The brain of a carder isolated from contact with other people is capable of performing strange metamorphoses with his consciousness, says Michael Bond, author of articles on the psychology of human behavior and the book The Power of Others.
An ordinary girl Sarah Shurd spent about two months in the Evin prison in Tehran: she heard extraneous steps, saw lights of light, spent most of the time on all fours and listened to what was happening behind a closed door. That summer, 32-year-old Sarah, accompanied by two of her friends, traveled through the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. On the border with Iran, they were arrested on suspicion of espionage and taken into custody. Sarah spent about ten thousand hours in solitary confinement, she was haunted by hallucinations. “With peripheral vision, I recorded flashes of light, but when I turned my head, they immediately disappeared,” the girl told The New York Times in 2011. “Once I heard someone screaming. This scream remained in my ears until I was revived by a friendly security guard. It turned out.
We all want to be alone from time to time, away from the crowds and conversations with colleagues. But loneliness within a group of people and alone with oneself are two different things. For the vast majority of people, prolonged social isolation has a detrimental effect on psychological health. We are familiar with this phenomenon not only from other people's stories, but also from scientific research and experiments on isolation and social deprivation, many of which have not been completed due to the frightening reaction of the experimental subjects. Why are people able to lose their minds, being left alone with themselves, and is there a way to avoid insanity in such situations?
Few would argue that isolation is physically harmful to humans. It is known that single people are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, they are more vulnerable to viral infections, and they also have an increased risk of developing Alzheimer's syndrome and dementia. Loneliness affects the state of health: the state of sleep, attention, logical and verbal thinking, causes a disorder of the immune system, hormonal imbalance, activates inflammatory processes in the body. What is behind such violations is not completely clear - perhaps the reason lies in evolution - it was physically dangerous for our ancestors to be without the support of fellow tribesmen.
In the modern world, the refusal to contact with other people entails not only all sorts of diseases, but the greatest blow falls on the work of consciousness. For example, isolation affects our perception of time. People who have spent long periods of time without sunlight have noticed a time shift effect. Mikel Siffre went on a two-week expedition to explore the underground glaciers of the French Alps. After some time, he discovered that under the influence of darkness, his consciousness began to change, and decided to spend two more months underground. The researcher left all the instruments outside and lived according to his measuring biological clock. After completing the experiment, Mikel discovered that two minutes of earth time were equivalent to 5 of his subjective minutes underground.
A similar effect of time dilation was observed by the sociologist and amateur speleologist Maurizio Montalbini. In 1993, he spent 366 days in an underground cave built by NASA to train astronauts. Maurizio himself was convinced that only 219 days had passed during his absence, his daily cycle almost doubled. Recent studies have also shown that in the dark, most people adjust to a 48-hour rhythm - 36 hours awake and 12 hours asleep. The reasons for this phenomenon have not yet been established.
In the middle of the twentieth century, many experiments were carried out on social deprivation of a person. In the 1950s and 60s, it was believed that the Chinese were using solitary confinement cells to "indoctrinate" American prisoners of war captured during the Korean War. Around the same time, the US and Canadian Departments of Defense began funding a series of experiments that, from the point of view of modern Western ethics, seemed unacceptable. For example, a study by psychologist Donald Hebb, which took place at McGill University Medical Center in Montreal. The researchers invited volunteers - mostly college students? - to live for two to several weeks in soundproof rooms. The goal was to keep the subjects' physical activity to a minimum and to see their reactions. Subjects were given special ammunition, The ability to perceive information to a minimum: glasses, gloves, cardboard cuffs that reach to the fingertips, U-shaped sound-absorbing pillows that are worn over the head. Air conditioners were installed inside the rooms, whose noise drowned out any outside sounds. After just a couple of hours, the volunteers felt anxiety, they wanted to regain the ability to feel and tried to break the monotony of their pastime: they tried to speak, sing or read poetry aloud.
Later, many of them began to behave extremely emotionally and restlessly, isolation also affected their intellectual abilities, the ability to solve arithmetic problems and pass associative tests. The most disturbing consequences were hallucinations - lights of light turning into lines, spots, and even specific visual images like squirrels carrying backpacks over their shoulders or a procession of glasses walking down the street. The subjects did not control their visions: some imagined dogs, others - babies. Some had auditory hallucinations: they heard the sounds of a barrel organ or choral singing. Others have imaginary tactile sensations, as if they were being shot in the arm or electrocuted. In the real world, subjects found it difficult to shake off this altered perception of reality.
