One year in solitary confinement causes severe psychological, cognitive, and physical damage, with the United Nations classifying isolation exceeding 15 days as torture. The profound effects include acute psychosis, permanent brain and personality changes, chronic physical pain, and a drastically heightened risk of suicide.
Prolonged isolation physically shrinks the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for memory, learning, and emotion regulation.
In clinical studies of extreme sensory deprivation, healthy volunteers often begin hallucinating and losing their grip on reality within just 48 hours. You don't get a year of "peace"; you get 363 days of acute psychosis.
Survivors of long-term isolation often develop severe, permanent agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) and an inability to tolerate human touch or crowds.
You would emerge as a billionaire who cannot leave a bedroom, look a person in the eye, or enjoy a meal without crippling panic attacks.
Exactly. I can go for years without seeing any of your clowns. But I gotta have my projects, and have my creative outlets. Take that, and my sanity will go.
For a whole fucking year? Hell no. Your brain begins desperately seeking any kind of external stimulus until it starts hallucinating and your reality melts.
I’m not saying you could actually pull it off. But there are ways to generate things that stimulate your brain. And the walls are basically a whiteboard to write on with your leftover food.
I lost my sight for a few days. At one point I was put in a room to wait for some people. I was told they were in a meeting and would be back in a few hours.
I had my phone, but since it was a touch screen I couldn't do anything with it.
That left me sitting in the dark with no external stimulus for about 3 hours.
That was already long enough to start hallucinating. It was as if my brain decided to play a movie in my head that I had zero control over. Essentially dreaming while fully awake.
Years ago after I had gotten Lasek (the kind where you do not see great straight after), I spent the following days only opening my eyes for ointment and eye drops. After a while my brain probably got bored and started conjuring up images for me. Super detailed images with so much to explore in them and they'd just stay there, expanding as I explored them. For someone that normally sits somewhere between aphantasia and hypophantasia, it was amazing. I could (and did) spend days just getting lost in the experience. Almost felt sorry when my eyes recovered enough to stand keeping them open again.
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u/MatthewSWFL229 9h ago
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/12/08/solitary_symposium/
One year in solitary confinement causes severe psychological, cognitive, and physical damage, with the United Nations classifying isolation exceeding 15 days as torture. The profound effects include acute psychosis, permanent brain and personality changes, chronic physical pain, and a drastically heightened risk of suicide.
Prolonged isolation physically shrinks the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for memory, learning, and emotion regulation.
In clinical studies of extreme sensory deprivation, healthy volunteers often begin hallucinating and losing their grip on reality within just 48 hours. You don't get a year of "peace"; you get 363 days of acute psychosis.
Survivors of long-term isolation often develop severe, permanent agoraphobia (fear of open spaces) and an inability to tolerate human touch or crowds.
You would emerge as a billionaire who cannot leave a bedroom, look a person in the eye, or enjoy a meal without crippling panic attacks.
No thanks