall, you know?

Yeah. So you have to like get it from the outside. But he is able to, the baby is able to bring it in from outside and utilize it. Yeah. Wow. So yeah, like you said, melatonin and dopamine, they crossed through this, you know, barrier between the mother and the baby. Uh-huh. And it starts kind of training the baby's circadian rhythms even before it's born.

Wow. So it's already kind of like, you know, participating in your daily activities. But obviously it's off a little because it'll be kicking the shit out of your stomach in the middle of the night. Right. One, two, it's being trained to be active during the day. If you're active during the day as a mom, right? It's going to be active when you are. So if you're active during the day, again, you're going to have this different hormone and melanin production and the baby's going to receive that. And then when you're resting, it's like, oh, now it's time to do that. Right. Wow. And then you think about things like preemies or scheduled inductions or C-sections, that's going to mess up that pattern a little bit, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And so he talks about his story with his twins, and they came six and a half weeks preemie. they're born about four minutes apart and it was in the early hours of the 4th of July I guess.

I don't know what year this was but so but he laughs because he's like dude when they came out there were tiny half crazed disjointed marionettes. He's just like him out of the cave. Just like Sifery's out of the cave. And he basically says that he's like in a sense they're experiencing their own version of Sifery's cave

which I like it sounds better than Plato's cave. I like Sifery's cave. sounds like syphilis like you get syphilis going in there but it's okay it's syphre oh okay but it's a fancy kind of syphilis so it's all good yeah it's the baguette syphilis right but so he's think about this so okay before they're born they're receiving their mothers these rhythmic signals from their mother continuously and then all of a sudden they're outside of it and that maternal clock is gone right so they they do have their own circadian system but uh the communication between And, you know, their central clock and the rest of the body is very immature still.

So newborn sleep is chaos, right? Everyone knows that. And now they're doing it synchronized to an energy system that they've got to now maintain. So they've got to pull energy in, utilize that energy. Once that energy is gone, it doesn't matter what the circadian rhythm says. It's shut down. And then they then learn how to regulate that energy to expend more of the daylight. So interesting, man.

They get ruined by the world and then now they're on this fucking schedule, right? I think it's called domestication. Yeah. Mm, yes. So as people who have had babies might know, I mean, your baby could sleep 16, 17 hours a day, but they're broken up into chunks scattered everywhere. And I know what that's like, but there's no real, like nighttime. It's just trying to go to sleep and then the next time somebody screams.

And it's like that for months for a lot of parents. Just exhaustion and stimuli. It's crazy. Do not recommend. end. Yeah, I know. I saw all you having kids and I was like,

nah, I'm just gonna not. You guys enjoy that. You breeders have fun. But Berdick and his wife, they're so sleep deprived that his memory of that time starts looking a lot like

Sifery's cave thing. Yeah. He said he could remember watching the French connection over and over and over again, late at night while he's like bottle feeding the babies, but he said he barely remembers the movie. He just remembers like Gene Hackman,

pork pie hat subway chase that's about it the days were together yesterday's like when was that was that two days ago i don't know and so by the end of this after the first few months they both kind of had him and his wife both had this view that they're like time simultaneously stood still and also flew by yeah and both of them feel exactly correct so what is that and so for years these uh the neonatal intensive care units they kept preemie babies in this constantly dim light because they were like, okay, the womb is dark, so the Nick, you should imitate the womb, right? And there's a pediatric researcher that was like, maybe depriving them of this, you know, depriving them of useful timing information. Yes, yes.

They should set the lights timed to the sun. Yeah. So they actually ended up changing it into different practices where they'd just alter the light, dark cycling. Yeah. To try to get the babies into more of a pattern instead of putting him in another cave after they came out, right? Mm-hmm. I wonder if the baby sinks sleeping like that. If you did it like six on, six off, that's kind of rotate that?

