Passions lead people to do unthinkable things. And the story of Michel Sffre It is no exception. It was one of the men most passionate about geology: at 23 years he decided to camp 63 days only in a cave in the Alps French to self -experience on chronobiology. And, thanks to the fact that it was exposed in this way, they managed to discover a finding that marked a before and after in the history of mankind.
In an interview with Cabinet Magazine In 2008, the geologist said why he decided to perform that experience so risky and lonely: “You have to understand that I was a training geologist. In 1961, we discovered an underground glacier in the Alps, about seventy kilometers from Nice. At first, my idea was to prepare a geological expedition and spend about fifteen days underground studying the glacier, but a couple of months later, I told myself that fifteen days were not enough. ”
Sffre He entered the underground cave in the Alps on June 16, 1962 and left on September 17 of that same year. In his experimentation, the specialist scientist in the study of the caves ended with an unexpected finding that transformed compression on the perception of time humans have.
“I decided to stay two months; and then this idea occurred to me, the idea that became the idea of my life. I decided to live as an animal, without clock, in the dark, without knowing the time”He said in reference to how the idea of analyzing the perception of the passage of time in humans arose.
For research, Sffre invented a protocol. “I put a team at the entrance of the cave. I decided to call them when I woke up, when eating and just before sleeping. My team had no right to call me, so I had no idea of the time it was outside. Without knowing it, he had created the field of human chronobiology“He said about the process in which they carried out the protocol.
In 1922, it had been discovered that rats have an internal biological clock. “My experiment showed that humans, like lower mammals, also have a biological clock,” he said.
In addition, the passionate geologist said that he had a poor team and a small camp “with many things tight inside.” The scientist spent time accompanied by the reading, writing and research of the cave in which he was.
“They did two tests every time I went to the surface. First, I took my pulse. Second, a psychological test. I had to count from 1 to 120, at a rate of a digit per second. With that test we made a great discovery: I took five minutes to count to 120,” he said.
Suffre’s findings suggest that, without the circadian rhythms that are guided by nature through the sunrise and sunset, Our bodies seem to have an internal clock that works approximately in a 48 -hour cycle. This theory was reinforced through other experiments carried out by the French speleologist throughout its more than 50 years of experience.