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by gHosts 162 days ago
Arguably a single datapoint doesn't allow you to discern which caused what....

Did being alone underground for months warp his mind...?

Or do you have to be pretty bent to start with to do what every non-warped person doesn't do, because they can foresee it would really suck....

2 comments

While you raise a valid point, I think we should also be careful to not accidentally apply so-called "question substitution" here: whether or not his mind already was "warped" compared to the norm is a different question from whether or not it was warped before and did not warp any further.

To me it seems pretty difficult to argue that the time spent underground did not affect his mind, regardless of the state it was in before.

One more anecdotal point: He arranged for a female spelunker to perform the same experiment later. She stayed underground for 100-some days. 14 months after her stay, she OD'd on barbiturates. There's a wikipedia article about her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A9ronique_Le_Guen

Tragic - I'd hesitate to tie the cave experiments to the death, but it sure looks bad. It doesn't seem like humans are designed to cope well with long isolation and detachment from reality, but deprivation tanks and other practices show significantly positive results.

That’s really sad. Does seem like they might be correlated. Reading all this I’m not sure why they have to be underground in a cave?? Ok they’re cavers doing these temporal experiments but those could be done as easily above ground somewhere with no solar cues.