Michel Siffre’s self-experiments in a cave with no light (2018)

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23931900-400-this-man-spent-months-alone-underground-and-it-warped-his-mind/

50•Anon84•1mo ago

Comments

Teknomadix•1mo ago

gHosts•1mo ago

Arguably a single datapoint doesn't allow you to discern which caused what....

Did being alone underground for months warp his mind...?

Or do you have to be pretty bent to start with to do what every non-warped person doesn't do, because they can foresee it would really suck....

vanderZwan•1mo ago

While you raise a valid point, I think we should also be careful to not accidentally apply so-called "question substitution" here: whether or not his mind already was "warped" compared to the norm is a different question from whether or not it was warped before and did not warp any further.

To me it seems pretty difficult to argue that the time spent underground did not affect his mind, regardless of the state it was in before.

mcswell•1mo ago

One more anecdotal point: He arranged for a female spelunker to perform the same experiment later. She stayed underground for 100-some days. 14 months after her stay, she OD'd on barbiturates. There's a wikipedia article about her.

observationist•1mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A9ronique_Le_Guen

Tragic - I'd hesitate to tie the cave experiments to the death, but it sure looks bad. It doesn't seem like humans are designed to cope well with long isolation and detachment from reality, but deprivation tanks and other practices show significantly positive results.

gizajob•1mo ago

That’s really sad. Does seem like they might be correlated. Reading all this I’m not sure why they have to be underground in a cave?? Ok they’re cavers doing these temporal experiments but those could be done as easily above ground somewhere with no solar cues.

lombasihir•1mo ago

if thats the case, im wondering, do people on northen hemisphere perceived time differently than people on equator? since the day/night sun cycle is different?

jotaen•1mo ago

I find the “no light” bit in the subtitle confusing, as the article says he had “a torch as his only light source”. I get that a torch is not much light, but it’s still significantly different from “no light”. Or maybe they meant “no daylight”, but that seems hardly worth to mention for a cave.

adammarples•4w ago

It's worth mentioning because we use daylight to regulate our circadian rhythm, and he was studying the body's circadian rhythm without daylight

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