Michael Bond
When people are isolated from human contact, their mind can do some truly
bizarre things, says Michael Bond. Why does this happen?
Sarah Shourd s mind began to slip after about two months into her
incarceration. She heard phantom footsteps and flashing lights, and spent most
of her day crouched on all fours, listening through a gap in the door.
That summer, the 32-year-old had been hiking with two friends in the mountains
of Iraqi Kurdistan when they were arrested by Iranian troops after straying
onto the border with Iran. Accused of spying, they were kept in solitary
confinement in Evin prison in Tehran, each in their own tiny cell. She endured
almost 10,000 hours with little human contact before she was freed. One of the
most disturbing effects was the hallucinations.
In the periphery of my vision, I began to see flashing lights, only to jerk my
head around to find that nothing was there, she wrote in the New York Times in
2011. At one point, I heard someone screaming, and it wasn t until I felt the
hands of one of the friendlier guards on my face, trying to revive me, that I
realised the screams were my own.
We all want to be alone from time to time, to escape the demands of our
colleagues or the hassle of crowds. But not alone alone. For most people,
prolonged social isolation is all bad, particularly mentally. We know this not
only from reports by people like Shourd who have experienced it first-hand, but
also from psychological experiments on the effects of isolation and sensory
deprivation, some of which had to be called off due to the extreme and bizarre
reactions of those involved. Why does the mind unravel so spectacularly when we
re truly on our own, and is there any way to stop it?
Inside prison walls, solitude can play disturbing tricks on the mind (Flickr/
Cyri)
We ve known for a while that isolation is physically bad for us. Chronically
lonely people have higher blood pressure, are more vulnerable to infection, and
are also more likely to develop Alzheimer s disease and dementia. Loneliness
also interferes with a whole range of everyday functioning, such as sleep
patterns, attention and logical and verbal reasoning. The mechanisms behind
these effects are still unclear, though what is known is that social isolation
unleashes an extreme immune response a cascade of stress hormones and
inflammation. This may have been appropriate in our early ancestors, when being
isolated from the group carried big physical risks, but for us the outcome is
mostly harmful.
Yet some of the most profound effects of loneliness are on the mind. For
starters, isolation messes with our sense of time. One of the strangest effects
is the time-shifting reported by those who have spent long periods living
underground without daylight. In 1961, French geologist Michel Siffre led a
two-week expedition to study an underground glacier beneath the French Alps and
ended up staying two months, fascinated by how the darkness affected human
biology. He decided to abandon his watch and live like an animal . While
conducting tests with his team on the surface, they discovered it took him five
minutes to count to what he thought was 120 seconds.
A similar pattern of slowing time was reported by Maurizio Montalbini, a
sociologist and caving enthusiast. In 1993, Montalbini spent 366 days in an
underground cavern near Pesaro in Italy that had been designed with Nasa to
simulate space missions, breaking his own world record for time spent
underground. When he emerged, he was convinced only 219 days had passed. His
sleep-wake cycles had almost doubled in length. Since then, researchers have
found that in darkness most people eventually adjust to a 48-hour cycle: 36
hours of activity followed by 12 hours of sleep. The reasons are still unclear.
After emerging from a nine week stint in underground darkness, Michel Siffre
needed to wear a blindfold to protect his eyes (Getty Images)
As well as their time-shifts, Siffre and Montalbini reported periods of mental
instability too. But these experiences were nothing compared with the extreme
reactions seen in notorious sensory deprivation experiments in the mid-20th
Century.
In the 1950s and 1960s, China was rumoured to be using solitary confinement to
brainwash American prisoners captured during the Korean War, and the US and
Canadian governments were all too keen to try it out. Their defence departments
funded a series of research programmes that might be considered ethically
dubious today.
The most extensive took place at McGill University Medical Center in Montreal,
led by the psychologist Donald Hebb. The McGill researchers invited paid
volunteers mainly college students to spend days or weeks by themselves in
sound-proof cubicles, deprived of meaningful human contact. Their aim was to
reduce perceptual stimulation to a minimum, to see how their subjects would
behave when almost nothing was happening. They minimised what they could feel,
see, hear and touch, fitting them with translucent visors, cotton gloves and
cardboard cuffs extending beyond the fingertips. As Scientific American
magazine reported at the time, they had them lie on U-shaped foam pillows to
restrict noise, and set up a continuous hum of air-conditioning units to mask
small sounds.
After only a few hours, the students became acutely restless. They started to
crave stimulation, talking, singing or reciting poetry to themselves to break
the monotony. Later, many of them became anxious or highly emotional. Their
mental performance suffered too, struggling with arithmetic and word
association tests.
