How extreme isolation warps the mind
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Re: How extreme isolation warps the mind
#2> For starters, isolation messes with our sense of time.
Interestingly, people who have lost their sight or hearing, at birth or from a young age, experience this too.
From my own experience (back when I was deaf), I would (and occasionally still do) perceive relatively large stretches of time (up to a few hours) as considerably less, and vice-versa.
Funnily enough, though understandably I suppose, I also have a very hard time placing events in time in relation to each other, it very often becomes an exercise in rationality (i.e. event A could only have happened if event B had too).
Sadly, I can't find much information about this, except maybe this (which I don't have full access to) http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn_a_00135...
Re: How extreme isolation warps the mind
#3It's worth noting that Kalin at UW-Madison is looking to resurrect Harlow's work on socially deprived primates[1], something that was previously posted here at HN.
Some of the primate researchers' work is (to a layman like me) just bizarre -- one study involved isolating mother-deprived rhesus monkeys in individual cages and giving them unrestricted access to food, water, and ethanol, in order to test their postmortem CSF 5-HIAA levels and study "early life stress on drinking and serotonin system activity." (Conclusion: if you deprive a monkey of maternal contact and then give it booze, you'll end up with a drunk monkey.)
For me, I'm both fascinated and repulsed by research into, e.g., rh5-HTTLPR polymorphisms and anxiety. Fascinated because it really is inherently interesting, and repulsed because I'm not at all certain that torturing monkeys through isolation and/or maternal deprivation and then killing them is really advancing the state of 5-HTTPLPR research far beyond what is already being done with studies that don't involve the psychiatric destruction of presocial primates. (PubMed shows 75 animal-based 5-HTTLPR/rh5-HTTLPR studies, and 1221 human-based studies.) There are some truly thorny questions here -- and I'm a proponent of animal studies in many cases -- that I feel researchers, particularly those involved in psychiatric animal models, are hand-waving away.
[1] Fellow UW-Madison researcher A. J. Bennett's view of Harlow's work is available at http://speakingofresearch.com/2014/08/03/harlow-dead-bioethi...
Re: How extreme isolation warps the mind
#4More on Michel Siffre:
Re: How extreme isolation warps the mind
#5It's worth noting that Kalin at UW-Madison is looking to resurrect Harlow's work on socially deprived primates[1], something that was previously posted here at HN. Some of the primate researchers' work is (to a layman like me) just bizarre -- one study involved isolating mother-deprived rhesus monkeys in individual cages and giving them unrestricted access to food, water, and ethanol, in order to test their postmorte…
No need to study primates when isolation is given out like free candy at prisons across America. If you make guards angry enough, you could get years "in the hole".
Re: How extreme isolation warps the mind
#6I've noticed when I don't speak to people for very long my mind becomes less active, almost switches off. I lack inspiration or life.
Solitary confinement must be the worst torture, I can't bear to imagine it. Yet it is used around the world as standard practice, in the USA, Israel, all over!
Re: How extreme isolation warps the mind
#7Ill have to tell you that this theory is wrong,
Re: How extreme isolation warps the mind
#8This article from May is extremely pertinent to today's news: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-28793055 about how Chinese detention ad isolation has "Destroyed" the most famous Chinese human rights lawyer.
Re: How extreme isolation warps the mind
#9The article seems to mix up sensory deprivation with isolation.
Suppose you are stuck on a deserted island with no human contact, like Robinson Crusoe.
Surely, you're not going to get hallucinations?
You're not in a box or dark prison cell; you have day and night, the beach, woods, animals. Survival activities to keep you busy, like making shelter and gathering food.
Maybe the sensory deprivation causes the brain slide into another kind of consciousness which is not exactly sleep and not exactly wakefulness. The hallucinations are perhaps related to the mechanism which produces dreams, and not evidence that you're going bonkers.
Re: How extreme isolation warps the mind
#10> For starters, isolation messes with our sense of time. Interestingly, people who have lost their sight or hearing, at birth or from a young age, experience this too. From my own experience (back when I was deaf), I would (and occasionally still do) perceive relatively large stretches of time (up to a few hours) as considerably less, and vice-versa. Funnily enough, though understandably I suppose, I also have a very…
I have a son who is aspie and time blind. This article and your comment sort of suggest an intriguing potential connection between the two things.