Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

I found this part interesting.

"Many prisoners find survival in physical exercise, prayer, or plans for escape. Many carry out elaborate mental exercises, building entire houses in their heads, board by board, nail by nail, from the ground up, or memorizing team rosters for a baseball season. McCain recreated in his mind movies he’d seen. Anderson reconstructed complete novels from memory. Yuri Nosenko, a K.G.B. defector whom the C.I.A. wrongly accused of being a double agent and held for three years in total isolation (no reading material, no news, no human contact except with interrogators) in a closet-size concrete cell near Williamsburg, Virginia, made chess sets from threads and a calendar from lint (only to have them discovered and swept away)."

It seems that isolation works like a virus attack, slowly rendering the mind incapable of working properly. Somewhat like a mental Gom Jabbar. Some people at least seem to fight back by consciously creating stimulation. Hack and Counter Hack.

During 10 days of silence and meditation, I had entire movies play in my head, in great detail, line by line, scene by scene. Movies I could normally barely remember. I didn't have to try, it just happened. In fact I was trying not to think. My mind wanted any kind of content to play. I think it happens naturally.

Fascinating. Makes me wonder what evolutionary necessity drove this need to constantly have content playing?

Amusing. Guess its how 'being socially engaged' has evolved.

It wouldn't surprise me if many of us develop similar traits of isolation even when cut off from internet too not just physical interaction.

Maybe its more conditioned than an evolutionary thing? We've all been barraged with media and social interaction 16 hours a day for most of our lives and most of us never stop thinking all day, and even dream much of the night.

Who knows, maybe it's part of the the low-level threat scanning aspect of our nature. Maybe it has something to do with our capacity for self-consciousness, maybe it's a side effect of being sentient.

I somehow doubt that it's a purely socially ingrained tendency though.

Interesting. Would you consider yourself an introvert or an extrovert, in general? I am an introvert and when I did 10 days of silence and meditation, the lack of social interaction was the easiest part for me. In fact, I think it made the whole experience easier for me because it alleviated the pressure to interact with people. I had none of the experiences you mentioned. And I was by no means an experienced meditator.

One thing I've always been really curious about is how an experienced meditator like a Buddhist monk would deal with forced solitary confinement. I think they would probably do much better than the average, untrained person. Now that would be a really interesting experiment.

I consider myself an introvert, but people tell me I never shut up. So uhh... somewhere in between? :) Not sure why it took the form of movies, but most people do have trouble ceasing thought, as I'm sure you experienced.

Yeah, if I was isolated I would use it to my advantage and meditate. Perhaps I would exit enlightened :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Royal_Game

The story of Yuri Nosenko looks very similar to the main protagonist of Zweig's last book, written in 1942. A must read about solitary confinement, about chess, about the Nazis, about a lot of things actually.

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