The experiment had to be interrupted earlier than planned due to the students' inability to physically continue the tests - no one could hold out in such conditions for more than a week. Subsequently, Hebb wrote in American Psychologist that the results alarmed him: "It is one thing to read about how the Chinese" brainwashed "prisoners of war, it is quite another to observe with your own eyes how people, deprived of the opportunity to observe, listen and touch, go crazy."
In 2008, clinical psychologist Ian Robbins collaborated with the BBC to replicate Hebb's experiment. He put six volunteers for 48 hours in soundproofed cells in a former nuclear bunker. The results were similar - the development of anxiety, increased emotionality, obsessive thoughts, mental disorders, hallucinations. Why does the brain of a person devoid of tactile sensations behave this way? Cognitive psychologists believe that the part of the brain responsible for performing current tasks gets used to receiving and processing a large amount of information coming to the senses. Robbins notes that when the sources of information are lost, the nervous system still continues to transmit signals to the central processing unit of the brain, despite these signals being false. The brain, in turn, tries to interpret them,
Such deceptions of the psyche should not surprise us. First, we know that other primates are also poorly adapted to social isolation. Harry Harlow, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, decided to study the issue in the 1960s using the example of rhesus monkeys. Newborn macaques from several months to a year grew completely alone. They showed anxiety already after 30 days, after a year their ability to social contacts of any level was practically destroyed. Secondly, because a person learns to be aware of their emotions through communication with other people. Biologists believe that it was the cooperation of our ancestors in the distant past that contributed to the evolution of human sensory experience. The primary function of emotions is social. If there is no one who can share with us the feelings of fear, anger.
At the moment, there are about 25 thousand prisoners in specially guarded prisons in the United States. Without social interaction, such prisoners have no way of testing the reality of their emotions and the adequacy of their thoughts, says Terry Coopers, a forensic psychiatrist at the California Institute at Berkeley. This is one of the reasons many people suffer from anxiety, paranoia, and obsession. Craig Haney, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a leading specialist in the mental health of US prisoners, claims that some of them purposefully begin open confrontation with the warders in order to confirm their existence, to remember who they are.
Social isolation can destroy a person's consciousness, but there are ways to counter it. Everyone copes in their own way - some are better, some are worse. Is there a way to protect yourself if you happen to be imprisoned? Scientists do not have a consensus on this question, but let's look at examples of those people who managed to avoid insanity after many years spent alone with themselves.
When Sarah Shurd was arrested in Iran, she was definitely not ready for this. For any person in such a situation, the world can turn upside down. He has no one to help, no one to share his experiences with. He must find strength in himself and realize all the difficulties that he will have to face. Understand how he can exist in a new reality.
Hussein Al-Shahristani was Saddam Hussein's top nuclear adviser. He was imprisoned in Abu Khraim prison near Baghdad after he refused to support a project to develop atomic weapons for Iraq. Hussein managed to maintain his sanity during 10 years of solitary confinement, he trained his brain, solving math problems, which he composed for himself. Today he is the Deputy Energy Minister of Iraq. A similar method was used during her seven-year stay in captivity by the Hungarian communist government by Edith Bon, MD and translator. She constructed abacus from slices of stale bread and went over in her mind the vocabulary of six languages that she knew perfectly.
Members of military organizations tolerate isolation relatively more easily. Caron Fletcher, a consultant psychiatrist who works with ex-prisoners of war, says the detentions and interrogations he has been subjected to on numerous occasions while serving in the RAF prepares well for accepting his own confinement. “You are learning the basics of resistance,” he says. “Plus, you believe that your friends and colleagues will turn themselves inside out to free you. In my opinion, military people are less likely to succumb to despair in a difficult situation. Feelings of hopelessness and helplessness can play a cruel joke on you, they undermine your morale and will to live."
US Senator John McCain proved by his example that the military mindset provides psychological advantages in this matter. His five and a half years in a Vietnamese prison only strengthened his spirit. About two years of his imprisonment, he says: “Solitary cells are a terrible thing. They suppress your spirit and weaken your ability to resist more than any other form of cruelty ... Desperation grips you immediately. It is your main enemy for the period of imprisonment."
