Sensory isolation, or, as psychologists call it, sensory deprivation, is not getting enough information from the senses. This condition is characterized by a number of psychological and mental phenomena, and doctors, psychologists, and more recently, parapsychologists have paid attention to it.
INSULATION AND VISION
What provokes sensual isolation? Well, first of all, there are more than enough cases when a person from birth or due to life circumstances turned out to be deaf, blind or dumb. This should also include a long-existing monotonous, monotonous environment, which is equally depressing. Solitary confinement, polar wintering, hermitage, prolonged hospital bed stays, and many days of solo spacecraft flight all lead to sensory deprivation.
From the point of view of parapsychology, sensual isolation is often a reason and a sufficient condition for opening a direct channel of communication with the subtle world. It gives rise to "information hunger" and the so-called negative induction (strengthening of the inhibitory process under the influence of the focus of excitation). First of all, this phenomenon manifests itself in mentally ill people. For the first time this was noted a hundred years ago by the Swiss psychiatrist E. Bleuler, describing the characteristics of patients with schizophrenia. These people initially have autism - "the predominance of inner life with active withdrawal from the outside world." Self-isolation gives rise to illusions and hallucinations that make up the patient's whole inner world, which is in no way inferior in brightness, significance and reality to the ordinary impressions of an ordinary person.
However, the same visions arise in completely healthy people, which include, for example, cosmonauts who have undergone a serious selection, in cases where they underwent a multi-day training in an isolation chamber.
Similar examples are found in the biographies of religious ascetics who subjected themselves to severe asceticism and self-isolation in a cell, skete and away from people. So, for example, Jesus Christ was tempted by the devil during a forty-day solitary vigil in the desert. And in 1507, after 23 years of living in the wilderness, the Holy Trinity appeared to Saint Alexander Svirsky.
Experimental sensory isolation of mentally healthy subjects in our days in the same way naturally led to active stimulation of the subconscious region and the occurrence of hallucinations. I must say that such experiences were not very pleasant for their participants.
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EXPERIMENT IN SILENCE
In the 1950s, an isolation experiment was conducted at McGill University in Canada. The student volunteers were supposed to lie in comfortable beds in complete silence and soft, non-annoying light. For greater effect, everyone wore light-diffusing glasses on their eyes, and long gloves with cardboard cuffs up to the elbows, and covered their ears with a rubber pillow. All this excluded the receipt of any information from the senses. At the same time, a device was used to restrict the movement of volunteers.
Most of the students willingly went to this experiment, looking forward to a good rest from their studies at the university … But that was not the case. After some time, most of the subjects developed visual hallucinations, in some cases accompanied by false auditory and tactile sensations. At first it even amused them, but after a while the visions and sounds became annoying, irritated and interfered with sleep. The volunteers were kept in this state for several hours, and then every last one demanded to stop the experiment.
Similar studies with a stay in an isolation chamber were carried out with a group of Soviet cosmonauts. The results were similar: after a while in the isolation chamber, illusions appeared, and then hallucinations. However, future cosmonauts as people who passed a special selection and distinguished by endurance and obedience to the order steadfastly withstood the entire experiment to the end.
It is curious that in similar conditions all people experience similar sensations, regardless of their education, cultural level and confessional affiliation. This is described in detail in the book by O. N. Kuznetsov and V. I. Lebedev "Psychology and psychopathology of loneliness."
EMPTY FIELD
Science is also known for another amazing experiment called "ganzfeld", which in German means "empty field". This study was conducted by the parapsychologist Charles Honorton of the University of Edinburgh in the UK in the 70s and 80s of the last century. The main task of the scientist was to investigate the telepathic abilities of a person.
The essence of this experience was as follows. The subject was placed in an easy chair or on a bed in a soundproof room (isolation chamber). His eyes were covered with halves of ping-pong balls, to which a stream of light was directed through a red filter. At the same time, he heard white or flickering (“pink”) noise through the headphones. The monotony of all these signals from the external environment reduced the level of their perception, as a result of which the percipient's consciousness involuntarily switched to the perception of weak signals within itself, which in a normal situation are subthreshold and are not perceived. Why was this interested in Hornton, who was studying telepathy? Because such subthreshold signals included those that were telepathically transmitted to the subject from the next room.
Before starting the experiment, the subject was introduced to certain plots, or "targets". And in the course of the experiment, the experimenter sitting in the next room, using a computer, presented these "targets" to the percipient by the method of random selection.
A series of experiments confirmed the original hypothesis that everyone possesses latent telepathic abilities, which are manifested in conditions of sensory deprivation. They are more pronounced in women, persons who have been practicing meditation for a long time, in people of creative professions for whom intuition and the work of the subconscious are of great importance, as well as in persons with innate eidetism - the ability to perceive objects in their absence.
BATH OF JOHN LILLY
In the middle of the last century, an interesting independent experiment was carried out. We are talking about the so-called "isolation bath" - a device created on the initiative of the American neurophysiologist and philosopher John Lilly and designed to study the properties of human consciousness in conditions of maximum isolation from external stimuli.
What was the experiment? The subject was placed in a spacious bath filled with saline, heated to + 34 ° C and located in a dark soundproof chamber. A special soft mask with a hose through which air was supplied was put on the volunteer's face.
As a result of a series of experiments with various volunteers, among whom was John Lilly himself, the following was established.
Cut off from the outside world, autonomous consciousness continues to exist, but in a changed form. First, dreamlike visions appear - any memories and ideas acquire extraordinary brightness and richness. Thinking works surprisingly easily, associations arise with various and sometimes very distant, but not always pleasant concepts and ideas, creative thinking is liberated. After some more time, the person in the bath has auditory and visual hallucinations, the flow of which he can no longer stop. So, Lilly himself traveled in space and time, visited parallel worlds, talked with aliens in their language … All this made an indelible impression on the scientist!
Arkady VYATKIN, psychiatrist, parapsychologist