500 Days Underground

[taiwan_girl]

Interesting, and I would like to see the data on her sleep etc. I remember reading about another caver who went underground for a long period with out clocks, etc., and if I remember, she ended up having days of around 36 hours - 14 hours sleep and 22 hours awake or something like that.

"A 50-year-old Spanish extreme athlete who spent 500 days living 70 metres deep in a cave outside Granada with no contact with the outside world has told how the time flew by, and said she did not want to come out.

Beatriz Flamini, an elite sportswoman and mountaineer, is said by her support team to have broken a world record for the longest time spent in a cave in an experiment closely monitored by scientists seeking to learn more about the capacities of the human mind and circadian rhythms. She was 48 when she went into the cave, and celebrated two birthdays alone underground."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/spain-cave-500-days-beatriz-flamini-1.6810428

[Jolly]

Research is flawed. Most people would be incapable of that much solitude and sensory deprivation.

[taiwan_girl]

@Jolly said in 500 Days Underground:

Research is flawed. Most people would be incapable of that much solitude and sensory deprivation.

I agree. It would definitely take a certain type of person to be able to do that.

I think the person I read about in the earlier cave study ended up committing suicide (though not necessary because of the time she spent in the cave)

[George K]

@taiwan_girl said in 500 Days Underground:

if I remember, she ended up having days of around 36 hours - 14 hours sleep and 22 hours awake or something like that.

From Walker's book, "Why We Sleep."

“Kleitman and Richardson were to be their own experimental guinea pigs. Loaded with food and water for six weeks and a pair of dismantled, high-standing hospital beds, they took a trip into Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, one of the deepest caverns on the planet—so deep, in fact, that no detectable sunlight penetrates its farthest reaches. It was from this darkness that Kleitman and Richardson were to illuminate a striking scientific finding that would define our biological rhythm as being approximately one day (circadian), and not precisely one day.”

“When cut off from the daily cycle of light and dark, would their biological rhythms of sleep and wakefulness, together with body temperature, become completely erratic, or would they stay the same as those individuals in the outside world exposed to rhythmic daylight? In total, they lasted thirty-two days in complete darkness. Not only did they aggregate some impressive facial hair, but they made two groundbreaking discoveries in the process. The first was that humans, like de Mairan’s heliotrope plants, generated their own endogenous circadian rhythm in the absence of external light from the sun. That is, neither Kleitman nor Richardson descended into random spurts of wake and sleep, but instead expressed a predictable and repeating pattern of prolonged wakefulness (about fifteen hours), paired with consolidated bouts of about nine hours of sleep.

The second unexpected—and more profound—result was that their reliably repeating cycles of wake and sleep were not precisely twenty-four hours in length, but consistently and undeniably longer than twenty-four hours. Richardson, in his twenties, developed a sleep-wake cycle of between twenty-six and twenty-eight hours in length. That of Kleitman, in his forties, was a little closer to, but “ still longer than, twenty-four hours. Therefore, when removed from the external influence of daylight, the internally generated “day” of each man was not exactly twenty-four hours, but a little more than that. Like an inaccurate wristwatch whose time runs long, with each passing (real) day in the outside world, Kleitman and Richardson began to add time based on their longer, internally generated chronometry.
Since our innate biological rhythm is not precisely twenty-four hours, but thereabouts, a new nomenclature was required: the circadian rhythm—that is, one that is approximately, or around, one day in length, and not precisely one day.III In the seventy-plus years since Kleitman and Richardson’s seminal experiment, we have now determined that the average duration of a human adult’s endogenous circadian clock runs around twenty-four hours and fifteen minutes in length. Not too far off the twenty-four-hour rotation of the Earth, but not the precise timing that any self-respecting Swiss watchmaker would ever accept.”

[Copper]

@Jolly said in 500 Days Underground:

Most people would be incapable of that much solitude and sensory deprivation.

It could have been worse.

She could have been watching reruns of The View for 500 days.

[Jolly]

You are a cruel man.