These volunteers spent 40 days in a cave with no sunlight or way to tell time
Montreal s Marina Lançon was one of 15 people who volunteered to spend 40 days in a French cave without any way to tell the time or communicate with the outside world all in the name of science.
Social Sharing
CBC Radio ·
Posted: Apr 27, 2021 5:44 PM ET | Last Updated: April 27
Marina Lançon, pictured in the centre with a blue bandana and gray sweater, emerges from the Lombrives Cave in France with 14 other people after 40 days underground.(Renata Brito/The Associated Press)
What happens if you put 15 people together in a dark cave and take away their ability to track the passage of time? An extraordinary experiment in France has attempted to answer this question, and the results are fascinating.
They spent 40 days in a cave with no sunlight, no phones, and no clocks krbe.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from krbe.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Share this article
Fifteen people emerged from a cave in southwestern France on Saturday after voluntarily participating in an experiment meant to test the limits of human isolation.
The scientific experiment, titled the Deep Time project, lasted 40 days and 40 nights and was conducted in the Lombrives cave completely underground. The goal of the study, led by scientists at the Human Adaption Institute, was to observe how the absence of clocks, daylight and communication with the outside world would affect the participants’ sense of time.
The isolation was completely voluntary and two-thirds of the participants even remarked that they had wanted to stay in the cave longer. Some felt like they had been in the cave for a much shorter period of time. Participants used their biological clocks to identify the passage of time and counted days in sleep cycles.