Psychologists studying how people deal with the effects of isolation have learned a lot from the experiences of pioneers and climbers. For many adventurers who have voluntarily moved away from society, being in contact with nature can serve as an effective substitute for face-to-face communication. Norwegian psychologist Gro Sandal of the University of Bergen surveyed a group of travelers on how they cope in extreme conditions alone, and noted that the ability to accept the situation is the main method of solving this problem: “Then they feel safe, feel less alone ". A similar psychological phenomenon explains why shipwrecked sailors and sailors thrown onto an uninhabited island have imaginary friends, and sometimes groups of imaginary companions, with whom they try to share their loneliness. This insanity is simply a defense mechanism. As in the story of the traveler Ellen MacArthur and her trimaran called Moby. During her voyage around the world in 2005, the girl sent letters to friends with the signature "With love, E. and Moby." In her public records on the Internet, she used the pronoun "we" instead of "I".
It is hard to find a clearer illustration of the power of loneliness that can overwhelm one person and liberate another than the story of Bernard Muatessier and Donald Crowhurst, two participants in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe. Muatessier, an ascetic Frenchman, practiced yoga throughout his journey and fed the petrels that sat on his stern - he liked the process so much that the returning of civilization became alien to him. After sailing around land one more time, he landed on the island of Tahiti: “I spend all my time on the high seas, because here I am happy,” he said. "Perhaps it will help save my soul." The second member, Crowhurst, felt unhappy from the start. He left England with insufficient preparation for the event, and from the very beginning of the journey sent fake reports of his whereabouts. He drifted aimlessly for several months off the coast of South America, and his despondency and loneliness only intensified. Eventually, he locked himself in his cabin, wrote a suicide note, and jumped overboard. His body was never found.
What conclusion can we draw from these stories of confrontation and despair? Obviously, we lose a lot of energy when we find ourselves outside of society. Isolation, according to writer Thomas Carlisle, is at the heart of unhappiness. However, there are more optimistic assessments, which are no less fair - we can always remain sane, even when we are alone, if we are able to find consolation outside the boundaries of our own "I". You must always be ready and be able to show perseverance. At the same time, we cannot underestimate the power of our imagination, which knocks on the walls of solitary cells, penetrates into the ice caves and introduces us to fictional friends.
An ordinary girl Sarah Shurd spent about two months in the Evin prison in Tehran: she heard extraneous steps, saw lights of light, spent most of the time on all fours and listened to what was happening behind a closed door. That summer, 32-year-old Sarah, accompanied by two of her friends, traveled through the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. On the border with Iran, they were arrested on suspicion of espionage and taken into custody. Sarah spent about ten thousand hours in solitary confinement, she was haunted by hallucinations. “With peripheral vision, I recorded flashes of light, but when I turned my head, they immediately disappeared,” the girl told The New York Times in 2011. “Once I heard someone screaming. This scream remained in my ears until I was revived by a friendly security guard. It turned out.
We all want to be alone from time to time, away from the crowds and conversations with colleagues. But loneliness within a group of people and alone with oneself are two different things. For the vast majority of people, prolonged social isolation has a detrimental effect on psychological health. We are familiar with this phenomenon not only from other people's stories, but also from scientific research and experiments on isolation and social deprivation, many of which have not been completed due to the frightening reaction of the experimental subjects. Why are people able to lose their minds, being left alone with themselves, and is there a way to avoid insanity in such situations?
Few would argue that isolation is physically harmful to humans. It is known that single people are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, they are more vulnerable to viral infections, and they also have an increased risk of developing Alzheimer's syndrome and dementia. Loneliness affects the state of health: the state of sleep, attention, logical and verbal thinking, causes a disorder of the immune system, hormonal imbalance, activates inflammatory processes in the body. What is behind such violations is not completely clear - perhaps the reason lies in evolution - it was physically dangerous for our ancestors to be without the support of fellow tribesmen.
In the modern world, the refusal to contact with other people entails not only all sorts of diseases, but the greatest blow falls on the work of consciousness. For example, isolation affects our perception of time. People who have spent long periods of time without sunlight have noticed a time shift effect. Mikel Siffre went on a two-week expedition to explore the underground glaciers of the French Alps. After some time, he discovered that under the influence of darkness, his consciousness began to change, and decided to spend two more months underground. The researcher left all the instruments outside and lived according to his measuring biological clock. After completing the experiment, Mikel discovered that two minutes of earth time were equivalent to 5 of his subjective minutes underground.
