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Forced desynchrony

An experimental protocol that places people in a time-isolated environment on an artificial day length well outside the range of entrainment - twenty hours, say, or twenty-eight. Because the master clock cannot follow that light cycle, it reverts to free-running on its own period while sleep, metabolism and cognitive performance decouple from it - and that decoupling is precisely what the researcher wants to observe, since it separates the effect of the clock from the effect of simply having been awake a long time. The out-of-laboratory version is the Mars rover teams living on a 24.65-hour day: a mismatch of only thirty-nine minutes, and still more than half the personnel suffered chronic fatigue and measurable desynchrony.