Spanish athlete Beatriz Flamini had almost no contact with the outside world during her impressive feat of human endurance. For 500 days, she documented her experiences to help scientists understand the effects of extreme isolation.
A year and half alone in a cave might sound like a nightmare to a lot of people, but Spanish athlete Beatriz Flamini emerged with a cheerful grin and said she thought she had more time to finish her book.
One of the first things that became apparent on April 12, 2023, when she emerged from the cave was how fluid time is, shaped more by your personality traits and the people around you than a ticking clock. One way in which we keep track of the passage of time is memory. If we don’t know how long we have been doing something for, we use the number offormed during the event as an index to the amount of time that has passed. The more memories we form in an event or era, the longer we perceive it to have lasted.