Deprived of Input

How long would you last in sensory deprivation?

Here's the thing, and it goes back to what I say from time to time: Humans are obligatorily social animals. Sensory deprivation, floating in a tank for a half hour, isn't dangerous. You might hallucinate, you might not, you might get weirded out, you might relax. Sensory deprivation for days on end drives you bufguck insane. Without stimulus, that oversized three-pound lump of gray and pink jello in our skulls has nothing to work on. Like a model without boundary conditions, an unstimulated brain's behavior is unconstrained, and it can rapidly work itself into a state from which it can't return.

And it is the policy of the United States of America and the Central Intelligence Agency to drive prisoners insane.

It is the policy of George W. Bush's administration that it can choose to take an American citizen, hold them captive indefinitely without oversight or review, and make them permanently crazy.

We need to fix our government, and we need to fix it now.

I don't know how long I'd last under sensory deprivation. Probably not too long. I can sometimes hear my brain going squirrelly if I spend a weekend without talking to anybody; I probably would be singing the Tom Lehrer songbook within the same time if I were also blinded and deafened. Sure, I'd like to be the carefree movie hero, quipping blithely in my cell, confounding my captors with my insouciant indomitability, but let's be honest: The reason they use sensory deprivation is because it works on anybody who's not already crazy to the point of catatonia.

Posted by Greg at June 7, 2007 2:46 PM