Sensory deprivation can cause hallucinations - sometimes starting with
geometric shapes or points of light, and then getting stranger... (Akuei/
Flickr)
But the most alarming effects were the hallucinations. They would start with
points of light, lines or shapes, eventually evolving into bizarre scenes, such
as squirrels marching with sacks over their shoulders or processions of
eyeglasses filing down a street. They had no control over what they saw: one
man saw only dogs; another, babies.
Some of them experienced sound hallucinations as well: a music box or a choir,
for instance. Others imagined sensations of touch: one man had the sense he had
been hit in the arm by pellets fired from guns. Another, reaching out to touch
a doorknob, felt an electric shock.
When they emerged from the experiment they found it hard to shake this altered
sense of reality, convinced that the whole room was in motion, or that objects
were constantly changing shape and size.
The researchers had hoped to observe their subjects over several weeks, but the
trial was cut short because they became too distressed to carry on. Few lasted
beyond two days, and none as long as a week. Afterwards, Hebb wrote in the
journal American Psychologist that the results were very unsettling to us It
is one thing to hear that the Chinese are brainwashing their prisoners on the
other side of the world; it is another to find, in your own laboratory, that
merely taking away the usual sights, sounds, and bodily contacts from a healthy
university student for a few days can shake him, right down to the base.
In 2008, clinical psychologist Ian Robbins recreated Hebb s experiment in
collaboration with the BBC, isolating six volunteers for 48 hours in
sound-proofed rooms in a former nuclear bunker. The results were similar. The
volunteers suffered anxiety, extreme emotions, paranoia and significant
deterioration in their mental functioning. They also hallucinated: a heap of
5,000 empty oyster shells; a snake; zebras; tiny cars; the room taking off;
mosquitoes; fighter planes buzzing around.
A clip from BBC Horizon s Total Isolation experiment read more information
about the programme here.
Why does the perceptually deprived brain play such tricks? Cognitive
psychologists believe that the part of the brain that deals with ongoing tasks,
such as sensory perception, is accustomed to dealing with a large quantity of
information, such as visual, auditory and other environmental cues. But when
there is a dearth of information, says Robbins, the various nerve systems
feeding in to the brain s central processor are still firing off, but in a way
that doesn t make sense. So after a while the brain starts to make sense of
them, to make them into a pattern. It creates whole images out of partial
ones. In other words, it tries to construct a reality from the scant signals
available to it, yet it ends up building a fantasy world.
Such mental failures should perhaps not surprise us. For one thing, we know
that other primates do not fare well in isolation. One of the most graphic
examples is psychologist Harry Harlow s experiments on rhesus macaque monkeys
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during the 1960s, in which he deprived
them of social contact after birth for months or years. They became, he
observed, enormously disturbed even after 30 days, and after a year were
obliterated socially, incapable of interaction of any kind. (A comparable
social fracturing has been observed in humans: consider the children rescued
from Romanian orphanages in the early 1990s, who after being almost entirely
deprived of close social contact since birth grew up with serious behavioural
and attachment issues.)
We may crave solitude occasionally, but in the long term it's not good for us
physically or mentally (Getty Images)
Secondly, we derive meaning from our emotional states largely through contact
with others. Biologists believe that human emotions evolved because they aided
co-operation among our early ancestors who benefited from living in groups.
Their primary function is social. With no one to mediate our feelings of fear,
anger, anxiety and sadness and help us determine their appropriateness, before
long they deliver us a distorted sense of self, a perceptual fracturing or a
profound irrationality. It seems that left too much to ourselves, the very
system that regulates our social living can overwhelm us.
Take the 25,000 inmates held in super-maximum security prisons in the US
today. Without social interaction, supermax prisoners have no way to test the
appropriateness of their emotions or their fantastical thinking, says Terry
Kupers, a forensic psychiatrist at the Wright Institute in Berkeley,
California, who has interviewed thousands of supermax prisoners. This is one of
the reasons many suffer anxiety, paranoia and obsessive thoughts. Craig Haney,
a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a leading
authority on the mental health of inmates in the US, believes that some of them
purposefully initiate brutal confrontations with prison staff just to reaffirm
their own existence to remember who they are.
Social isolation is not always debilitating, however. Are some better than
others at coping? And can you train yourself to resist the worst effects? Here
scientists have fewer hard answers, but we can at least look to the lessons of
individuals who thrived or floundered under isolation.
