The athlete Beatriz Flamini has accomplished a feat: 500 days in total isolation in a cave 70 meters deep. Fresh out of the experience, she explained to the media that she had lost track of time. What mechanisms are at the origin of this scrambling of time in such a context?
The story of Beatriz Flamini made the media rounds in mid-April 2023. This 50-year-old Spanish athlete spent 510 days in a cave, 70 meters deep, completely isolated. Admittedly, this is a record now listed in the Guinness Book. But this isolation also constitutes a scientific experiment and, at the heart of it, the question of our approach to time.
” On the 65th day, I stopped counting and lost track of time “said Beatriz Flamini. When the time came to leave the cave, when her friends and colleagues arrived, she was unaware that it was the 500th day: for her, at this stage, she had only spent 160-170 days. How to explain that our brain ends up losing the notion of time in such circumstances? Psychologist Ruth Ogden looked into the matter and gave some explanations in The Conversation, April 20.
500 days lived in 160 days
If the notion of time was lost for Ruth Ogden, it is perhaps already quite simply because this very notion was not totally relevant in the context of this cave: it gradually gave less importance over time.
But the phenomenon is deeper still: time is not just a matter of the clock. “ Our actions, emotions, and changes in our environment can have a huge effect on how our minds sense time. “, explains Ruth Ogden.
To follow the passage of time, our way of life, in society, is full of signals. There are of course our watches or the time on electronic devices, but also the Sun, our personal and professional activities, social interactions. In the cave, these signals of the passage of time were absent. ” It is therefore possible that Flamini relied more on psychological processes to monitor the weather. adds Ogden.
But what psychological mechanisms can they take over? According to the psychologist, first of all there are memories, which serve as time markers. ” If we don’t know how long we’ve been doing something, we use the number of memories formed during the event as an index of how much time has passed. “, she explains. This is why it is easier to remember a week or a weekend where a lot has happened, than a relatively monotonous or banal week or weekend. Similarly, the more an event marks us, the longer we have the impression that it lasted.
“It seems that we can only really let go of time when we have control over it”
Ruth Ogden, psychologist
In the cave, strictly speaking, not much was happening, and the athlete had no information about the outside world or his relatives. She read books—sixty on one e-reader—knitted, painted, and simply waited in silence. In fact, the number of memorable memories was less. The feeling of passing time has reduced to the point where the 500 days seemed to pass as 160 days.
As Ogden points out, these explanations apply in this case to voluntary isolation. ” Flamini’s ability to break free from time may have been enhanced by her deep desire to reach her 500-day goal. After all, she was the one who decided to enter the cave and she could get out of it if she wanted to. ” In the event of forced confinement, the perception can be completely reversed: ” Prisoners of war and people serving prison sentences often report that watching the passage of time can become an obsession. It seems we can only really let go of time when we have control of it. counterbalances Ogden.
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