Leah Nagle Week 10 - Why Do People Lose Their Mental Sanity in Isolation?

If a human being is left in isolation for a long enough period of time, they will eventually lose their mental sanity. People need human contact. Contact with the world is essential to survive and function. Curious experimenters have conducted many research projects to test why people lose their mental sanity in isolation. 

Experiments have shown that people locked up in isolation begin to feel extreme emotions, depression, panic, severe anxiety, struggle to sleep in regular patterns, have higher blood pressure leading to increased risk of infections, Alzheimer's disease, and Dementia (diseases that cause memory loss and imparired thinking skills), physical pain, and lastly, they begin to hallucinate. 

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, China used isolation as a method of torchure on American prisoners captured in the Korean War. The United States and Canadian governments funded experiments to find out what horrors China was bringing to American prisoners. The most famous of these research programs was held at the McGill University Medical Center in Montreal, run by psychologist Donald Hebb. Paid volunteers spent days in sound-proof cubicles with no human contact at all. The volunteers had limited methods of expressing their senses of feeling, sight, hearing, and touch since they were dressed in translucent visors, cotton gloves, and cardboard cuffs. They lay on U-shaped foam pillows and listened to loud air-conditioners in order to limit noise. 

Only hours into the experiment, the research subjects became bored and restless. They began to speak, sing, or recite poetry in order to provide themselves with stimulation that they so desperately craved. Soon after, most of the research subjects felt seriously anxious and emotional. They were also unable to complete basic arithmetic and word association tests. 

Eventually, test subjects saw hallucinations, beginning with basic dots, shapes, and lines, but ultimately becoming vivid, strange scenarios. One person saw dogs, another saw babies, one saw squirrels marching with sacks, and another saw eyeglasses moving down a street. Some even imagined sounds such as a music box or a choir and others felt the sense of touch in the form of a gun wound or an electric shock. 

After the experiment ended, test subjects were unable to distinguish hallucinations from reality. They thought that the room was moving or that objects were changing in shape or size.  

Cognitive psychologists suggest that these extreme reactions to isolation are due to the brain’s constant reinforcement or multiple sensations at once. When the brain is deprived of stimulation, it begins to create scenarios and fantasies out of the limited sensations available. Robbins claimed after the experiment that,“the various nerve systems feeding into 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.”

The theory was that emotions were developed to assist in human cooperation. A disorientated sense-of-self, lack of perception, and irrationality arose because in isolation, there is no one to help regulate fear, anxiety, anger, and sadness. When humans are left alone, the brain that is meant to assist people in social situations haunts them. 

In conclusion, it is essential for people to live among others and in a world full of stimulation. Humans were created social creatures who not only benefit tremendously from social interaction, but also suffer without it. 

What do you think about this? Did you know some of these facts before? Did you learn something new? 

Citations 

“How Extreme Isolation Warps the Mind.” BBC Future, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140514-how-extreme-isolation-warps-minds. 

Source 

“In Social Isolation, the Brain Begins to Act in Strange Ways to Preserve Its Sanity.” PsyPost, 15 Nov. 2016, https://www.psypost.org/2016/11/social-isolation-brain-begins-act-strange-ways-preserve-sanity-45946. 

Source

Posted September 1, 2017. “How Isolation Impacts Mental Health.” Mental Health Connecticut, 1 Sept. 2017, https://www.mhconn.org/uncategorized/isolation-impacts-mental-health/. 

Source