I don't know. I got lucky with my kid, dude. He slept a solid 12 most nights. Nice. And I could time it almost to the hour. Like, if I wanted to stay up a little later, I'd make sure he was awake till 9.30 or 10, because I knew I could sleep till 10 the next day. It was awesome. That is not, that is the exception, not the rule. So, uh, even before a baby understands, you know, what morning and night is, uh, the body needs someone to tell what part of the day it's in.

And Burdick learns this firsthand. So longest day of the year, June 21st, he wakes up to one of his twins crying like four in the morning. And like three minutes later, the birds are going nuts. and then his wife gets the baby back down and almost immediately the other twin wakes up and apparently there's a chronobiology word here is a German zeitgeber and it's close to like time giver

and zeitgeber is apparently an external signal that helps reset or synchronize an internal clock and obviously the most powerful one is daylight but other things can do it too like alarm clocks or you know, when you're hungry, when you've got to take a poop or sounds, things like your cat that screams at 5 o'clock in the morning because it wants to eat. Mm-hmm. These are all zeitikikis. So in Burtig's experience, though, the coming dawn, that first light, resets the robin outside the window.

Yeah. The robin starts spraking off outside and it wakes up the kid. Then the kid wakes up the parent. And they're just laying there going, I'm going to. kill this bird. I think about that most mornings about my one cat. Well, we live out in the country. Everybody's got chickens out here and nobody,

you all, you want roosters to keep your flock in line because there's something about having a cock around. Man, these bitches need cocks. They just do. If they don't, they start pecking each other's eyes out and all kinds of shit. They keep them safe like it's just important. So yeah,

we have roosters going off out here. Plus there's work to be done. So why would you sleep in? You live in the country. Yeah. Yeah. So he says it's like a whole, this whole chain or system of clocks that are entraining each other.

and now he's like wow this whole trying to escape time by not wearing a watch is just hopeless and he actually says that he thinks of him and his wife as like the managers of a company and they have these two tiny employees and they just need to be put on a reasonable schedule you know eat eat now nap now poop now sleep whatever and uh but they they very soon discover that the employees have you know taken over the company and mutiny he gets almost religious about making sure that the boys's afternoon nap happens because it's that one stretch of the day where he can just be like, I can work on my book. I can do whatever I want. It's like my time of the day, right? That's his rhythm. Yeah. Yeah. And then one of the twins just is like, yeah, I'm a child.

I'm not going to let you do that. So the kid will just be in there having a good old time in his crib, just talking to himself, jumping around, calling for dad, blah, blah, blah. And he gets pissed because he's like, dude, this is my time. And the kid just thinks it's hilarious. as babies do. Like, you know, like when you hurt yourself and babies laugh, it's like, oh, great. See what kind of kid you are. Psycho. You're going to grow up doing things to mice in the lab.

So he realizes, though, as he's getting pissed and being like, I'm acting fucking bad, he's like, oh, man. I'm this external time authority. I'm literally the man now. Time cop. Yeah. I'm a time cop. So he kind of just surrenders to him. it and he's like, all right, take you out of the crib. We'll hang out and, you know, read books or do whatever.

We'll just hang out. Fine. If you're not going to sleep, we'll hang out. And eventually the kid notices the clock ticking on the wall. And he's like, Daddy, let me see that. So he takes it down. He shows them the little battery compartment and all the little gears and whatnot. And then he turns it around. And they're just watching the second hand go around. And he realizes, wow, none of us have any idea what we're looking at. No. Like, what the hell is that? Yeah. It's just something we all agree to, dude. That's it. We could also all agree that it's Saturday everywhere right now. And then at 24 hours at a place that we decide, it changes to the next day and then follows it around. It could be Saturday in China right now. It should be. Like it's silly that we don't do this. And everybody just have the different times because the time zones are covered. And there's time zone anomalies. When you go over shit, there's like a 22-hour difference in a 45-minute span of geography. But the time jumps like that, which then calls into question the shape of the realm that we're on. And we don't have time for that. But it is interesting these sort of time zone anomalies and how they split them up, you know, how they jack at the GMT lines. What the fuck's going on?

