In the outside world, the busyness of modern life, and social pressure to avoid wasting time, mean many of us live in a perpetual state of time stress. The loss of time may also reflect the reduced importance of time in cave life. Flamini herself noted: “I’m still stuck on November 21, 2021. The more memories we form in an event or era, the longer we perceive it to have lasted.īusy days and weeks filled with lots of novel and exciting events are typically remembered as longer than more monotonous ones where nothing noteworthy happens.įor Flamini, the absence of social interaction combined with a lack of information about family and current affairs (the war in Ukraine, the reopening of society after COVID lockdowns), may have significantly reduced the number of memories she formed during her isolation. If we don’t know how long we have been doing something for, we use the number of memories formed during the event as an index to the amount of time that has passed. One way in which we keep track of the passage of time is memory. So Flamini may have become more reliant on psychological processes to monitor time. In the darkness of an underground cave, without the company of others, many signals of passing of time will have disappeared. Our actions, emotions and changes in our environment can have powerful effects on the way in which our minds process time.įor most people, the rising and setting of the sun mark the passing of days, and work and social routines mark the passing of hours. The loss of time was so profound that, when her support team came to retrieve her, she was surprised that her time was up, instead believing she had only been there for 160-170 days. When talking to reporters about her experiences, Flamini explained she rapidly lost her sense of time. One of the first things that became apparent on Apwhen she emerged from the cave was how fluid time is, shaped more by your personality traits and the people around you than a ticking clock. For 500 days, she documented her experiences to help scientists understand the effects of extreme isolation. She had almost no contact with the outside world during her impressive feat of human endurance. The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.Ī year and half alone in a cave might sound like a nightmare to a lot of people, but Spanish athlete Beatriz Flamini emerged with a cheerful grin and said she thought she had more time to finish her book.
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