Getting Lost Makes the Brain Go Haywire

On the evening of December 18, 2004, in the hamlet of Madiran, in southwestern France, a man named Jean-Luc Josuat-Vergès wandered into the tunnels of an abandoned mushroom farm and got lost. Josuat-Vergès, who was 48 and employed as a caretaker at a local health center, had been depressed. Leaving his wife and 14-year-old son at home, he’d driven up into the hills with a bottle of whiskey and a pocketful of sleeping pills. After steering his Land Rover into the large entrance tunnel of the mushroom farm, he’d clicked on his flashlight and stumbled into the dark.

The tunnels, which had been originally dug out of the limestone hills as a chalk mine, comprised a five-mile-long labyrinth of blind corridors, twisting passages, and dead ends. Josuat-Vergès walked down one corridor, turned, then turned again. His flashlight battery slowly dimmed, then died; shortly after, as he tromped down one soggy corridor, his shoes were sucked off his feet and swallowed by the mud. Josuat-Vergès stumbled barefoot through the maze, groping in pitch-darkness, searching in vain for the exit.

On the afternoon of January 21, 2005, exactly 34 days after Josuat-Vergès first entered the tunnels, three local teenage boys decided to explore the abandoned mushroom farm. Just a few steps into the dark entrance corridor, they discovered the empty Land Rover, with the driver’s door still open. The boys called the police, who promptly dispatched a search team. After 90 minutes, in a chamber just 600 feet from the entrance, they found Josuat-Vergès. He was ghostly pale, thin as a skeleton, and had grown out a long, scraggly beard—but he was alive.

In the following days, as the story of Josuat-Vergès’s survival reached the media, he became known as le miraculé des ténèbres, “the miracle of darkness.”

He regaled reporters with stories from his weeks in the mushroom farm, which seemed to rival even the grandest tales of stranded mountain climbers or