Time's weird, man. And I get it that we, I mean, in this worldwide society we have now, like I can't say, hey, I'm booking a flight to China on this Saturday. But in China, it's Thursday. Like that would be real confusing really fast. So I get it. But Ethiopia, I think, is the one that's like something like 10 years or something behind us. Eight years, yeah. Eight years?

Yeah. Yeah. They're doing their own thing over there with their Bible, their time, everything. Everything. Living their lives. They might have figured it out. Yeah. But Michel Cichre wasn't finished.

So 10 years after that first experiment he did, he's like, you know what? Let's go deeper. That wasn't enough for me. And this time he actually had backing by like NASA and shit. Yeah. And this time he chooses a cave, a midnight cave near Del Rio, Texas. Oh, shut out. Yeah, this is 10 years later, February of 1972, and he's like, all right, time to go again.

And this time they had like camera crews, news, all that stuff. And he had been married by then. So he's like, Adios, I'll see you in six months because he planned to be there again until September, but starting in February. So he's six months. He goes, about a hundred feet down in this vertical shaft into this midnight cave. And this time it was a little more thought out than the first one. He has like a wooden platform and a bigger tent and a bed, table chairs. Yeah.

Scientific instruments. He's got freezers full of food and exactly 780 one gallon drugs of water. And I think that's probably so he can be like making sure he's drinking enough water over six months or whatever. But again, he didn't have clocks or calendars. Because this time he's not doing geological surveys. He's doing time cop shit. He's doing meological surveys. Meological, yeah.

and what he what he really wanted to do is just absolute darkness and total silence and it was actually elaborate how he planned out his days so he followed this he's trying to get more of a cycle going so when he woke up he'd like all right beginning of one of my subjective ass days right again he does the same thing as before where he calls the team on the surface and they turn on artificial lights which i don't know know if he thought that that was, I think what he wanted was absolute darkness, but they ended of having artificial light. I don't, I didn't understand that, but I think you'd want to walk around. Okay. Yeah, he got to see what you're doing, right? Mm-hmm. And you've taken a piss and you're taking a piss. Taking a piss.

Like, yeah, you want to be in the same spot, I would think. So basically that was his sunrise. They'd turn on these artificial lights and then he'd start the testing on himself. He'd test his blood pressure and then he'd go three miles on like a exercise bike, fired a couple rounds off with a pellet gun at a target. I mean, he had all these things. He had electrodes attached to his chest to track his heart rhythms and sleep. He also included

a rectal probe. And he says it's to measure his body temperature, but I think he's just a freak. That was his choice, wasn't it? That was his choice. He's like, I should probably measure body temperature somehow, right? Through the butt? Yeah, through the butt. Aliens come down there for him. He was like, oh, I brought my own.

Wow. Oh, another freaky part is when he shaved, he would save the the face pub so that they could examine them later for hormonal changes is what he says, right? Science. And then he's constantly sweeping this whole time too every single day because the cave is, it's a cave. So it's super dusty. It's got like rock dust and all this.

But the even worse than that, the dust is mixed with bat shit. Bat shit. Yes. I've always thought this about the Batcave, by the way, with Batman. I'm like, dude, it would have bad shit everywhere. Let me guess. Guano. Guano.

So every time he's sweeping everything, he's like worrying about what exactly he's breathing in. But that's his life now. Exercise bike, pellet gun, electrodes, poop shoot thermometer, collect my face, pubes, bat shit, dust, repeat. And he doesn't know, again, like last time, he doesn't know how often he's doing this relative to anybody above the ground. and I guess NASA was interested in this for obvious reasons, you know, isolation studies and for, you know, for when we go to Mars. Yeah, they have to pretend they're going to Mars, yeah. Yeah. But he started having an even weirder rhythm this time.

