Human beings are social creatures. We love to surround ourselves with other people
and share our personal stories and experiences. We crave connection and interaction. Today we only have to turn on our laptops
or smartphones to instantly spark up a conversation. So being on your own for long periods of time,
isolated from family, friends and loved ones, can sound a little scary. But what can isolation really do to a person? What effect does disconnecting from the world
and society have? And if the time alone is indefinite, how long
would it take to drive a person insane? Today we will attempt to answer these questions
by exploring stories of people who have spent hours, months, and even years on their own,
in this episode of The Infographics Show ‘Effects of isolation and how long would it take to
go crazy?’ Let’s begin by looking at the case of Michel
Siffre, a French underground explorer, adventurer and scientist. On Valentine's Day in 1972, Siffre kissed
his wife goodbye and descended a hundred feet into the Midnight Cave in Texas. He did not emerge for six months. He didn’t go crazy, but things did get pretty
strange. Siffre lived in a nylon tent surrounded by
scientific equipment. He took a few creature comforts including
a freezer, furniture, books, and a music player. NASA supplied all of his food, so they could
monitor the experiment as part of their research for long haul space missions. So how did Siffre fair? Well the lack of sensory and social stimulation
led to a gradual deterioration in his mental wellbeing and at one point he even thought
about suicide. By day seventy-seven, his memory was so bad,
that he forgot things unless he wrote them down immediately. Siffre survived the ordeal, he did not lose
his mind, but even three years after leaving the cave, he continued to have issues with
his memory and eyesight. Years later in 2008, the BBC conducted a similar
experiment but with a shorter time frame and more extreme conditions. They wanted to try and answer a simple question:
Can any human endure total sensory deprivation without losing their sanity? A group of six volunteers were put into a
total isolation chamber, hidden in a former nuclear bunker. No light, no sound, no sensory interaction
for 48 hours. One of the volunteers was comedian, Adam Bloom. Bloom explained his experience as the hours
went by. He started out by talking, singing and making
jokes out loud until he was bored. Next he stared off into space for sometime
and his mind filled with thoughts of his life outside. This led him to worry about his fiancée and
family. He fell asleep after a few hours but when
he woke up, he had totally lost track of time. In pitch black and with nothing to reference
for the time of day, he found it impossible to regain his body clock. After 18 hours, things took a turn for the
worse and comedian Bloom started experiencing paranoia. He was singing and then crying, his emotions
running out of control. At the halfway mark, 24 hours, Bloom’s brainpower
was really flagging. He felt it was impossible to stimulate his
mind. At 30 hours, he started pacing his room endlessly,
to keep himself occupied. Finally, after 40 hours, with only 8 hours
to go, Bloom began to hallucinate, seeing a pile of 500 oyster shells. He described seeing the pearly sheen on the
shells as clear as day, and he felt like the room was taking off from beneath him. He realized that the lack of stimulation was
driving him close to insanity. Bloom survived the final 8 hours and lived
to tell the tale. But we can see from this experiment, that
taking away all of a person’s sensory input and locking them away on their own for even
a short period of time, can begin to drive them crazy. When you think of isolation, something that
also springs to mind is life inside a prison. So we decided to take a look at some of the
cases that involved prisoners being kept in solitary confinement. Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore spent 36 consecutive
years in solitary confinement in Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. During his time there, Whitmore was deprived
of virtually all human contact, and spent 23 hours a day living in a 6-foot by 9-foot
cell. After he was eventually released back into
the general prison population, Whitmore was suffering from what he described as a constellation
of muscle atrophy, cardiovascular hypertension and deteriorating vision caused by a lack
of light and visual stimulation in his stifling cell. 36 years in solitary, now that’s a long
time but it’s actually NOT the record! With a little more digging, we discovered
the story of Albert Woodfox. Woodfox was released from jail after a staggering
43 years in isolation. Like Whitmore, Woodfox spent 23 hours of his
day living alone in his small cell. In 2014, he relayed his experiences to a blogger. Woodfox described what it was like to be locked
in the cell for so many years. He said he feared he might start screaming
and not be able to stop. He also felt he might turn into a baby, curl
up in a fetal position and lay there day after day for the rest of his life. Or that he might cut off his balls, throw
them through the bars the way he had seen others do when they couldn’t take any more. Albert Woodfox’s comments certainly sound
like those of a man who was flirting with insanity, but he survived. His attorney said Woodfox made it through
the ordeal because of his extraordinary strength and character. So we’ve looked at isolation experiments
and the effects on the mind, and we’ve seen how years in a jail cell can push a person
to the edge. What other extreme examples of isolation are
there? Well not everyone is forced into isolation. In fact, in some spiritual traditions, practitioners
chose to retreat to the forest or in to caves for years at a time. One such person is Tenzin Palmo who at the
age of 21 swapped her job as a London librarian for life as a nun in a monastery in India. But even that was not isolated enough for
Palmo and after a few years there, she moved from the monastery and started living in a
cave in the Himalayas. The cave measured 10 feet wide and six feet
deep and Palmo stayed there for 12 years. Three of those years she spent meditating,
never laying down, sleeping seated, in a traditional wooden meditation box for only three hours
a night. The idea of spending more than a decade in
a cave is certainly a crazy one, but this nun reemerged years later to teach others
in the monastery. Did she hold on to her sanity? Was she enlightened? We may never know. So today we’ve seen there are many examples
of people being in isolation for long periods. How long it takes to drive you crazy depends
on the individual and the conditions of their isolation. But even in the extreme cases we looked at,
when people do lose their grip on reality, they also tend to recover. So, how do you think you’d react to being
in isolation? Let us know in the comments. Also, be sure to check out our other video
called What Would Happen to Your Body if You Lived in the Bathtub? Thanks for watching, and, as always, don’t
forget to like, share, and subscribe. See you next time!
