Depriving
people of human contact, or of sensory stimulation, can have profoundly
dismal effects on human beings. Whether one is in solitary confinement,
a solo adventure, or a laboratory, most deprived people will encounter
strange changes in their psyches and their bodies alike.
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.
But that’s nothing compared to the hallucinations.
Read about a range of effects isolation and deprivation can have, from both experiments and real life situations, at the BBC.
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