So at first, it was about a 26-hour rhythm like the last time because his body temperature would still rise and fall about every 26 hours. And he sleeps and wakes on roughly the same schedule, at least as far as he knows. and but without knowing it he's getting up about two hours later relative to the outside world every cycle he's free running yes raw dog in it right uh on his 37th actual day according to the surface underground which he thinks is day 30 so he's already a week behind at a month is all these different systems his internal clocks just start splitting apart so his body temperature rhythm keeps ticking every 20s 26 hours, but his sleep wake rhythm doesn't. He's staying awake way longer than usual, and then he'll sleep for 15 hours, but then be awake for like, you know, 40 hours at a time, 40 to 50 hours. It's crazy how the variance of this.

Yeah. But again, his temperature is the only constant through all of this. It's still rising and falling about every 26 hours. And so he's just desynchronizing. He's descending into chaos with this, and he has absolutely no idea it's happening. And I guess the research after this whole thing explains part of it, and it's that sleep isn't controlled by one clock. Yeah. It's the circadian system, but there's also a homeostatic sleep pressure. I'd never heard about this either.

But so I guess when you're awake, there's a chemical called adenosine, and that builds up. So the longer you're awake, generally, the more of this sleep pressure builds up. Huh. You know, you could take a nap and it reduces some of that pressure. It's like a pressure release valve, right? Yes. Things like caffeine could interfere with the perception of it, but it doesn't really stop this from accumulating. But the circadian clock runs alongside that system.

So you have this one clock or process saying, dude, you've been awake forever, go to sleep, while another one's going, and, you know, biologically, this isn't really the ideal time yet. Wow. And normally, when you're above ground, right, these two systems stay coordinated well enough that we don't even notice the difference between them.

And so Sifra here is basically watching them come apart from the inside without being able to see the actual data that proves it, but he's experiencing it. but as these different body rhythms start drifting into chaos, his mind starts going too. So around day 77, he's getting kind of retarded with his hands. He can't even like string beads together.

His memory starts going. He said he wrote in his journal that he could barely remember yesterday or like maybe what even happened earlier that same day unless he writes it down immediately. Wow. And then he finds this old magazine and it's covered in mildew so he scrapes all of it off. and he comes across an article saying that bat urine and saliva can transmit rabies through the air.

And he's living in a cave full of old bat shit. And that just sends him spiraling. Why didn't they go clean this thing out? If you're planning to be in there for six months, you go pick a really good cave with like a water supply. You do this a little bit better, right? You cite choose a little better you would think. He's a pioneer though. This is 1972.

They were just like, whatever, go in there. See what happens. There's a hole in the wall. Yeah. Can you imagine if there was a little bit. like something super carcinogenic or something in there and he's breathing that for six months straight like yes or something hibernating in the back that you didn't think to check because whatever it's the 70s and then all of a sudden while you're in there the thing's time to wake up because it is

on a damn cycle wakes up and gets out there yeah he seemed like he was pretty prepared but then also not not so once he reads this old article about that he just he starts freaking out and he just grabs the phone day 79 he's like I've had enough jeanai except he hasn't. He's not even halfway through. So they calm him down enough for him to keep going. They're like, it's just some bad shit, dude. Don't worry about it.

So again, he goes back to whatever the fuck a day means down there. Measure, record, stick something up your butt, electrodes, all this stuff. Save your whiskers from your face. And eventually he gets to a point where he just, he cannot deal with it anymore. So he unhooks all the equipment from himself. He's like, I'm done. I've McFucking had it. Wow.

He's like, I'm wasting my life on this. But then another thought hits him, he's like, oh, shit, if I stop gathering all this data, they're going to lose part of the experiment. Fuck, I'll plug myself in. Okay, fine. And at one point, he actually starts thinking about, you know, unaliving himself. And he's like, I can make it look accidental. It would be easy. It'd be easy to explain, right?

