He surrounded himself with 14 Assistants to carry out his experiment in Ussat, in Ariège. Explorer Christian Clute launched a group cave retreat this Sunday, which will take 40 days. The Fifteen Adventurers are not restrained, as in the myth of Plato’s Cave, but they will still be deprived of daylight and any notion of time. Thirty-nine kilometers of galleries were created for this world first, and the goal is to understand how the human body and brain adapt to severe confinement.

Social relations under the microscope

In 1962, scientist Ness Michel Seaver led this type of cave adventure for only 59 days. This time, social relationships became the center of the experience. “When you don’t have a watch, you don’t have an alarm, and when you don’t have a means to meet (…), you will have to find a completely new solution,” Christian Klot explained before entering the cave. His hypothesis is that after a period of destruction of human relations and loss of temporal parameters “The group will succeed in creating a synchronization system that allows it to work.”