The Great Deprivation Experiment

“Alone again, [un]naturally” Gilbert O’Sullivan

During the 1950s academic psychologists found much appetite in government funding circles for Sensory Deprivation experiments.

That is, cutting individuals off from all sensory input, in order to learn what happened to the individual human mind when it gets isolated from the outside world.

Why would government be interested in this? It seems obviously cruel – throughout the ages, humanity has used exclusion and isolation as a punishment. “Go to your room..” being the mildest of these.

At the height of the Cold War, Western powers were convinced that the Russians and Chinese had developed interrogation and brainwashing techniques based on isolation (it was believed that extended isolation would tend to lead an individual’s mind and will to collapse).

Canadian Donald Hebb was one of these (you’ve probably stolen a phrase he coined to articulate how neural – brain – networks get structured and retain information or skills – “cells that fire together, wire together”).

Hebb conducted his Deprivation experiments as a young post-doctoral student with  a $10000 grant from the Canadian government.

His original plan was to isolate individual male students in cells 1m x 2m with just enough room for a bed, with headphones, blindfolds and white noise from the AC.

Things didn’t go to plan, as his collaborator Woodburn Heron put it later

“Most of the subjects had planned to think about their work: some intended to review their studies, some to plan term papers, and one thought he would organize a lecture he had to deliver…Nearly all of them reported that the most striking thing about the experience was that they were unable to think clearly about anything for any length of time and that their thought processes seemed to be affected in other ways.”

And far from lasting the proposed 6 weeks, most lasted just a few days.

Being deprived sensory input revealed just how important it is to our everyday function and our cognitive abilities.

The Great Experiment

So this is what it feels like now: as if we’re living in a great Social Deprivation experiment; an experiment designed to reveal to us quite how much we rely on other people and our real life interaction with them.

Since governments around the world have enforced lockdowns of their populations to stem the spread of the COVID 19 pandemic, this centrality of the social aspect of us humans and our lives has become as clear as day.

In the past I’ve used unusual phenomena to highlight the importance of our social sides – like the outburst of public mourning and floral tributes on the death of Princess Diana here in the UK or the spread of “ghost bikes” to mark the site of cyclists fatal accidents in the US.

I’ve highlighted the science that people might not be familiar with that shows us to be the Super Social creatures we are.

I’ve harnessed the popularity of social media in all its forms and the way ideas, words and behaviours can be shown to spread socially.

But nothing highlights the importance of our social sides like a good pandemic of a virus that is spread by human-human interaction.

The only way to stop it spreading is to get between humans.

To isolate them from each other.

To create social distance mechanisms and ban social gatherings.

To slam the brakes on our social selves.

Of course, people are finding different (often digital) ways to compensate.

Of course these things spread by peoplecopying other people’s workarounds.

Whether that’s the now ritual clapping and potbanging of a Thursday night Thank You to health workers in the UK, Italian balcony-balcony serenading or the explosion of zoom drinks and House Party er…house parties…everywhere.

Even in the strictest lockdowns, it’s just that our social selves – our HERD nature – keep leaking out.