How Antarctic explorers kept themselves sane on the voyage | Hacker News Reader

How Antarctic explorers kept themselves sane on the voyage

lithub.com

40 pointsubac34 comments

Whether or not you go insane when exposed to emotional stress has nothing to do with your character or personality. It’s biochemical. I hate the way that this article says “it’s impossible to predict who will go insane and who won’t” and it’s universally accepted when it’s not true and is based on untrue and harmful fuzzy thinking. It’s like saying “it’s impossible for man to fly” which may have been true in a practical sense a thousand years ago but it was never actually true. If more people had appreciated that, maybe we would have been flying much earlier.

The reason he says it’s impossible is because he thinks it’s based on subtle aspects of personality traits which are ephemeral and impossible to grasp.

Of course you can predict who will go insane. There are specific biochemical pathways that are responsible. In the future when we have mastered them we will probably find that there are certain obvious traits that correlate strongly to the disposition. It is often the case that the simple truth was hiding right in front of us.

Unfortunately, we’re in the stone ages of mental health. There is no blood test or brain scan we can do to assuredly find depression, bipolar, or any other common mental health diseases. Hopefully you’re correct and in the future we will have some for sure predictor, but at the current rate we have very little to nothing. You’re optimism doesn’t seem to match the environment.

There’s a huge number of leads in the search for markers. It’s just that nobody is talking about it. I’ve never met a lay person who had any clue of what’s going on in the space

Interesting. Care to elaborate?

Last year a couple of researchers published a paper on their approach to treat depression in otherwise-untreatable patients.

They implanted a chip in the patient's (yes, n=1) brain, which they trained to detect when the patient is going into depressing thoughts. Using Deep Brain Stimulation they terminate the signal propagation of that neural pathway.

Similar techniques have been used to treat Parkinson's.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32846987/

Interesting. I think the field of using electronic brain stimulation to help disease is moving forward in a good direction compared to the lobotomies and craziness of the 60s. That seems to be what you’ve linked here.

I’m talking about a simple, non intrusive way of testing someone’s mental health without talking to them. That stills seems far off on the horizon. Maybe some MRI research might be able to take us into the future in that regard.

Well it's certainly sometimes impossible to predict. But that's enough!

Got a couple of my dad's old employment performance reviews yesterday from his time overwintering in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It's a standard list of 21 questions applied to each person, each question scoring from 1 to 5, so not dissimilar to the sort of performance review many of us will be familiar with. Some of the questions could even conceivably appear in an IT performance review, e.g. "2. His work is well planned and organised" and "7. He utilises his technical knowledge". However, given the nature of both working and living with people in close confinement and in adverse conditions, there are definitely a few questions you wouldn't see for the typical office job (although arguably we should:-), e.g.

- "10. He is well liked by his associates"

- "12. He is stable and well adjusted"

- "13. In restricted living and working conditions, he is not a source of friction"

- "19. He has no distasteful personal characteristics"

- "20. I would select him to live and work with under adverse field conditions"

That's cool that you have that from your dad.

Those questions don't seem crazy to me at all for a normal office environment. We called it the "airport test" in evaluating candidates for hire: would you enjoy being stuck at an airport with a delayed flight with this person?

I read Michael Palin's book on HMS Erebus last year and in addition to being quite interesting all around, it went into great detail about the every day lives of sailors during that era based on the detailed logs kept by the ships.

The short answer: They were all expected to chip in and help entertain their fellow shipmates and keep up morale. In addition to music and songs, they'd write and perform skits, tell stories, have holiday contests between ships (usually they sailed in a group of at least two) and more.

Here's the man himself: https://youtu.be/KhsxTSbsVeo

From my readings, this was cultural to the Royal Navy of the time, probably since the looooong blockades and cruises of the earlier wars with the French. Ships would spend weeks or months sailing back and forth off of Brest or Toulon with little to no contact with shore except for the occasional resupply ship bringing letters and newspapers.

So, sailors would organize plays and skits as you said, concerts, athletic competitions, etc.

Even so, if you read the resources and the ship's logs they reference, there was a LOT of petty crime, crimes of passion like assaults, murders, etc during those blockades.

Enough so that it was notable even in the height of the unwilling drafts of any man with a pulse that strayed close enough to the water.

>Even so, if you read the resources and the ship's logs they reference, there was a LOT of petty crime, crimes of passion like assaults, murders, etc during those blockades.

