Trapped in Time

The scientist who disappeared into a cave for six months.

What is time? Is time simply something our minds fabricate? This is a story of a scientist who risked his life to solve this question and did a bizarre experiment.

We base our lives upon ''time''. We understand the day when it's sunrise and the night when it's sunset. Clocks, calendars, the sun, and the moon are the rulers with which time is counted up with us! But what if none of these external factors existed? Is time something our minds can make sense of on their own?

It was this that a French scientist, Michel Siffre, had wanted to know back in 1972. To do that, he was prepared to do what no one else had done.

That takes the cake, or rather, you know what I mean, that life In The Entire Darkness below ground. Some people were saying this was too insane an idea. But Sifre's aim was to know how the human body and soul respond under extreme circumstances, and the mystery of how the mind functions in relation to time was a particular puzzle for him.

Sifre had intended to retire from the world and to seclude himself. There were no clocks, no sunshine. His team was to watch just what he did from below.

What does the human brain do in complete isolation? What if you're removed from the normal rhythms?

So 44 years after our country's official rebranding, the company ventured into a dank cave in the US state of Texas, 440 feet below the surface. It wasn't just any darkness. It was complete darkness. In it reigned an unutterable stillness. He and a bag were the only things he required for survival.

Time inside the cave was immeasurable. There wasn't even an image of a clock like the one shown in the picture. He would eat, drink, and sleep as /when he was hungry/drowsy. At first, he tried to become accustomed to the new daily routine outside. But gradually, his sense of time began to alter. Hours felt like minutes. Days froze together. Was it day? Night? How many hours had passed? He had no idea.

We have vehicles that could make the run from Sifre to Gayau with ease. After this, he started having hallucinations, he could see shadows and hear invisible voices. He grew scared, thinking that there must be another person inside the cave. His thoughts became confused. The loneliness was splintering his mind.

But Sifre knew none of this. Up above the cave, his research team was also scientifically recording everything Sifre did, when he slept, when he woke, and when he ate. In addition, Sifre's only means of communication with the outside team was a phone. He would call the team when he called the team. The team never confronted him. Over these phone calls, they captured his emotions and his thoughts about time. It was a wild, unmeasurable success to say the least.

Sifre was removed from real-time. By his second month, he believed 24 days had gone by. But actually, 47 days had gone by! His internal clock was on the verge of extreme sluggishness. His body had become attuned to a circadian cycle. Now '36 hours awake / '12 hours asleep'. This surprised scientists. It's just that human bodies have evolved to operate on a 24-hour circadian schedule attuned to the sun. But when the sun was shining, Sifre’s body also had a rhythm of its own! Unattached to the sun. This proved there's some internal system in the human brain that tracks time.

But there was a downside to this experiment. With each passing week and month, Sifre's mind deteriorated. He even started to forget spoken words. It was hard to even remember everyday things. He just sort of immediately flipped emotional states, from delighted to incredibly sad. The isolation was reprogramming his brain. Sifre, who eventually made a full recovery, explained that the experience was a ''slow descent into madness''.

In solitude, he started talking to the insects. Even his voice in the cave was a comfort to listen to for a time until the awful, oppressive silence flowed back.

At the end of 180 days, Sifre was removed from the cave. It felt like no more than maybe 151 days. 29 days less than real time! He was startled by how much time he had wasted. Without those external cues, the brain has no idea what time it is. What Siffre's experiment demonstrated, however, was that

👉 Time is not merely external. It's an agency of the mind.

👉 Isolation and sensory deprivation (i.e, darkness, silence) disable this ability, and so you come into chaotic states.

Siffre's findings radically altered our understanding of time, and were a great help in the study of circadian rhythms (our daily body clock), in discoveries made about space travel (the way astronauts coped with isolation) and in our comprehension of the mental health of people in solitary.

But Siffre paid dearly for it all. He experienced prolonged memory loss. His mental health would not recover for years. He would later call the cave ''an endless night,'' an unsettling experience that haunted him for decades.