after an experience of 510 days underground, the sportswoman Beatriz Flamini found the open air

What were you doing on November 20, 2021? Somewhere in Spain, Beatriz Flamini, a Spanish athlete, was preparing to descend 70 meters underground to spend 500 days there alone, without time markers. “It’s not that time goes faster or slower, it’s that time doesn’t go by at all because it’s 4 a.m. all the time”, she confided during the experience. This extreme athlete, then 48 years old, lost all sense of time on the 65th day.

Loss of time markers

She paints, reads, knits, plays sports, and sometimes, cracks. Outside, speleologists and scientists take care of its comfort and explain that it “must be able not to lose memory, to make decisions, to concentrate and keep reasoning skills”. The experiment had already been attempted. In 1962, the Frenchman Michel Siffre lasted 59 days alone. In 2021, a group of 15 French people spent 40 days in community, to study the loss of temporal markers. Beatriz Flamini has now found the open air.