"The findings to which Johnson-Schwartz referred were from the last 80 years of isolation research, a field of study initiated during World War II, when the British Royal Air Force grew concerned about pilots’ performance during solo reconnaissance flights. Officers noticed that the longer a pilot stayed in the air, the fewer German submarines he detected. The psychologist Norman Mackworth determined that the monotony of the mission was responsible. But inattention wasn’t the worst of it: Monotony weakened the pilots’ competence in even the most basic tasks.
Mackworth’s conclusions inspired a series of studies by the psychologist Donald O. Hebb at McGill University in Montreal, in which male students earned $20 a day to lie on a bed in a lighted, soundproofed gray cubicle. Hebb confirmed Mackworth’s findings and added a disturbing new wrinkle. Monotony didn’t only cause intellectual impairment. It led to “change of attitude.”
At first Hebb’s students slept a lot and ruminated on their studies and their personal problems. Later they fell into reminiscences, recreating movies they had watched or trips they had taken. Some counted to incredibly large numbers. Eventually, however, they lost the ability to focus. Several students reported “blank periods” during which they did not have a single thought.
Next came the hallucinations: a procession of marching squirrels hauling sacks over their shoulders. Nude women frolicking in a woodland pool. Giant eyeglasses marching down a street. An old man wearing a battle helmet in a bathtub rolling across a field on rubber wheels. Dogs, endless dogs. One student complained of a phantom “sucking my mind out through my eyes.” The delusions made the students vulnerable to manipulation. When played recordings about ghosts, poltergeists and ESP, they were far more likely to believe such phenomena were real, even long after the experiment ended.
Hebb’s findings inspired a boom of isolation studies. Subjects were confined within iron lungs, water tanks and subterranean caves; the results were consistent. “These experiments were extremely useful to many different people,” says Jeffrey Mathias, a historian of science at Cornell University, who is writing a book about the history of isolation research. Besides attracting neuroscientists and psychologists, the research also drew the interest, and funding, of the U.S. intelligence community. The C.I.A. incorporated findings into their practice of “coercive counterintelligence interrogation,” or what today might be called “brainwashing” or “torture.”
The isolation studies were also closely monitored by the Air Force, which directed the nascent U.S. space program before the creation of NASA in 1958. Worried that spaceflight might drive astronauts insane, the Air Force conducted the first iteration of a CHAPEA-like experiment at the Air Force’s School of Aeronautic Medicine in San Antonio in 1955. Prospective astronauts were enclosed for a week within a spaceship cockpit slightly larger than a coffin perpetually illuminated by bright fluorescent lights. The airmen were assigned an overwhelming number of technical tasks and, in some cases, given huge doses of amphetamines.
Their experience followed a familiar trajectory: Initial high spirits gave way to what one researcher called a “gradual increase in irritability,” which abruptly flipped into “frank hostility.” Many participants, including a few who hadn’t taken speed, hallucinated. One pilot saw “little people” perched on the instrument panel. “I can’t say if I thought they were alive or not,” he said. “I really don’t know.” Another pilot abandoned the experiment after three hours and demanded psychiatric care." [1]
1. Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars? Rich, Nathaniel. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Feb 25, 2024.
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