The influence of cave darkness on Thai chatter teams is stuck

Living long in the darkness of the cave deep in the ground can make youngsters sleepless, depressed, and easily in conflict with their teammates.

The youth team consists of 12 players who are teenagers (11-16 years old) and 25-year-old coaches missing in Tham Luang cave in Chiang Rai province for 9 days from June 23. The cave is flooded where they are found very dark, wet and dangerous, according to the BBC.

After the rescue team found that they survived on July 2, the team was provided with food, water and a medical examination confirming that no members were in critical condition. But with the forecast of higher rainfall in the coming days, authorities said it could take up to four months for the flood to recede to rescue the team from the cave.

The rescue team is looking for ways to get stuck players and coaches out of the cave.(Photo: AFP).

Besides the psychological shock of being trapped hundreds of meters underground, the dark environment lacking sunlight can affect the senses and perception of the boys' time. Changes can put them at risk of depression, insomnia and discord within the team.

This is not the first isolated case in the cave system for months. In 1962, French geologist Michel Siffre crawled into the underground glacier that he discovered near Nice, France, for two months. There is no clock, calendar or sunlight, no contact with the outside world, Siffre lets the body decide the behavior.

Michel Siffre volunteered to stay underground for a long time for scientific research.(Photo: AFP).

He records his activities and calls his associates outside whenever he wakes up, eats and before going to bed. They did not tell him what time it was. When a colleague called to announce that the two months had ended, Siffre showed no confidence. He thought that only one month had passed. His psychological awareness of time has become distorted due to being constantly in the dark. Similarly, when divers find the team stuck, one of the youngsters' first questions is how long they've been down there.

Siffre's notes reveal another interesting phenomenon. Although he spends about a third of his time sleeping like he does on the ground, his sleep / wake cycle is not 24 hours, but 24 hours and 30 minutes. He began to live on his own internal time, not the time most of us followed in everyday life, determined by the time of the sun's rise and fall.

The same phenomenon can be observed in people who are completely blind. Although their biological clocks are different, some people have less than 24 hours of time while many others live 25-hour cycles. They no longer maintain their time according to the outside world. Therefore, their sleep time also changes day by day.

The medical term for this condition is a 24-hour non-periodic sleep rhythm disorder . The characteristic of this disorder is the period of good sleep when the biological clock follows the same world as the outside, accompanied by poor sleep and long sleepiness during the day. Biological rhythms are produced by very small brain tissue called suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) , based on signals from a group of light sensitive retinal ganglion cells.

If you are stuck underground, or your eyes are so wide that your brain can no longer perceive light, you will begin to experience sleep disorder / sleep, just like the Thai football team at the moment. Due to the less likely the biological clock of all members in the same team, the time they feel sleepy and alert will be different. This can cause problems in confined spaces, when someone wants to sleep while others feel awake.

Putting lights to regulate the circadian rhythm into a cave can help reduce the impact of darkness on the team.(Photo: Alamy).

There are also biological clocks in our other tissues. They are synchronized with each other thanks to SCN. If you are stuck underground, those watches are also disordered. Biological arrhythmias have been associated with depression, insomnia, metabolic disorders and hormones, and decreased ability to concentrate.

When 33 miners were stranded 69 days in a copper mine in Chile in 2010, a special bio-rhythm regulator was dropped to simulate the natural light / dark cycle outside. The same way can be used in Thailand. If the artificial light used in the day is bright enough, it can trick the SCN to adjust itself, allowing it to synchronize with the outside world and keep the body on time.