Why 15 volunteers spent 40 days and 40 nights in a dark cave, with no contact with outside world

TORONTO -

After 40 days in a cave with no clocks and no sunlight, the director of an unusual project designed to test humans’ perception of time says he would do it all again, without hesitation.

The Deep Time project had 15 volunteers enter a cave with no sunlight and no clocks for 40 days and 40 nights. The aim of the isolation study was to see what happened when people had no sense of time, inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The group of volunteers had no contact with the outside world, no internet, just each other to pass the time inside the Lombrives cave in France.

“We decided to understand what happened in the brain when you are completely out of time,” Christian Clot, director of Deep Time project, told CTV’s Your Morning on Thursday.

Clot is the founder and president of the Human Adaptation Institute, which led the study and focuses on people’s ability to adapt to various situations. Clot is a Swiss explorer and researcher. He has been on numerous expeditions in extreme environments, including being one of the first people to cross the Cordillera Darwin mountain range in Chile.

Deep Time project volunteers had some rules to follow in the cave -- they weren’t allowed to wake each other up or force anyone to do anything they didn’t want to do. They were there to answer the question: how do our brains track time?

“We just follow our own rhythm,” he said. “And that was really interesting to see what happened in the brain of each people in the cave.”

While isolating with several strangers, no natural sunlight and no outside contact might sound like a recipe for disaster, but Clot said that the team worked well together.

“We saw that the group was the best synchronizer, we just worked well together and we were happy to be there together,” he said. “Each time we had an argument or something a bit difficult, we just talked, final solution on everything went alright, so it was nice to see that.”

The cave dwelling volunteers passed their time by keeping the cave in clean and good condition, talking and getting to know each other, and quiet contemplation. Prior to entering the cave the volunteers knew very little about each other.

“A lot of time to just get to know each other because we didn't know all of us before going into a cave,” said Clot.

With no access to social media to snoop through each other’s past, they had to have real conversations.

“It's really nice when you don't have Facebook, Instagram, all these kind of things, but suddenly you just need to talk to people to have a real idea of them. It was just amazing to see that,” he said.

His big takeaway was how adaptable humans are when they decide to work together, and how working together brought them all closer.

“We learned that when a group of people without any experience decide to work together and to put everything they have in them toward the community, you can live in any kind of conditions,” said Clot.

And the conditions weren’t exactly perfect. It was just 10C in the cave, with 100 per cent humidity. The 40 days of isolation came to an end on April 24.

Clot said that the volunteers had changes in their brains after the 40-day isolation showing that we do adapt quickly to our surroundings. The volunteers underwent MRI scans and standard laboratory testing before and after their time spent in the cave. Outside the cave, 40 scientists kept a close eye on the volunteers through various sensors to track their sleep, social interactions and behavioural reactions.

“We create some neurons, and we destroy some others of course, but we create some new tools, some new functions in the brain,” he said.

And being able to change and adapt this quickly is good, he said. Especially if you want to learn something new or break an old habit.

“You can change whenever you want, if you decide to learn some new things, use some new tools,” he said.

He plans to do it all again, in other caves but also in other environments like rain forests and deserts.

“We try to understand what we are as human beings when facing new conditions, new changes.”