When Shourd was imprisoned in Iran, she was arguably among the least-equipped
people to cope, because her incarceration came out of the blue. People in her
circumstances have their world suddenly inverted, and there is nothing in the
manner of their taking no narrative of sacrifice, or enduring for a greater
good to help them derive meaning from it. They must somehow find meaning in
their predicament or mentally detach themselves from their day-to-day
reality, which is a monumental task when alone.
Hussain Al-Shahristani managed it. He was Saddam Hussein s chief nuclear
adviser before he was tortured and shut away in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad
after refusing on moral grounds to cooperate on the development of an atomic
weapon. He kept his sanity during 10 years of solitary confinement by taking
refuge in a world of abstractions, making up mathematical problems which he
then tried to solve. He is now deputy energy minister of Iraq. Edith Bone, a
medical academic and translator, followed a similar strategy during the seven
years she spent imprisoned by the Hungarian communist government after World
War Two, constructing an abacus out of stale bread and counting out an
inventory of her vocabulary in the six languages she spoke fluently.
Some believe a military background may help prevent the worst effects of
isolation (Thinkstock)
Such experiences may be easier to take if you belong to a military
organisation. Keron Fletcher, a consultant psychiatrist who has helped debrief
and treat hostages, says mock detention and interrogation exercises of the kind
he himself underwent while serving with the Royal Air Force are a good
preparation for the shock of capture. They teach you the basics of coping, he
says. Also, you know your buddies will be busting a gut to get you back in one
piece. I think the military are less likely to feel helpless or hopeless.
Hopelessness and helplessness are horrible things to live with and they erode
morale and coping ability.
US senator John McCain is a good example of how a military mindset bestows
psychological advantages. His five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war in
Vietnam, during which he refused to yield to his interrogators, actually seemed
to strengthen him. Though note what he had to say about the two years he spent
in isolation: It s an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and
weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment
The onset of despair is immediate, and it is a formidable foe.
Psychologists who study how people cope with isolation have learnt much from
solo explorers and mountaineers. For many adventurers deprived of human company
albeit voluntarily the landscape itself can serve as an effective
surrogate, drawing them out of themselves into the beauty or grandeur of their
surroundings. Norwegian psychologist Gro Sandal at the University of Bergen in
Norway, who has interviewed many adventurers about how they cope in extreme
environments, says that transcending the reality of their situation in this way
is a common coping mechanism. It makes them feel safer. It makes them feel
less alone.
A similar psychological mechanism could explain why shipwrecked mariners
marooned on islands have been known to anthropomorphise inanimate objects, in
some cases creating a cabal of imaginary companions with whom to share the
solitude. It sounds like madness but is likely a foil against it. Take the way
sailor Ellen MacArthur nicknamed her trimaran Mobi , during her
record-breaking solo circumnavigation of the globe in 2005. During the voyage
she signed emails to her support team love e and mobi , and in her published
account uses we rather than I .
Sailors have been known to combat the loneliness of the ocean by
anthropomorphising inanimate objects (Thinkstock)
There is no more poignant illustration of the power of solitude to sink one
person while lifting up another than the stories of Bernard Moitessier and
Donald Crowhurst, two of the competitors in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe
round-the-world yacht race. The trophy, offered to the first sailor to complete
a solo non-stop circumnavigation of the globe, was won in 313 days by Robin
Knox-Johnston, the only one out of nine starters to finish. He seemed to relish
being alone with his boat, but not as much as Moitessier, an ascetic Frenchman
who practised yoga on deck and fed cheese to the shearwater birds that shadowed
him. Moitessier found the experience so fulfilling, and the idea of returning
to civilisation so distasteful, that he abandoned the race despite a good
chance of victory and just kept on sailing, eventually landing in Tahiti after
travelling more than halfway round the world again. I continue non-stop
because I am happy at sea, he declared, and perhaps because I want to save my
soul.
Crowhurst, meanwhile, was in trouble from the start. He left England
ill-prepared and sent fake reports about his supposed progress through the
southern seas while never actually leaving the Atlantic. Drifting aimlessly for
months off the coast of South America, he became increasingly depressed and
lonely, eventually retreating to his cabin and consolidating his fantasies in a
rambling 25,000-word philosophical treatise before jumping overboard. His body
was never found.
What message can we take from these stories of endurance and despair? The
obvious one is that we are, as a rule, considerably diminished when disengaged
from others. Isolation may very often be the sum total of wretchedness , as
the writer Thomas Carlyle put it. However, a more upbeat assessment seems
equally valid: it is possible to connect, to find solace beyond ourselves, even
when we are alone. It helps to be prepared, and to be mentally resilient. But
we shouldn t underestimate the power of our imagination to knock over prison
walls, penetrate icy caves or provide make-believe companions to walk with us.