What does it do to a person to be socially isolated - over many months?
Christiane Heinicke knew this even before the corona pandemic.
In 2015, the geophysicist embarked on a challenging experiment: for 365 days, she and five colleagues rehearsed life on Mars, in a simulated space station in Hawaii, cut off from the rest of the world.
"On the first day after the end of the experiment, I felt like a sponge that had been squeezed for a long time - and which was finally able to expand again," she recalls.
What Heinicke experienced at the time was extreme;
but most people today can easily empathize with the pressure that weighed on it.
Twelve months with the Sars-CoV-2 virus and without the usual social life have left their mark on many (many).