French Researchers Spent 40 Days in a Cave to Study Our Perception of Time
In today’s fast-paced world, many of us feel that time is a luxury we just don’t have. But what would happen if we had no way of telling the passing of time? A group of volunteers, isolated in a French cave for 40 days, recently found out.
A group of 15 French volunteers was part of a study called “Deep Time”, which set out to explore human adaptability to isolation. Christian Clot, an explorer and the project’s director, was also one of the volunteers.
“The main objective for the entire mission was to understand how a group of human beings can adapt when suddenly they are in a situation without one of the most important things in our life, which is time. I mean, everything is time in our life, we’re always watching our watch or smartphone, and suddenly you are out of time, you don’t have this information,” he said.
“What happens to the brain? What happens to social situations? What happens to our genetics?”
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We're Born Natural Innovators, So Does School Kill Creativity?
As children, we’re born with wild and inventive imaginations. In fact, 98 percent of children are born creative geniuses according to a test devised by NASA scientists. But as we get older that figure dwindles, and by adulthood, the number of creative geniuses drops to an astonishingly low average. Which begs the question: does school kill creativity?
George Land’s Creativity Test
When the deputy director for NASA wanted to figure out how to separate creative types from the rest, he tapped George Land to create a test. The goal was to seclude those who could think outside the box and come up with atypical solutions to some of NASA’s toughest problems. So, in 1968, he created a test that accurately predicted creativity, but then found himself faced with the question of where creativity comes from. Is it learned, or does it come from experience?
Land decided to apply his test to a range of age groups to see how creativity varied as we get older. He used a sample of 1,600 children and continued the study into his subjects’ adulthood. Incredibly, he found that by the time they reached maturity, only two percent of subjects passed the creativity test, despite their creative success as kids.