Because I'm down here. It could be anything. Shit. And then he goes, oh, shit. The bills. It's like, my parents would be left with this absolute mess created by all this research. And just that thought enough. alone was enough for him to, you know, stay because he's like, I can't fuck over my parents like that.

So I'll stay. Oh, sweet. And then later on, very late near the end of this experiment, here's a mouse. And this is funny because at the beginning, he fucking hated mice and he would just kill the little fuckers. Like he killed an entire colony of mice when he first started going down there because he's like, I'm not having mice down here. They poop, whatever. Now he's got standards. He eat all my food.

Well, now he's so lonely. This is on day 160 that he's. he hears a little wrestling. He's like, oh, I want a mouse friend so much. Anything at this point will do. Like, I want a little companion. And so he sees this little mouse and he names it moose, which I imagine is French. I thought he would have named it Wilson.

You'd think. This is before that movie. Early. Okay. But so for several days, he just watches it and looks at its habits. And he's like, all right, how am I going to catch this thing? He's like, I don't want to kill it. I want company.

So around day 170 is about a week and a half later, he's like, all right, I use this casserole dish and put some jam underneath of it. So the mouse comes up and he watches it. It's closer, closer, closer. And then he goes, ah, and slams the dish down. He's like, yes, I got my mouse. And he said, for the first time in months, he wrote in his journal, and he felt this enormous surge of joy.

He's like, I caught my friend, yay. And he lifts the dish, and he smashed the fucking thing. Aw. And the worst part is it was alive for like a moment and it was still like whimpering and then it just stopped. Super sad, right? Fuck. Fuck, science.

And that just wrecks him. He's like, I can't believe I just wiped out a whole colony. And now the only thing I want is one of these mice to be a friend. Mm-hmm. Poor little moose. But then nine days after that is when he gets the phone call, hey, it's over, dude, and come out now. This is nuts, man. Oh, no.

So this is August 10th. The main experiment is over. He'll be in there for another month. But the strict isolation ends now. So he can have, like, friends and friends. family come down and hang out with him for the last month, I guess, was part of the deal. Oh, okay. But then September 5th, he actually does return to the surface.

And, you know, people are waiting for him. There's cameras, you know, everybody, oh, yeah, good job. And he said, the first thing he noticed was the smell of grass. So imagine that. I mean, after seven months almost over. Just rock dust and bat shit, frozen food, just all of your own body. Deteriorating mice. That's the first thing, just that fresh smell of grass.

Wow. And obviously he's carrying an absurd amount of data and audio tapes and just recorded observations, all these things. But he did have some damaged eyesight from this and a chronic squint. So it's that photophobia I was talking about. Weird. Like had a chronic squint after everything was too bright. And this is after six, seven months. Six, seven months under ground, you come back out and now the sun's too much for you.

Yeah. Damn. See, this is what happened at the Zeta. Ritigta, allegedly. But they did it for like years, man. And that's why they're so psychotic. I mean, he started going crazy after how long? So imagine a couple centuries or however long these fucking people have been underground.

They get a little crazy. I don't think it's good for you. I really don't. I don't think it's healthy. I don't think we're meant to live underground. I'm a little biased being up here in the sun and all. But even after all of his worry, he still comes back to basically a half a million dollars in debt. What?

He does pay it off. It takes him a decade, but he pays it off. I don't know how. If he had NASA backing and all the, like, you'd think they would have, like, you'd think they would have, Oh, I know how NASA shitheads. So. Oh, well, yeah, there is that. They're like, actually, thanks for your data. You pay for this.

Okay, bye. But yeah, so he basically comes back with a couple takeaways from this that there really is no single human day. There's a rough, like, astronomical day and the clock day and the sleep day. There is the body temperature day. He didn't notice that. And these cellular and hormonal metabolic, rhythms, but most of the time these things, you know, they all line up close enough that we just call the whole thing today. But then you take away the sun, clock schedules, all these things.

