Excerpted from "Cause . . . And How It Doesn't Always Equal Effect" by Gregory Smithsimon (Melville House Publishing, 2018). Reprinted by permission of Melville House Publishing.
Lots of people are afraid of driving past massive tractor trailers on the highway — perhaps for more reasons than they know. In one study, a truck driver described “traveling down a flat, straight stretch of roadway in the middle of the night in clear weather. Suddenly he ‘saw’ a calf standing in the road ahead. He swerved his vehicle sharply to the left, and it overturned in the roadway.” The driver admitted that in the past he had seen “things that are not there.” The driver wrote off the hallucinations to being very sleepy. But there’s another explanation: he was lonely.
There have been stories about truck drivers at the wheel when they’re tired, or drugged, or delusional from methamphetamines. But there’s a rarely recognized danger of being alone.
We hear similar stories of British and US Air Force pilots experiencing disorientation, anxiety, and a feeling of “detachment from reality” after flying for extended periods without other human contact. The disorientation was more likely to happen when flying at high altitudes, not because of the thinness of the atmosphere, but because pilots could not see the ground. In short, they were suffering from sensory deprivation.
We have learned more in the last decade about sensory deprivation thanks to the use of various forms of solitary confinement against people captured, imprisoned, tortured, and “extraordinarily rendered” as part of the so-called war on terror. U.S. prisons, too, have radically increased the number of prisoners subjected to solitary confinement, often for extended periods of time.
To explore causality—the ways we explain the world and how to do it better—we need to dispense with generic models of the human mind and recognize the way it actually operates. The experiences of people in isolation strip away some of our assumptions. For starters, we call humans rational individuals when really we’re neither. We’re not individuals because when we’re taken out of the company of other people, even for relatively brief periods, we fall apart. We’re not rational because our rationales are shaped by where we see ourselves in the social world, where our ancestors were in the natural order, and what social concepts we adopt to understand everything around us. It’s clear that we don’t think like some idealized computer. Like the trucker who hallucinated the calf, we see things that aren’t there. Like the pilots in the stratosphere, we lose sight of things that really do exist. Our vision is selective and creative, and how we make sense of it all depends on what we learn from the social web of people around us. Isolation distorts our perception of the world, and we need to be more alert to its appearance than we are.
* * *
We understand physical torture more viscerally than the torture of isolation. Certainly, most of us imagine that physical torture must be far worse than being left alone. But the horrors of solitary confinement are as unparalleled as they are unexpected. U.S. Senator John McCain, who spent two years in solitary confinement after being shot down while bombing Hanoi as a Navy pilot in the Vietnam War, described solitary in unequivocal terms: “It’s an awful thing, solitary. It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” This assessment is from a man whose escape from his crippled plane broke his right arm in three places, his knee, and his left arm, who then had his shoulder broken from a blow from a rifle butt, and was stabbed in the ankle and groin with a bayonet. His injuries were left unset and largely untreated for five years while he was a prisoner of war, where he suffered years of dysentery that reduced him to one hundred pounds, and was regularly subjected to physical torture to the point of losing consciousness. If solitary confinement is worse than that physical agony, then we must reevaluate how our minds really work.
McCain’s description of how crushing solitary is shows us something about the brain we’re working with. First and foremost, it’s deeply social. Alone, the mind loses its resolve, loses its identity, and doesn’t even know what it knows. We think in particular ways. (It would be impossible for us to think in every possible way.) The fact that social context influences what we know, that we notice social explanations and disregard others, gives us a preview into what we overemphasize and what we overlook.
The underappreciated effects of solitary confinement demonstrate how harmful the mistaken image of ourselves as rational individuals has been—not just to prisoners, but to everyday people from truck drivers to anyone who has been lonely in a crowd, and to the economic models (and Robinson Crusoe stories) we mistakenly think will predict how people will act. First we need a sharper sense of how being alone affects us.
Solitary confinement is used extensively in U.S. prisons, in part because federal courts rarely acknowledge that it is torture. (Courts have said they will intervene only in cases of physical injury, not mental torture.) This classification grossly underestimates the damage solitary confinement does to the human psyche. One prisoner who had a long history of offenses was sentenced to five years in solitary confinement when he was recaptured after escaping from prison. When he was brought into the thirteen-by-eight-foot cell, he thought, “This is going to be a piece of cake.” He would have a radio and television and could read. But within a few months, he was pacing back and forth compulsively, then began having panic attacks and screaming for help. He hallucinated and became enraged by routine sounds, like the shutting of a nearby door. Soon he heard voices speaking directly from the television, which he hid under his bed.
