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Sensory deprivation (from Latin sensus — feeling, sensation and deprivatio — deprivation) — a prolonged, more or less complete deprivation of a person’s sensory impressions, carried out for experimental purposes.
For an ordinary person, almost any deprivation is a nuisance. Deprivation is deprivation, and if this senseless deprivation brings anxiety, people experience deprivation hard. This was especially evident in experiments on sensory deprivation.
In the middle of the 3th century, researchers from the American McGill University suggested that volunteers stay as long as possible in a special chamber, where they were protected from external stimuli as much as possible. The subjects were in a supine position in a small closed room; all sounds were covered by the monotonous hum of the air conditioning motor; the subjects’ hands were inserted into cardboard sleeves, and darkened glasses let in only a weak diffused light. For staying in this state, a fairly decent time wage was due. It would seem — lie to yourself in complete peace and count how your wallet is filled without any effort on your part. Scientists were struck by the fact that most of the subjects were unable to withstand such conditions for more than XNUMX days. What’s the matter?
Consciousness, deprived of the usual external stimulation, was forced to turn «inward», and from there the most bizarre, incredible images and pseudo-sensations began to emerge, which could not be defined otherwise than as hallucinations. The subjects themselves did not find anything pleasant in this, they were even frightened by these experiences and demanded to stop the experiment. From this, scientists concluded that sensory stimulation is vital for the normal functioning of consciousness, and sensory deprivation is a sure way to the degradation of thought processes and the personality itself.
Impaired memory, attention and thinking, disruption of the rhythm of sleep and wakefulness, anxiety, abrupt mood swings from depression to euphoria and back, inability to distinguish reality from frequent hallucinations — all this was described as the inevitable consequences of sensory deprivation. This began to be widely written in popular literature, almost everyone believed it.
Later it turned out that everything is more complicated and interesting.
Everything is determined not by the fact of deprivation, but by the attitude of a person to this fact. In itself, deprivation is not terrible for an adult — it is just a change in environmental conditions, and the human body can adapt to this by restructuring its functioning. Food deprivation is not necessarily accompanied by suffering, only those who are not used to it and for whom this is a violent procedure begin to suffer from starvation. Those who consciously practice therapeutic fasting know that already on the third day a feeling of lightness arises in the body, and prepared people can easily endure even a ten-day fast.
The same goes for sensory deprivation. Scientist John Lilly tested the effect of sensory deprivation on himself, even under even more complicated conditions. He was in an impenetrable chamber, where he was immersed in a saline solution with a temperature close to body temperature, so that he was deprived of even temperature and gravity sensations. Naturally, he began to have bizarre images and unexpected pseudo-sensations, just like the subjects from McGill University. However, Lilly approached his feelings with a different attitude. In his opinion, discomfort arises due to the fact that a person perceives illusions and hallucinations as something pathological, and therefore is frightened of them and seeks to return to a normal state of consciousness. And for John Lilly, these were just studies, he studied with interest the images and sensations that appeared in him, as a result of which he did not experience any discomfort during sensory deprivation. Moreover, he liked it so much that he began to immerse himself in these sensations and fantasies, stimulating their emergence with drugs. Actually, on the basis of these fantasies of his, the foundation of transpersonal psychology, set out in S. Grof’s book «Journey in Search of Yourself», was largely built.
People who have undergone special training, who have mastered auto-training and the practice of calm presence, endure sensory deprivation without much difficulty.