And that today just kind of falls apart. And it's, he didn't lose time because his body stopped keeping it or anything. He just lost time because his body had several versions of it all at once. Again, this desynchronization of it. So crazy guy, but bravo for coming back with all that data and debt. Wow. What a fascinating tale, man. And yeah, great observations about time and synchronization.

Dude, this is amazing. Yeah, and this is definitely going to be at least a two-parter. There's so much more in this book. But I did want to go probably next Tuesday into where Burtig tries to do the opposite experiment where the sun never sets and see how that affects him. So that would be coming up on Tuesday. How weird. That's interesting. So how did you do that? Do you chase the sun around?

No, he went up to Alaska's north slope, north of the Arctic Circle. So kind of. It's, yeah, so the sun basically just drops low, hangs around the horizon, comes back up, whatever the fuck that is. He's basically like, what do I do if I don't have an actual dark nighttime? Yes. Cating rhythm got to get fucked up from that. So I'll find out about that on Tuesday. Spoiler alert, it probably does, huh?

You have to wait and find out. We are looking forward to it. A beautiful T-Sor. up in the links below guys. And in the extension, while you're signing up, you can go ahead and do that now so you can get to this extension with us. We're going to talk about this incredible book,

The Strange World of Animals and Pets, by Vincent and Margaret Gaddis. And this is 1970 book, and it's just so cool. There's so many things in here, and I'm not even going to go over the part on this. We'll save it, but there's a part in there about horses

that learn how to count, and they will click the 10 spot on their right hoof and the 100 spot on their left. So if the answer is 34, they'll take their hoof and click three times on their right and four times on the left and get 34 with that. And they do perfect math. They talk. That's going to be a completely different one. But on this one, actually, I chose the cycles.

So this is cosmic cycles and bioclocks. Animals along with all living things are affected by cosmic rhythms and celestial cycles. And we're going to get into why a tiny little hummingbird can fly over the Caribbean, the entire Caribbean. How does Robin return year after year? to a certain backyard in Ohio, like these crazy cycles that these animals are on. Monarch butterflies make this incredible journey and they have to breed along the way. Some of them only see part of the journey and they still are compelled to follow it. What happens to pigeons when you start screwing with those things and their ability to navigate?

This one scientist, where I'm putting air quotes up for that, he put a magnet around the neck of a pigeon and it screwed it up. It flew around all silly. And then some other people claim that magnets do nothing to pigeons and that they can still, So there are multiple things that they navigate through and multiple cycles that they're picked up on as well. Same thing like you talked about. They're snails that will go, snails and clams that go and live by the tides, even the ones in captivity. These flies that will approach only at sunlight. So if you have them in a dark laboratory and you flash a light under the dirt, they will all arrive at the same time.

Other than that, it's kind of a crapshoot. They come out at different times. It's really bizarre. And again, the turtles are fascinating. We go into a lot of nature cycles, but then also the human tie-in to that. Your circadian rhythm is tied into this work. So check out the links below, guys. It's going to be amazing.

We're going to learn about some lovable pets that you absolutely adore. And it's just a great book with a lot of really cool stories and incredible information in it. So sign up in the links below. Join us for that plus. And go for the plus max, guys, so you can get all the stuff. Yeah, it's more content than you could ever listen to in, you know, a month. Unless you listen back to back, maybe. It might take you three years.

Yeah. And Amber actually shout out again. Plus member Amber. She said that she was listening all the way back into the feed when Aaron joined the show, first joined the show and they were talking about spontaneous human combustion and then you came out with your series on it. Like the synchronicity of that is just incredible. Amazing. Sign up guys. Join us to that. Get more than one third of what we're doing here. Get a higher bit rate feed all the stuff. Yes. Do it. Do it now. Do it. And yeah, thanks for listening through all of that. And we got way more coming up in the extension and next Tuesday like Brandon said. And until then, if you're on plus, I'll stick around after the break. Otherwise, we will see you all next week. Welcome back to your Plus extension.

And thank you all for joining us here on Plus.