Solitary confinement can induce a predictable and terrifying array of symptoms. Examining a hundred years of research, journalist Brandon Keim found that:
Consistent patterns emerge, centering around . . . extreme anxiety, anger, hallucinations, mood swings and flatness, and loss of impulse control. In the absence of stimuli, prisoners may also become hypersensitive to any stimuli at all. Often they obsess uncontrollably, as if their minds didn’t belong to them, over tiny details or personal grievances. Panic attacks are routine, as is depression and loss of memory and cognitive function.
Beyond prisoners, pilots, and truck drivers, who else might exhibit those symptoms—extreme anger, hallucinations, mood swings, hypersensitivity, panic attacks, depression, and loss of memory and cognitive function? Security guards? Cowboys? Suburban housewives? Kids stuck on social media? Video game junkies? Elderly people living alone? In a society where we take our rationality and individuality for granted, and make few explicit accommodations for our needs as social beings, the effects of solitary are more common than we acknowledge. These symptoms identify the outer bounds of how far humans can be from other people.
The changes brought on by solitary can be rapid. Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian, a former professor at Harvard Medical School, is one of the foremost experts in solitary confinement. At the outset of his research, he expected to conclude that the prisoners’ claims of mental distress were self-serving exaggerations. But he found that the effects were far more severe than he imagined. Grassian noted that, “even a few days of solitary confinement will predictably shift the electroencephalogram (EEG) pattern toward an abnormal pattern characteristic of stupor and delirium.” Victims often describe falling into a “fog” in which they cannot remain alert or concentrate. They are simultaneously deprived of external stimuli and unable to process what little stimuli they may experience, causing them to be hypersensitive to small noises or irritation by slight physical sensations.
In 2009, three Americans were hiking on the border between Iraq and Iran when they were taken into custody by Iranian guards, and ultimately brought to the notorious Evin prison in Tehran. Unlike Iranian prisoners, they were kept in individual cells, and were not beaten like the inmates whose screams they could hear through the doors. But this diplomatic treatment turned out to be its own torture. Even though they saw their interrogator almost daily, got outside twice a day, saw the guards who brought them meals, and occasionally even whispered to a prisoner in the hall or a nearby cell, Josh Fattal, Sarah Shourd, and Shane Bauer began experiencing the effects of solitary confinement after just a few days.
Josh Fattal became so hypersensitive to the whirring sound of the fan in his cell that he hid in his bathroom, under the sink, to avoid the noise. More symptoms, like depression and loss of cognitive function, followed: “In the cell,” Fattal wrote in the account all three contributed to, “the blankness is my enemy. I don’t have a better word for it, but it’s dulling my mind. It’s a world where I can only reference myself in circular loops, where nothing makes sense.” His mind could no longer assemble logical explanations: hearing a helicopter, he became sure he was about to be rescued, and fixated on the thirtieth day of their captivity, certain that that arbitrary and insignificant date would bring about their release.
People in solitary confinement are often haunted by hyper-violent fantasies in response to tiny perceived slights from other people. Josh imagined he’d find a particular guard one day on the street: “I’ll push him into an alleyway, get him on the ground, and kick him and watch him bleed amidst garbage and rats.” What atrocity had the guard committed? “Bystanders will try to stop my rage,” Josh went on, “then I’ll explain to them that this guy took my books when I was in prison, and they’ll cheer me on as I continue kicking him.”
From his experiences, Shane Bauer described solitary confinement as “the slow erasure of who you thought you were.” Each of them tried all sorts of mental gymnastics—working out endlessly, remembering the details of their life in sequence, singing songs, reading when they could get books, writing when they could find a contraband pen, but they felt themselves breaking apart.
