
How extreme isolation warps the mind - dynofuz
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140514-how-extreme-isolation-warps-minds?src=hn
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grownseed
> _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...](http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn_a_00135?journalCode=jocn#.U-0kJZA-
iXg)

~~~
delinka
Do we have a "sense of time"? I ask because upon reflection, it seems that I
have to get back to my sentinels and time tracking devices _constantly_ to
know where I am in time. What day is it? What's the current time? I comprehend
time ordering, cause and effect, but I can't measure nor track time worth a
damn. If I go on holiday and avoid reference a watch and calendar, I can
easily lose track in short order.

I'm not blind, nor deaf. I have a family and have never been isolated. I just
assumed this is How Things Are, that attention must be paid in an effort to
stay "in sync."

~~~
Retric
I found with the right schedule I would generally wake up 10 minutes before my
alarm when off even when it was still dark outside. I can often guess what
time it is +/-10 minutes throughout the day. I even stopped using a watch at
collage as my internal clock was enough to get to class on time.

Granted, I was keeping a vary regular schedule and there where plenty of
clocks around which helped, but I think most people can probably get to that
level of precision.

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HillRat
It'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...](http://speakingofresearch.com/2014/08/03/harlow-dead-bioethicists-
outraged/)

~~~
cheepin
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".

------
kazinator
The 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.

~~~
Swizec
> Surely, you're not going to get hallucinations?

And yet we all cried when Wilson died.

~~~
socceroos
Wilson didn't die. Wilson left him. I assume that Wilson dying would require
severe degeneration or destruction such as a shark ripping the ball in pieces.

------
triplesec
This article from May is extremely pertinent to today's news:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-
china-28793055](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.

~~~
socceroos
Boy that article just made me sad. I'm not angry at those responsible for his
abuse exclusively though, the sadness grows when you realize that this is done
all over the world. Justice being silenced by 'justice'.

------
Synaesthesia
I'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!

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fiatpandas
More on Michel Siffre:

[http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/30/foer.php](http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/30/foer.php)

------
ars
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7750935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7750935)

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ChintanGhate
"researchers have found that in darkness most people eventually adjust to a
48-hour cycle: 36 hours of activity followed by 12 hours of sleep". Wondering
if this would be possible under normal circumstances (without the isolation,
in daylight, with no psychological side effects).

------
5414h
Ill have to tell you that this theory is wrong,

~~~
socceroos
I agree that the title of this post backs itself into a corner, so to speak.

