After 40 days “out of time”, seven women and eight men aged 27 to 50 left a cave in the Pyrenees on Saturday, in southwestern France, where they had voluntarily confined themselves, noted journalists from AFP.
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Dazzled by the sun, the members of the expedition found the light of day around 10:30 am local time, faces a little pale, but visibly in good shape.
Without a watch, telephone or natural light, the 14 volunteers led by Franco-Swiss explorer Christian Clot had to get used to the 12 degrees and 95% humidity in the Lombrives cave in Ariège, generating their own electricity by a pedal boat system and draw water 45 meters deep.
According to the explorer, founder of the Human Adaptation Institute, this experiment called “Deep Time” aims to study our capacities to adapt to the loss of spatio-temporal landmarks, a question raised in particular with the health crisis.
Although researchers are associated with it, the approach is greeted with skepticism by other scientists who point out the absence of a sufficiently “rigorous” framework.
Etienne Koechlin, director of the cognitive neuroscience laboratory at the Ecole normale supérieure (ENS), which participates in “Deep Time” research, defends its “innovative” character.
Thus, data on the brain and on the cognitive capacities of the participants collected before entering the cave will be compared with those collected at the exit in order in particular to study the changes of the nervous system linked to this exceptional environment.
Like other researchers, Pierre-Marie Lledo, director of the “Genes, Synapses and Cognition” laboratory at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and of the “Perception and Memory” unit at the Institut Pasteur, points out the absence of a “control group” allowing the results of people locked up to be compared to those of others left outside, which prevents scientific validation of the results.
When they left, the 15 participants in Operation “Deep Time” reunited with their loved ones, before a press conference scheduled for mid-day and a discussion on their experience with journalists in the wake.