Sarah Shourd’s isolation was longer and more complete, so her individuals are not rational symptoms became proportionally more extreme. Many days, Sarah wrote, she fumed for every waking hour over the thought that Josh and Shane were able to speak to each other while she was still alone. Hypersensitivity and hallucinations consumed her as her concentration deteriorated. Sarah wrote later, “Like an animal, I spend hours crouched by the slot at the bottom of my door listening for sounds. Sometimes I hear footsteps coming down the hall, race to the door, and realize they were imagined . . . These symptoms scare me. I’m certain solitary confinement is having an effect on my brain.” She couldn’t focus to read and became hyperpossessive about her stuff. She had violent fantasies, like Josh: “I will run up to the first man in a suit that I see and I will wrap my hands around his neck and I will squeeze. I will squeeze his neck and look into his eyes as he tries to scream.” She heard screaming down the hall, and only when a group of guards rushed in did she realize it was she who was screaming, and that the wall was smeared with blood from her beating her fists against the wall. “I’m going crazy in here,” she told a guard soon after, “I am not safe!” Mirroring the thinking of U.S. prison guards, this guard didn’t understand what the problem was: “We gave you a TV—doesn’t that help?”
This quick descent into madness, triggered by nothing—triggered, in fact, by the absence of any trigger—tells us something important about ourselves. Once we realize that humans are so social that being alone, even briefly, is unnatural to the point of being dangerous, we see that being a lone individual is fundamentally at odds with being human.
Researchers now know that solitary confinement reprograms the brain. Research suggests solitary produces significant changes, like a smaller hippocampus region and impaired brain development.10 The damage is often permanent. In the most extreme cases, people may experience psychosis and be permanently debilitated. At minimum, individuals who have been subjected to solitary confinement are often unable to socialize, have trouble speaking, suffer from panic, and fail to reintegrate into the social world.
Few of us think of spending time alone as torture; many of us fantasize about taking just such a break. Probably because being solitary seems, to the uninitiated, so unobjectionable, research on the effects of solitary confinement tends to follow a predictable cycle of revelation, abhorrence, and collective amnesia: First, a powerful institution in society, typically government, will experiment with solitary confinement, imagining it will be harmless, even therapeutic, certainly not painful. After accounts of its true ferocity come to light, it is banished. After about fifty years, however, the culture has forgotten the effects of the last round of solitary, and the cycle begins again.
That cycle dates back to 1829 in the United States, when the Philadelphia Prison (or Eastern State Penitentiary) opened. It sought to be more humane and effective than earlier, intentionally punitive prisons. Eastern State aimed to be meditative, reforming, and enlightened. Prisoners would remain in solitary cells—in isolation from bad influences and distractions—where they could begin reflecting on their lives and reforming their ways.
The problem was that prisoners did not reform but went mad. Charles Dickens visited the prison in 1842, and reported in horror how one man “gazed about him and in the act of doing so fell into a strange state as if he had forgotten something . . . In another cell was a German, . . . a more dejected, broken-hearted, wretch creature, it would be difficult to imagine.” Dickens saw yet another man “stare at his hands and pick the flesh open, upon the fingers.” Eventually researchers concluded that “[i]t was unnatural . . . to leave men in solitary, day after day, year after year; indeed, it was so unnatural that it bred insanity.”
In 1890 a landmark Supreme Court case demonstrated how damaging the justices recognized solitary confinement to be. Colorado had passed a law requiring condemned prisoners be kept in solitary for a month before execution. A man murdered his wife before the law took effect, but was still sentenced to solitary. The court found that the month he was to be isolated before his execution was so severe that it constituted an additional punishment beyond what could be imposed. They let him go. As the court wrote,
This matter of solitary confinement is not . . . a mere unimportant regulation as to the safe-keeping of the prisoner . . . experience [with the penitentiary system of solitary confinement] demonstrated that there were serious objections to it. A considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide; while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.
After the 1890 decision, solitary confinement fell out of favor for some time. Research was resurrected in the 1950s and ’60s by the U.S. military, stirred by the fears of “brainwashing”—the concern that U.S. servicemen captured in Korea and other wars could be converted to communism through the use of solitary confinement during their incarceration as prisoners of war. In some of that research, college students and other participants in psychological tests were subjected to solitary confinement. Though projects often anticipated subjecting people to such conditions for over a month, their rapid deterioration often led to
the research being curtailed after just a week. That research on solitary confinement served as a warning, not an instruction manual, until it was blithely ignored by the Bush administration, which, half a century later, sought to use solitary confinement and other forms of torture against people picked up in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere who were presumed to be terrorists.
Our conception of human beings as individuals runs counter to the reality of our existence. The model of the “rational individual” is fundamentally flawed at its most basic assumption: Individuals are not rational. Individuals are not even individual. We are social, and we need social contact nearly as frequently as we need water to survive. If there is any human rationality, it is socially produced, not individually exercised. Where did we get this utterly inaccurate fiction that we could survive on our own?
Shares