I love this topic…
“What happens if you are left alone in the dark in solitary confinement for days on end? The result is called sensory deprivation and the human mind struggles to cope with it.”
Sensory deprivation is a controversial subject, with allegations the technique has been used at Guantanamo Bay as an interrogation strategy. And thousands of prisoners around the world are kept in solitary confinement, often with a significant degree of sensory deprivation.
The tests are exploring the theory that sensory deprivation makes subjects much more suggestible.
Some of the first research on this subject was carried out after the Korean War in the 1950s. The Canadian military wanted to investigate what had happened to POWs who appeared at international press conferences confessing that they were war criminals. It was thought they had been brainwashed following solitary confinement.
Hehe and this is funny, too:
Mickey, a postman is seeing mosquitoes and fighter planes buzzing around his head and it’s frightening him.
Claire a psychology student doesn’t mind the little cars, snakes and zebras. But she gets scared when she suddenly feels somebody is in the room.
“In the dark room there is nothing to focus on,” says Prof Robbins as he monitors their behaviour. “In the absence of information the human brain carries on working and processing information even if there is no information to process and after a while it starts to create that information itself.”
No wonder when I teach people to do their visualisations most of them freak out and never pursue it.
Horizon: Total Isolation is on BBC Two at 2100GMT on Tuesday 22 January.