Few things can be more claustrophobic than the idea of burying ourselves and holding us for an extended period of time in the darkness of a closed space. No one would force Michel Siffre to do so. This speleologist subjected himself to two months of complete isolation under an underground cave. An adventure that began in the early 60's with which great strides were made in the study of the dream. That's how it all started.
It is impossible to speak of the figure of Siffre without mentioning the man who would begin this type of studies. If for centuries there have been many scientists and doctors who have dedicated their lives to the study of sleep, Nathaniel Kleitman went a step further. Together with his assistant and student Bruce Richardson, the investigator left on July 6, 1938 to spend 32 days in a cave in Kentucky. Deprived of environmental cues, they had tried to switch to a 28-hour sleep cycle. A first advance that unfortunately for Kleitman had inconclusive results.
After that first foray of Kleitman to the study of the sleep cycles engulfed in the mass of the planet, more than two decades later the adventure of the French explorer would arrive.
Siffre: studying extreme insulation
Michel Siffre was born on January 3, 1939 in Nice. The explorer, adventurer and scientist reported that at only 10 years of age discovered that passion for caving after exploring Imperial Cave Park. He spent his youth interested in the space race and therefore decided that if he did not go to space, he would try to contribute in some way to the space race itself.
What did? The man thought that the best way to help was creating situations that could face the astronauts, situations such as the possibility of ending up in some kind of deep cave. In fact some of his early ideas were based on the reality of an astronaut, confined to spend months in small spaces. Thus began their first experiments. And yes, while for some the isolation can be a punishment, for Siffre became the way for the scientific discovery.
Inside the cave temperatures would be below zero, with 98% humidity and a body temperature below 34 degrees
The first major research would come in the early 1960s, with the space race booming and the time the scientific community learned and studied how to travel to space and how to improve that trip to astronauts. These studies led to a series of questions and questions about these conditions:
Could people cope with extreme isolation in a confined space?
Given the above question valid, what would happen to our sleep cycles if there is no Sun?
There was no clear answer, so Michel Siffre at the age of 23 decides to offer the answers to the community by experiencing such a situation himself. He spent two months living in total isolation, buried more than 100 meters deep in an underground glacier in the Alps (near Nice).
The astronaut in the cave
It was a glacier he had discovered a year earlier following a biological expedition. Siffre had spent 15 days there at the time of discovery, so he thought it would be the ideal place to put the experiment into practice. A confined space where there would be no clock or daylight to mark the time. Inside the cave temperatures would be below freezing, with 98% humidity and a body temperature below 34 degrees. In other words, there was a lot of cold and humidity there. As he explained years later:
Had a computer inside the cave downright bad, and all in a small space. My feet were always wet, and my body temperature was below 34 degrees. My hobbies were to read, write and conduct research in the cave. I also spent a lot of time thinking about my future. In addition, there were two tests he performed every time he called the surface. In the first place, I took the pulse. Second, he gave me a psychological test. He had to count from 1 to 120, at the rate of one digit per second. With that test we made a great discovery: it took me five minutes to count to 120. In other words, psychologically I had experienced five real minutes as if they were two.
Precisely the passage of time in the absence of a clock was one of the most strange and disturbing situations. The geologist carried out a scientific protocol by placing a team at the entrance to the cave. This way and every time he woke up, every time he ate and just before bed, Siffre called them to measure the times (although the team could not respond to him by order of the same Sifre). He had unknowingly created a field of human chronobiology. And it is that long before, in 1922, it had been discovered that the rats had an internal biological clock. Siffre's experiment showed that, like the lower mammals, we also have a biological clock.
Inside the cave suffered hypothermia and had to deal with extreme temperatures, however and as narrated from his experiences, never in the 63 days under the ground had problems to deal with reality. He only remembers once when he thought of madness. When Siffre arrived on September 14, the appointed date for her departure from the cave, she felt for the first time how she had lost track of time:
I went down to the cave on July 16 and was planning to finish the experiment on September 14th. When my team on the surface notified me that the day had finally arrived, I thought it was only August 20 and I thought I still had a month to get out of the cave. My psychological time had been compressed for two.
Although his mind had "lost," his body remained stable. The reason is because of that protocol he kept with his team abroad every time he woke up, ate or went to sleep. As a result he had kept unwanted regular cycles of sleep and wakefulness. A good day for the geologist lasted little more than 24 hours.
Following the experience and findings found, Siffre would continue to carry out similar tests until 1972. More than a hundred tests for ten years isolated in artificial underground bunkers, although after the first experiment, all would be less than a month.
In 1972, Siffre carried out the biggest challenge ever. He decides to descend to a cave in Texas to stay inside for six months. A NASA-sponsored experiment that also varied in the extreme conditions of its first voyage to the depths (in 1962). Now it was a warm cave and to some extent luxuriant, where the biggest inconvenience was a series of electrodes placed on the head intended to monitor his heart, brain and muscle activity.
Soon, he began to think of suicide, a confinement space where his only "friend" and company was a mouse
With the passage of the weeks he got used to it. He spent the day testing or exploring the cave. However on the 79th day of his isolation his sanity began to break. Everything indicated that there was a beginning of depression, especially after breaking the record player and when the mold began to spoil their books, magazines and scientific material. Soon, he began to think of suicide, a confinement space where his only "friend" and company was a mouse that appeared from time to time to rummage through his supplies. Siffre would have killed him by accident. By the time the experiment was coming to an end, a thunderstorm ended up in a flush over the scanner through the electrodes on the head.
At the end of the test this returned to yield interesting results. During the first month he had shown regular sleep-wake cycles of just over 24 hours. After this time, the cycles began to vary at random between 18 and 52 hours. It was Siffre's "dream" at an early age, an important finding that prompted interest in ways to induce longer sleep-wake cycles in humans, something that could benefit divers or astronauts.
Siffre would not finish his feats here. In 1999 (and at 60 years of age) was reintroduced, now in the cave Clamouse, for the study of conditions from the advanced ages. There he spent almost three months in his last approach to what he dedicated his life. The man who studied the caves and finished studying time left Clamouse on February 14, 2000.
The depth is dark. And we need light. And if the light goes out, we're dead. In the Middle Ages, the caves were the place where the demons lived. But at the same time, the caves are a place of hope. To enter them to find minerals and treasures, and is one of the last places where it is still possible to have adventures and make new discoveries.
Michel Siffre (2008)