Hardly surprising given a lot of the men before the mast were impressed (ie effectively kidnapped) merchant sailors and sometimes criminals offloaded out of prisons so that counties could fill their quota of seamen the government demanded. Having said that, apparently there were lots of volunteers despite the harsh conditions as the Navy was still better than some of their lives on land!

Right, I think for the most part the 'harshness' of life in the Royal navy during the age of sail is overblown, as all the things that are brutal or harsh to us (the discipline, the poor food, etc) was not much different than life for that same set of people on land, and as you say, in a lot of ways even better - your food for the most part was at least certain as the clock.

Yeah the harshness is definitely relative, I'd rather have been an ordinary seaman in the Royal Navy than say a miner of that era for example.

It's why I have low hopes for space - especially Mars.

Getting there and living there will produce even more extreme psychological and emotional pressures. But the people at the sharp end of them will be more used to 24/7 access to memes, selfies, and virtual dramas.

Even the most stable are likely to have limited experience of entertaining and supporting each other in person in a low-drama way without easy access to external support.

Imagine being stranded for years with only disco music and a steady diet of potatoes.

And eventually the ketchup is going to run out.

Presumably the memes would flow, they'd just be a bit delayed :)

They'd have the freshest "All Your Base" memes though.

Lovely book, great writing, highly recommended.

>Scott became famous through the courageous manner of his death

For most of my life I was told it was Scott's fault for bad leadership. Recent research shows otherwise, and blames a bad lieutenant.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171005102638.h...

Fascinating stories, that gave me fuel to be an adventurer. Shackleton is one of my great heroes and I cannot recommend highly enough becoming familiar with the story of the Endurance. Crushed in ice, far from anywhere yet all survived. Incredible incredible tale.

https://www.history.com/news/shackleton-endurance-survival

That's really interesting. Thanks for sharing. It does not absolve Scott for organising and leading the expedition badly though imo. The bad decisions are numerous, and having a trustworthy second-in-command is at the end of the day the leaders responsibility.

>Shackleton is one of my great heroes and I cannot recommend highly enough becoming familiar with the story of the Endurance.

Shackleton's journey to South Georgia in an open boat across the most hostile ocean and subsequent first ever crossing of the mountains of that island has to be one of the most incredible feats in the history of navigation. I don't think it's unreasonable to predict in a thousand years from now people will still learn about Endurance's sinking as one of the truly great survival stories.

Your linked article doesn't seem completely accurate to me.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard did take the dog team to meet the returning polar party. Maybe the orders he was given by Evans didn't match what Scott wanted but the article doesn't state this.

Best book to read about the Endurance?

I'm working my way through `Endurance: Shackleton's incredible voyage` by Alfred Lansing after it was recommended in another recent HN comment thread. I really like it so far.

Agree with Lansing. Also a gorgeous graphic novel if Spanish isn't a blocker:

https://www.luisbustos.es/Endurance

If you're ever in Oslo I can really recommend visiting the Fram Museum[1] which houses the Fram, the ship Amundsen used to reach the Antarctic (among other things).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fram_Museum

Scott and Shackleton's Discovery is in Dundee, Scotland (right next to the railway station)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RRS_Discovery#Discovery_Point,...

Much smaller but also very interesting: the Polar Museum in Cambridge, UK

https://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/museum/access/

Second this - the Fram is amazing and worth the ferry ride from downtown to get there.

Wow, that museum is gorgeous.

Not quite the same thing, but I've always been struck by Ranulph Fiennes's personality and how perfect it seems for the kind of expeditions he did. He is the complete opposite of a drama-lama, he seems incredibly even tempered and stoic about everything. The same goes for Elen MacArthur, the round the world solo sailer. This seems like an essential characteristic of a successful explorer, you don't want drama, argument or emotional instability in places like the arctic.

This is how Apsley Cherry-Garrard, in The Worst Journey in the World, his account of the Terra Nova expedition, described leader Captain Scott.

Temperamentally he was a weak man, and might very easily have been an irritable autocrat. As it was he had moods and depressions which might last for weeks, and of these there is ample evidence in his diary. The man with the nerves gets things done, but sometimes he has a terrible time in doing them. He cried more easily than any man I have ever known.

These are all symptoms of testosterone deficiency.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com