> <i>For starters, isolation messes with our sense of time.</i><p>Interestingly, people who have lost their sight or hearing, at birth or from a young age, experience this too.<p>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.<p>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).<p>Sadly, I can't find much information about this, except maybe this (which I don't have full access to) <a href="http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn_a_00135?journalCode=jocn#.U-0kJZA-iXg" rel="nofollow">http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn_a_00135...</a>
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.<p>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.)<p>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 <i>proponent</i> of animal studies in many cases -- that I feel researchers, particularly those involved in psychiatric animal models, are hand-waving away.<p>[1] Fellow UW-Madison researcher A. J. Bennett's view of Harlow's work is available at <a href="http://speakingofresearch.com/2014/08/03/harlow-dead-bioethicists-outraged/" rel="nofollow">http://speakingofresearch.com/2014/08/03/harlow-dead-bioethi...</a>
The article seems to mix up sensory deprivation with isolation.<p>Suppose you are stuck on a deserted island with no human contact, like Robinson Crusoe.<p>Surely, you're not going to get hallucinations?<p>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.<p>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.
This article from May is extremely pertinent to today's news: <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-28793055" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-28793055</a> about how Chinese detention ad isolation has "Destroyed" the most famous Chinese human rights lawyer.
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.<p>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!
More on Michel Siffre:<p><a href="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/30/foer.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/30/foer.php</a>
"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).