A similar effect of time dilation was observed by the sociologist and amateur speleologist Maurizio Montalbini. In 1993, he spent 366 days in an underground cave built by NASA to train astronauts. Maurizio himself was convinced that only 219 days had passed during his absence, his daily cycle almost doubled. Recent studies have also shown that in the dark, most people adjust to a 48-hour rhythm - 36 hours awake and 12 hours asleep. The reasons for this phenomenon have not yet been established.
In the middle of the twentieth century, many experiments were carried out on social deprivation of a person. In the 1950s and 60s, it was believed that the Chinese were using solitary confinement cells to "indoctrinate" American prisoners of war captured during the Korean War. Around the same time, the US and Canadian Departments of Defense began funding a series of experiments that, from the point of view of modern Western ethics, seemed unacceptable. For example, a study by psychologist Donald Hebb, which took place at McGill University Medical Center in Montreal. The researchers invited volunteers - mostly college students? - to live for two to several weeks in soundproof rooms. The goal was to keep the subjects' physical activity to a minimum and to see their reactions. Subjects were given special ammunition, The ability to perceive information to a minimum: glasses, gloves, cardboard cuffs that reach to the fingertips, U-shaped sound-absorbing pillows that are worn over the head. Air conditioners were installed inside the rooms, whose noise drowned out any outside sounds. After just a couple of hours, the volunteers felt anxiety, they wanted to regain the ability to feel and tried to break the monotony of their pastime: they tried to speak, sing or read poetry aloud.
Later, many of them began to behave extremely emotionally and restlessly, isolation also affected their intellectual abilities, the ability to solve arithmetic problems and pass associative tests. The most disturbing consequences were hallucinations - lights of light turning into lines, spots, and even specific visual images like squirrels carrying backpacks over their shoulders or a procession of glasses walking down the street. The subjects did not control their visions: some imagined dogs, others - babies. Some had auditory hallucinations: they heard the sounds of a barrel organ or choral singing. Others have imaginary tactile sensations, as if they were being shot in the arm or electrocuted. In the real world, subjects found it difficult to shake off this altered perception of reality.
The experiment had to be interrupted earlier than planned due to the students' inability to physically continue the tests - no one could hold out in such conditions for more than a week. Subsequently, Hebb wrote in American Psychologist that the results alarmed him: "It is one thing to read about how the Chinese" brainwashed "prisoners of war, it is quite another to observe with your own eyes how people, deprived of the opportunity to observe, listen and touch, go crazy."
In 2008, clinical psychologist Ian Robbins collaborated with the BBC to replicate Hebb's experiment. He put six volunteers for 48 hours in soundproofed cells in a former nuclear bunker. The results were similar - the development of anxiety, increased emotionality, obsessive thoughts, mental disorders, hallucinations. Why does the brain of a person devoid of tactile sensations behave this way? Cognitive psychologists believe that the part of the brain responsible for performing current tasks gets used to receiving and processing a large amount of information coming to the senses. Robbins notes that when the sources of information are lost, the nervous system still continues to transmit signals to the central processing unit of the brain, despite these signals being false. The brain, in turn, tries to interpret them,
Such deceptions of the psyche should not surprise us. First, we know that other primates are also poorly adapted to social isolation. Harry Harlow, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, decided to study the issue in the 1960s using the example of rhesus monkeys. Newborn macaques from several months to a year grew completely alone. They showed anxiety already after 30 days, after a year their ability to social contacts of any level was practically destroyed. Secondly, because a person learns to be aware of their emotions through communication with other people. Biologists believe that it was the cooperation of our ancestors in the distant past that contributed to the evolution of human sensory experience. The primary function of emotions is social. If there is no one who can share with us the feelings of fear, anger.
At the moment, there are about 25 thousand prisoners in specially guarded prisons in the United States. Without social interaction, such prisoners have no way of testing the reality of their emotions and the adequacy of their thoughts, says Terry Coopers, a forensic psychiatrist at the California Institute at Berkeley. This is one of the reasons many people suffer from anxiety, paranoia, and obsession. Craig Haney, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a leading specialist in the mental health of US prisoners, claims that some of them purposefully begin open confrontation with the warders in order to confirm their existence, to remember who they are.
