After 40 days with no notion of time,

seven women and eight men between 27 and 50 years old

left a cave in the Pyrenees, in southwestern France, where they had voluntarily confined themselves on Saturday.

Dazzled by the sun, the members of the expedition emerged into the daylight around 10:30, with slightly pale faces but in good physical condition. Without a watch, telephone or natural light, the 14 volunteers, led by the French-Swiss explorer

Christian Clot

,

had to get used to the 12 degrees and 95% humidity of the

Lombrives

cave

in Ariège, generating their own electricity through a pedal system and extract water at a depth of 45 meters.

According to the explorer, founder of the

Human Adaptation Institute

, this experiment called "Deep Time" aims to study our capacities to adapt to the loss of space-time reference points, a question that was raised above all with the health crisis.

Despite the participation of researchers, the initiative is received with skepticism by other scientists who emphasize the absence of a sufficiently "rigorous" framework.

Etienne Koechlin

, director of the cognitive neuroscience laboratory at the

Escuela Normal Superior

(ENS), who participates in the "Deep Time" research, defends its "innovative" nature. The data on the brain and cognitive abilities of the participants collected before entering the cave will be compared with those collected upon exit, in order to study the changes in the nervous system linked to this exceptional environment.

Like other researchers,

Pierre Marie Lledo

, director of the "Genes, Synapse and Cognition" laboratory at the

National Center for Scientific Research

(CNRS) and of the "Perception and Memory" unit at the Pasteur Institute, points out the

absence of a " control group ", which prevents scientifically validating the results

.

Upon their departure, the 15 participants of the "Deep Time" operation met with their families, before a press conference and an exchange about their experience with journalists.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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