How extreme isolation warps the mind | Hacker News Reader

How extreme isolation warps the mind

bbc.com

79 pointsdynofuz22 comments

> For starters, isolation messes with our sense of time.

Interestingly, people who have lost their sight or hearing, at birth or from a young age, experience this too.

From my own experience (back when I was deaf), I would (and occasionally still do) perceive relatively large stretches of time (up to a few hours) as considerably less, and vice-versa.

Funnily enough, though understandably I suppose, I also have a very hard time placing events in time in relation to each other, it very often becomes an exercise in rationality (i.e. event A could only have happened if event B had too).

Sadly, I can't find much information about this, except maybe this (which I don't have full access to) http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn_a_00135...

I have a son who is aspie and time blind. This article and your comment sort of suggest an intriguing potential connection between the two things.

If you want papers, it's always a good idea to check Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Hearing%20Shapes%20Our%2... which points to http://www.tmslab.org/publications/422.pdf / http://www.researchgate.net/publication/51629726_Hearing_sha... (and if GS doesn't work, there's always http://libgen.org/scimag/index.php )

Do we have a "sense of time"? I ask because upon reflection, it seems that I have to get back to my sentinels and time tracking devices constantly to know where I am in time. What day is it? What's the current time? I comprehend time ordering, cause and effect, but I can't measure nor track time worth a damn. If I go on holiday and avoid reference a watch and calendar, I can easily lose track in short order.

I'm not blind, nor deaf. I have a family and have never been isolated. I just assumed this is How Things Are, that attention must be paid in an effort to stay "in sync."

I found with the right schedule I would generally wake up 10 minutes before my alarm when off even when it was still dark outside. I can often guess what time it is +/-10 minutes throughout the day. I even stopped using a watch at collage as my internal clock was enough to get to class on time.

Granted, I was keeping a vary regular schedule and there where plenty of clocks around which helped, but I think most people can probably get to that level of precision.

In general humans have a sense of time. This is why the graveyard shift is so incomprehensibly difficult for human beings. At the core humans require routine but beyond that thoughtful activities lend themselves to daylight.

Depression is also strongly related to being in the dark, probably linked to us needing vitamin D.

I've experience the exact same process you do while trying to recall events and event order.

I attributed the difficult to a diagnosis of mild dyslexia and ADHD (if you believe in that sort of thing). Since these diagnoses in my early 20's I've learned these tricks (such as rationalizing event order).

Now, in my early 30's, this has just become habit. I'm still not as good at remembering events as others but with the mental tricks, I'm adequate.

It's worth noting that Kalin at UW-Madison is looking to resurrect Harlow's work on socially deprived primates[1], something that was previously posted here at HN.

Some of the primate researchers' work is (to a layman like me) just bizarre -- one study involved isolating mother-deprived rhesus monkeys in individual cages and giving them unrestricted access to food, water, and ethanol, in order to test their postmortem CSF 5-HIAA levels and study "early life stress on drinking and serotonin system activity." (Conclusion: if you deprive a monkey of maternal contact and then give it booze, you'll end up with a drunk monkey.)

For me, I'm both fascinated and repulsed by research into, e.g., rh5-HTTLPR polymorphisms and anxiety. Fascinated because it really is inherently interesting, and repulsed because I'm not at all certain that torturing monkeys through isolation and/or maternal deprivation and then killing them is really advancing the state of 5-HTTPLPR research far beyond what is already being done with studies that don't involve the psychiatric destruction of presocial primates. (PubMed shows 75 animal-based 5-HTTLPR/rh5-HTTLPR studies, and 1221 human-based studies.) There are some truly thorny questions here -- and I'm a proponent of animal studies in many cases -- that I feel researchers, particularly those involved in psychiatric animal models, are hand-waving away.

[1] Fellow UW-Madison researcher A. J. Bennett's view of Harlow's work is available at http://speakingofresearch.com/2014/08/03/harlow-dead-bioethi...

No need to study primates when isolation is given out like free candy at prisons across America. If you make guards angry enough, you could get years "in the hole".

The article seems to mix up sensory deprivation with isolation.

Suppose you are stuck on a deserted island with no human contact, like Robinson Crusoe.

Surely, you're not going to get hallucinations?

You're not in a box or dark prison cell; you have day and night, the beach, woods, animals. Survival activities to keep you busy, like making shelter and gathering food.

Maybe the sensory deprivation causes the brain slide into another kind of consciousness which is not exactly sleep and not exactly wakefulness. The hallucinations are perhaps related to the mechanism which produces dreams, and not evidence that you're going bonkers.

I think extended isolation could lead to sensory numbness, which I imagine could get pretty close to sensory deprivation.

There is also the story about Ellen MacArthur mentioned in the article. Isolation from civilization, in this case complete solitude, leads her to anthropomorphise her boat.

> The hallucinations are perhaps related to the mechanism which produces dreams, and not evidence that you're going bonkers.

As the article mentions, hallucinations would be a way to not go bonkers. Humans need to be around other humans, and if that can't happen, we'll make them up.

Completely subjective supposition - I see hallucinations as being, in some cases, extreme forms of delusions. IIRC, I believe there has been a fair amount of research done on delusion (like this one [1] I suppose), suggesting delusion could be a survival mechanism, similar to what is described in the article.

[1] http://www.agroparistech.fr/mmip/maths/laurent_orseau/papers...

> Surely, you're not going to get hallucinations?

And yet we all cried when Wilson died.

Wilson didn't die. Wilson left him. I assume that Wilson dying would require severe degeneration or destruction such as a shark ripping the ball in pieces.

The hallucinations might be a form of dreaming ?

This article from May is extremely pertinent to today's news: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-28793055 about how Chinese detention ad isolation has "Destroyed" the most famous Chinese human rights lawyer.

Boy that article just made me sad. I'm not angry at those responsible for his abuse exclusively though, the sadness grows when you realize that this is done all over the world. Justice being silenced by 'justice'.

I've noticed when I don't speak to people for very long my mind becomes less active, almost switches off. I lack inspiration or life.

Solitary confinement must be the worst torture, I can't bear to imagine it. Yet it is used around the world as standard practice, in the USA, Israel, all over!