#hebb

 Ah, no, sorry but I think you’vegotten the wrong end of the stick.

Sensory deprivation cancause victims to lose the ability to recognise everyday objects (I Cobain calls this ‘severe prosopagnosia’ but this usually refers to inability to recognise faces, which the victims also suffered from).

Solitary confinementcan not.

They’re both extremebut they’re different. Sensory deprivation requires a special set up thatrestricts or masks at least four senses. Solitary confinement just requires aroom.

With prolonged solitaryconfinement and/or victims with pre-existing mental health problems, solitarycan cause hallucinations and psychosis. However these are not the most commonsymptoms. Youcan find a full list of symptoms, both physical and psychological, here.

Sensorydeprivation…well it’s something I advise writers to avoid for a few reasons.

It’s incredibly, almostuniquely, damaging. A realistic and respectful depiction of victims would, Ithink, be extremely difficult to write. Not impossible by any means, but very very difficult. 

Fiction generally does a pretty poorjob of respectfully depicting disability. The kind of multiple disabilitiessensory deprivation causes- well essentially I’ve never seen a good portrayalof mental health problems that severe.

A character who’dsurvived this for the extreme length of time we’re talking about would be incapable of doing a great many ordinary things. They’dneed a carer and would probably be in some sort of institution. That makes itdifficult to produce a plot which focuses on the victim. I personally don’tlike the idea of torture victims being relegated to the side lines; I thinkthis often risks stepping into rather unfortunate tropes.

I am not saying thatwriting a plot focusing on such a character would be impossible. But I think itwould be difficult and most of the asks I get about sensory deprivation seem towant the victim to come out of their ordeal capable of functioning in societywith some independence. In which case sensory deprivation is not a realistictechnique to use.

The technique itselfhas rarely been used in real life.The real victims were a small number of American mental health patientsinvolved in unethical, unconsensual experiments. There have been no cases that meet the legal definition torture using sensory deprivation.

Over-use of such a rareform of abuse in fiction teaches thepublic that this is what torture is like. That in turn makes it moredifficult for victims to share their stories and gain support.

I prefer to encouragereaders to write about torture techniques that were/are in regular use in theirsetting. In fantasy and sci fi I try to connect the setting to real world timesand places and suggest torture techniques that were used then.

Sensory deprivation, inmy opinion, feeds into stereotypes about torture being ‘high tech’ or‘scientific’, when the vast majority of torture is about as high tech as beinghit with a wooden plank.

And the final bigproblem with using sensory deprivation is that because it’s so rare we don’t have good information on it.

A lot of data isessentially the research notes of Dr E Cameron, the man who subjected severalmental health patients in his care to sensory deprivation in the hope of‘re-writing’ their personalities. The research was extremely poorly conducted. There are (so far as I know) no patientinterviews.

There was some work done by Dr Baldwin (who usedpeople who did not consent in his experiments) and ethical experiments using volunteers conducted by Drs Lily andHebb.

The work done by Lilyand Hebb is actually very very good, but it doesn’t by its nature talk about the more extreme lengths of time andextreme symptoms sensory deprivation can cause. Most people in Lily’s ‘tank’stayed inside for 4 hours. No one stayed in Hebb’s ‘box’ longer than six days.

Cameron kept a womanknown as ‘Mary C’ in a similar box for 35days. Most people can only voluntarily stay in one of these devices for 24 hours or less.

The result is thatwhile I can list symptoms for the more extreme time periods (ie a week ormore in box-like structures), such as the memory loss most of these people suffered and losing the abilityto recognise faces and ordinary objects which affected at least two of them*, I can’t sayfor certain how these symptoms manifested or affected Cameron’s victims intheir daily lives.

I know that they spentthe rest of their lives in care homes. Several years later other researcherspublished a further paper on them, which essentially said that none of them hadrecovered and the damage Cameron caused seemed more extensive than previouslythought.

The patients themselvesare anonymous.

If you really do want towrite about them, or a fictional character who undergoes something similar thenI think the level of research you’d need in order to portray them realisticallyand respectfully would be something like a doctoral thesis. I think you’d needto track down the doctors who had contact with them and if possible thepatients themselves and their families.

I think, essentially, aproject like that would be something akin to ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’.

It would take years.

Because at the moment I’m just not sure that a good nonfiction source which covers all the relevant information and focuses on the victims exists. And I think that to capture that experience the most important and useful thing is to listen to what the victims themselves have to say. Without their voices it’s very easy to misrepresent them. 

Unfortunately we’re talking about a group of people who are voiceless. For me respecting the victims means remembering what they say when I write. If I can’t find a simple resource then my instinct is to read around the topic and create my own library, my own resource. 

If that’s a project youwant to take on, for your writing or out of interest, then these are the bestsources on sensory deprivation I know of. And I sincerely wish you the best of luck.

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate,J Marks, Norton Co 1991

The Mind Manipulators, A Scheflin E Opton,1978 (I haven’t read either of these books yet, so far as I can tell from sources that cite them they cover sensory deprivation in a general way but do not focus on the victims)

A Textbook of Psychology, D Hebb 1966, 2nded

‘Effects of Decreased Variation in the Sensory Environment’ W HBexton, W Heron, T H Scott, CanadianJournal of Psychology 1954, 70-76

‘Production of Differential Amnesia as a Factor in the Treatment ofSchizophrenia’ D E Cameron, ComprehensivePsychiatry 1960

‘Effects of Repetition of Verbal Signals upon the Behaviourof Chronic Psychoneurotic Patients’ D E Cameron, L Levy,L Rubenstein, Journal of Mental Science1960

*Some of the patientssued the CIA and Canadian government over these experiments but that does notnecessarily indicate that more victims didn’t experience these symptoms.

Edit: In response to comment, yes I think prosopagonsia does generally refer to being unable to recognise faces. I took the term from I Cobain (Cruel Britannia) in his summary of case Cameron’s victims raised against the Canadian government and CIA. The victims were unable to recognise everyday objects and faces, something Rejali confirms. Cobain’s use of prosopagonsia might wlel be incorrect though, so thank you for pulling that up, I’ll edit the main text to reflect that.

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