Social isolation can destroy a person's consciousness, but there are ways to counter it. Everyone copes in their own way - some are better, some are worse. Is there a way to protect yourself if you happen to be imprisoned? Scientists do not have a consensus on this question, but let's look at examples of those people who managed to avoid insanity after many years spent alone with themselves.
When Sarah Shurd was arrested in Iran, she was definitely not ready for this. For any person in such a situation, the world can turn upside down. He has no one to help, no one to share his experiences with. He must find strength in himself and realize all the difficulties that he will have to face. Understand how he can exist in a new reality.
Hussein Al-Shahristani was Saddam Hussein's top nuclear adviser. He was imprisoned in Abu Khraim prison near Baghdad after he refused to support a project to develop atomic weapons for Iraq. Hussein managed to maintain his sanity during 10 years of solitary confinement, he trained his brain, solving math problems, which he composed for himself. Today he is the Deputy Energy Minister of Iraq. A similar method was used during her seven-year stay in captivity by the Hungarian communist government by Edith Bon, MD and translator. She constructed abacus from slices of stale bread and went over in her mind the vocabulary of six languages that she knew perfectly.
Members of military organizations tolerate isolation relatively more easily. Caron Fletcher, a consultant psychiatrist who works with ex-prisoners of war, says the detentions and interrogations he has been subjected to on numerous occasions while serving in the RAF prepares well for accepting his own confinement. “You are learning the basics of resistance,” he says. “Plus, you believe that your friends and colleagues will turn themselves inside out to free you. In my opinion, military people are less likely to succumb to despair in a difficult situation. Feelings of hopelessness and helplessness can play a cruel joke on you, they undermine your morale and will to live."
US Senator John McCain proved by his example that the military mindset provides psychological advantages in this matter. His five and a half years in a Vietnamese prison only strengthened his spirit. About two years of his imprisonment, he says: “Solitary cells are a terrible thing. They suppress your spirit and weaken your ability to resist more than any other form of cruelty ... Desperation grips you immediately. It is your main enemy for the period of imprisonment."
Psychologists studying how people deal with the effects of isolation have learned a lot from the experiences of pioneers and climbers. For many adventurers who have voluntarily moved away from society, being in contact with nature can serve as an effective substitute for face-to-face communication. Norwegian psychologist Gro Sandal of the University of Bergen surveyed a group of travelers on how they cope in extreme conditions alone, and noted that the ability to accept the situation is the main method of solving this problem: “Then they feel safe, feel less alone ". A similar psychological phenomenon explains why shipwrecked sailors and sailors thrown onto an uninhabited island have imaginary friends, and sometimes groups of imaginary companions, with whom they try to share their loneliness. This insanity is simply a defense mechanism. As in the story of the traveler Ellen MacArthur and her trimaran called Moby. During her voyage around the world in 2005, the girl sent letters to friends with the signature "With love, E. and Moby." In her public records on the Internet, she used the pronoun "we" instead of "I".
It is hard to find a clearer illustration of the power of loneliness that can overwhelm one person and liberate another than the story of Bernard Muatessier and Donald Crowhurst, two participants in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe. Muatessier, an ascetic Frenchman, practiced yoga throughout his journey and fed the petrels that sat on his stern - he liked the process so much that the returning of civilization became alien to him. After sailing around land one more time, he landed on the island of Tahiti: “I spend all my time on the high seas, because here I am happy,” he said. "Perhaps it will help save my soul." The second member, Crowhurst, felt unhappy from the start. He left England with insufficient preparation for the event, and from the very beginning of the journey sent fake reports of his whereabouts. He drifted aimlessly for several months off the coast of South America, and his despondency and loneliness only intensified. Eventually, he locked himself in his cabin, wrote a suicide note, and jumped overboard. His body was never found.
What conclusion can we draw from these stories of confrontation and despair? Obviously, we lose a lot of energy when we find ourselves outside of society. Isolation, according to writer Thomas Carlisle, is at the heart of unhappiness. However, there are more optimistic assessments, which are no less fair - we can always remain sane, even when we are alone, if we are able to find consolation outside the boundaries of our own "I". You must always be ready and be able to show perseverance. At the same time, we cannot underestimate the power of our imagination, which knocks on the walls of solitary cells, penetrates into the ice caves and introduces us to fictional friends.
