Science: Twilight of the Brain

How beautiful to do nothing, and afterward rest up.

The old Spanish proverb does not work out if doing nothing is carried too far. In a small attic office at McGill University in Montreal, Psychologist Woodburn Heron pays students $20 a day to lie on a soft bed in a soundproofed, air-conditioned cubicle. The students’ eyes are covered by translucent goggles so that they see only a foggy glow. On their hands they wear cardboard gauntlets over thick gloves to deaden their sense of touch.

Dr. Heron’s purpose is to find out by experiment how the brain behaves when deprived of fresh and varying stimulation from the senses. The problem is a practical one. Men watching radar screens on which nothing changes for hours often fail to see a strange blip when one appears. Many auto drivers are “hypnotized” into crackups by long hours behind the wheel on monotonous highways.

Bed of Boredom. The McGill experiment tries to measure the malfunctioning. The students generally sleep during their first few hours on the soft bed. Awake, they grow more and more restless. They squirm, whistle, sing, talk to themselves. They welcome any interruption, as when they are asked over an intercom to do mental arithmetic.

When interruptions cease, some of the victims try desperately to think about their studies, or to occupy themselves with intellectual problems. For the most part, they fail. Little by little their brains godead or slip out of control. They cannot concentrate; their thoughts wander aimlessly. Their arithmetic drops to primary-school level.

Strange hallucinations, like waking dreams, creep into their minds. The students see patterns of dots or lines. Then, as the empty hours drag on, livelier visions appear. They may see rows of little yellow men with black caps and open mouths, or a procession of squirrels with sacks on their backs marching across the snow. The students have reported seeing prehistoric animals, weird cities, a pair of disembodied hands coming out of the ground. One student saw a set of gigantic false teeth floating down a river on a raft.

For Darker Purposes? The visions are intensely real; so are the voices and music that come out of nothingness. One student was fired upon by a small rocket ship, and he felt the pellets striking his arm. Two students reported a strange sensation: each felt that two bodies were lying side by side on the bed, “as if there were two of me.” Some of the victims have stuck it out for six days, with only short respites for food. Some, in spite of the $20 wage, have quit after one day. As soon as they leave the cell, the hallucinations stop; the squirrels and little yellow men march away forever. But not for hours do the victims get back to normal. They have headaches, cannot study, lose their skill at handwriting. Sometimes such effects continue for 24 hours.

Dr. Heron is doing a specific and limited experiment, and he does not intend to speculate. But it has occurred to many observers that his technique of confusing and dimming the brain by starving it of sensation might be used, with proper modification, for darker purposes. It might explain the Communists’ success in getting untrue but apparently willing “confessions” out of prisoners led into a courtroom right out of isolated cells.