# What Extreme Isolation Does to Your Mind  URL:: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/donald-o-hebb-effects-extreme-isolation/ Author:: motherjones.com ## Highlights > Depriving a man of sensory input, he soon discovered, will break him in a matter of days. > Hebb’s experiments went well beyond the level of isolation prisoners typically experience in solitary. He offered male graduate students $20 a day—excellent pay for the time—to stay in small chambers containing little more than a bed. > Prone in their isolation rooms, the volunteers also wore gloves and cardboard tubes over their arms to limit their sense of touch. A U-shaped pillow covered their ears and the hum of an air conditioner further obscured outside noise. “According to his theory, the brain would deteriorate if it didn’t have a continuous stream of sensory input,” Milner told me. > Hebb had reportedly hoped to observe his subjects for six weeks. As it turned out, the majority lasted no more than a few days in isolation—and none more than a week. > Nearly all of them reported that the most striking thing about the experience was that they were unable to think clearly about anything for any length of time and that their thought processes seemed to be affected in other ways.” > A series of cognitive tests showed that the volunteers’ mental faculties were, in fact, temporarily impaired. While in isolation, for instance, the subjects were played tapes arguing that supernatural phenomena, including ghosts and poltergeists, were real; when interviewed later, they proved amenable to such beliefs. They performed poorly on grade-school tasks involving simple arithmetic, word associations, and pattern recognition. They also experienced extreme restlessness, childish emotional responses, and vivid hallucinations. > sensory deprivation as part of a technique called “psychic driving,” his unsuccessful attempt to “reprogram” the minds of mentally ill patients, > There was a concern during the 1950s that the Soviets were using sensory deprivation to brainwash Canadian POWs in Korea, and the McGill researchers viewed their own work—some of which the Canadian government forbid Hebb from publishing—as an attempt to understand sensory deprivation so that some sort of defense might be devised against it. Yet this type of knowledge was famously put to use as part of the Bush-era program of “enhanced interrogation” (a.k.a. torture) of US detainees. As The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer has reported, psychologists versed in techniques of “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape”—a military program wherein soldiers were exposed to extreme conditions, including isolation, that they might encounter as POWs—were enlisted to advise interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. According to Mayer’s sources, they essentially “tried to reverse-engineer” SERE techniques to extract information from enemy combatants. --- Title: What Extreme Isolation Does to Your Mind Author: motherjones.com Tags: readwise, articles date: 2024-01-30 --- # What Extreme Isolation Does to Your Mind  URL:: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/donald-o-hebb-effects-extreme-isolation/ Author:: motherjones.com ## AI-Generated Summary None ## Highlights > Depriving a man of sensory input, he soon discovered, will break him in a matter of days. > Hebb’s experiments went well beyond the level of isolation prisoners typically experience in solitary. He offered male graduate students $20 a day—excellent pay for the time—to stay in small chambers containing little more than a bed. > Prone in their isolation rooms, the volunteers also wore gloves and cardboard tubes over their arms to limit their sense of touch. A U-shaped pillow covered their ears and the hum of an air conditioner further obscured outside noise. “According to his theory, the brain would deteriorate if it didn’t have a continuous stream of sensory input,” Milner told me. > Hebb had reportedly hoped to observe his subjects for six weeks. As it turned out, the majority lasted no more than a few days in isolation—and none more than a week. > Nearly all of them reported that the most striking thing about the experience was that they were unable to think clearly about anything for any length of time and that their thought processes seemed to be affected in other ways.” > A series of cognitive tests showed that the volunteers’ mental faculties were, in fact, temporarily impaired. While in isolation, for instance, the subjects were played tapes arguing that supernatural phenomena, including ghosts and poltergeists, were real; when interviewed later, they proved amenable to such beliefs. They performed poorly on grade-school tasks involving simple arithmetic, word associations, and pattern recognition. They also experienced extreme restlessness, childish emotional responses, and vivid hallucinations. > sensory deprivation as part of a technique called “psychic driving,” his unsuccessful attempt to “reprogram” the minds of mentally ill patients, > There was a concern during the 1950s that the Soviets were using sensory deprivation to brainwash Canadian POWs in Korea, and the McGill researchers viewed their own work—some of which the Canadian government forbid Hebb from publishing—as an attempt to understand sensory deprivation so that some sort of defense might be devised against it. Yet this type of knowledge was famously put to use as part of the Bush-era program of “enhanced interrogation” (a.k.a. torture) of US detainees. As The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer has reported, psychologists versed in techniques of “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape”—a military program wherein soldiers were exposed to extreme conditions, including isolation, that they might encounter as POWs—were enlisted to advise interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. According to Mayer’s sources, they essentially “tried to reverse-engineer” SERE techniques to extract information from enemy combatants.