36.08 - MU Podcast - Free-Running | The Human Clock

Summary

Hosts Joe Hodgkin and Brandon Thomas dig into Alan Burdick's 2017 book Why Time Flies to explore how humans perceive and keep time, from atomic clocks to the clocks inside our own cells. The centerpiece is French geologist Michel Siffre, who lived alone in caves without clocks in 1962 and 1972, losing track of entire weeks as his body's internal rhythms drifted apart. Along the way the hosts riff on synchronicities, underground-dwelling beings, and the strange ways nature keeps time.

Key takeaways

• 1Alan Burdick's 2017 book 'Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation' is the episode's source.
• 2Michel Siffre spent 60 days in the Scarasson underground glacier cave in France in 1962 and believed only 35 days had passed.
• 3In 1972, with NASA interest, Siffre spent about six months in Midnight Cave near Del Rio, Texas, where his sleep-wake and body-temperature rhythms desynchronized. He reportedly came out roughly half a million dollars in debt.
• 4Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is a calculated average of atomic clocks worldwide, with the final values published after the fact in a document called 'Circular T'.
• 5Burdick cites the 3–5 a.m. 'zombie zone', when reaction time drops, and links it partly to human error in disasters including Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the Exxon Valdez.
• 6The hosts describe a listener synchronicity involving Reader's Digest's 1982 'Mysteries of the Unexplained' and preview Vincent and Margaret Gaddis's 1970 book 'The Strange World of Animals and Pets'.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

Welcome to Mysterious Universe Season 36, Episode 8. Today we're going to be talking about why time flies, and this is Alan Burdick from 2017. The subtitle is a mostly scientific investigation, and there is a lot of kind of dense scientific stuff in it, but I do want to leave some of it in there because it pertains to his theories on why time flies or doesn't fly. So we'll start out with that, and then there's a couple cool stories in there, too, that you might have heard before, but maybe not. I'm Joe Hodgkin. Joining me is Brandon Thomas. Yo, yo. How are you, sir? Yo, yo. Yeah, yo, yo, yo. Great. I did want to thank listener Amber, also Plus member Amber. Shout out. For sending in her stories about, well, today it was prophetic dreams, but also, do you want to tell the weird synchro that you had when you emailed her back? We have a huge synchro, and this is so cool. So Amber, first of all, shout out again, darling. Thank you, Joe, for bringing this up. Yes. So the synchro is that she reached out. She has an email that she wrote about maybe a possible, almost potential spontaneous combustion event that she had, which we are going to read in the extension. So sign up in the links below, guys, if you'd like to join us for more than one-third of the content we put out. In the links below, check it out, because we are going to read her email in full, and it's an incredible story. So yes, I called her yesterday on the phone. We have an incredible conversation. She's eloquent. ...

Excerpt from Mysterious Universe, Aug 28, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.