"With no daily obligations and no children around, the challenge was 'to profit from the present moment without ever thinking about what will happen in one hour, in two hours'...."

"In partnership with laboratories in France and Switzerland, scientists monitored the 15 team members’ sleep patterns, social interactions and behavioural reactions via sensors. One sensor was a tiny thermometer inside a capsule that participants swallowed like a pill. It measured body temperature and transmitted data to a computer until it was expelled naturally. The team members followed their biological clocks to know when to wake up, go to sleep and eat. They counted their days not in hours but in sleep cycles. 'It’s really interesting to observe how this group synchronises themselves,' [project director Christian] Clot said earlier in a recording from inside the cave.... Two-thirds of the participants expressed a desire to remain underground a little longer to finish group projects started during their stay.... "

From "15 French volunteers leave cave after 40 days without daylight or clocks/Deep Time project investigated how a lack of external contact would affect sense of time – and two thirds wanted to stay longer" (The Guardian). 

FROM THE EMAIL: ALP writes:

I found this very interesting - the fact that so many wanted to stay in the cave. Like you, I don't do "real travel" - the kind that involves airports and exotic places. Prefer ordinary days as well. My ideal vacation is one in which I have a stretch of days where I do not have to look at the clock. I am constantly worried about time passing when I'm on the job; such is life in Big Law. Just listening to traveling types describe their plans, designed with near military precision to fit it all in, is annoying. Of course the Cave People want to stay in the cave - we are so linked to the passing of time it is such a nice change to be divorced from it. I totally get it.

You're reminding me how much I hated working "billable hours." It's something I only did for a couple years after law school, but I've never forgotten how much I appreciated moving into a job where my time wasn't connected to the money. The money flowed in over there, and nothing about the way I did my work made me feel that time equals money. I know some people prefer to feel the connection between work and money. It can be quite motivating! But I love the disconnect. 

AND: SGT Ted emails:

The experiment of the cave dwellers is interesting but seems like contrived science to me, by removing normal activity that is required for survival, like finding food, raising the next generation and living in a natural diurnal environment. Maybe as an application towards living in outer space it has some merit. But they could just as easily have done that with a sealed building instead of underground caves.