A Look at Sensory Deprivation by Wade Pickren, PhD
Ryerson University; President-Elect Division 26
The following is a retro review of:
Sensory Deprivation: An Investigation of Phenomena Suggesting a Revised Concept of the Individual’s Response to His Environment.
P. Solomon, P. E. Kubzansky, P. H. Leiderman, J. H. Mendelson, R. Trumbull, & D. Wexler (Eds.). Harvard University Press, 1961.
This is a volume of edited contributions to a symposium held at Harvard Medical School in June 1958. In addition to the papers actually given at the conference, a few invited discussion pieces were added for publication. The chapters in the volume are most interesting in themselves, but they also hold added interest for us in light of the recent and current controversy over the involvement of psychologists in torture and “national security interrogations.” Before exploring that aspect of the volume’s interest, I will reprise the main points of the book and the symposium on which it was based.
The symposiasts and discussants were an all-star cast drawn from neurophysiology, experimental psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Psychologists included Donald Hebb and his collaborators, W. Heron, W. H. Bexton, T. H. Scott, B. K. Doane, as well as Austin Riesen, Donald Lindsley, Jack Vernon, Robert Holt, and Jerome Bruner, as well as others. The growing influence of cybernetics research and theorizing, itself a product of military needs and demands in World War II, was represented at the conference by Norbert Wiener and Warren McCulloch. And without a doubt the then current concern of the military and intelligence services about brainwashing and other psychological manipulations was an understated but very present impetus for the reported research and a primary reason for the conference.
If there was one overt influence or originating idea for the conference, it was the already seminal work of Donald Hebb and his colleagues at McGill University in Montreal. Hebb, of course, had presented the major statement of his innovative view of central nervous system functions and their role in behavior in his landmark text, The Organization of Behavior (1949). The book and the related journal publications gave rise to many important lines of research, including that of David Krech, Mark Rosenzweig, and Edward Bennett on enriched environments, which then influenced thinking and policy that led to the early childhood educational intervention, Head Start. But, Hebb and his colleagues pursued other implications of the role of the perceptual environment on brain functioning and behavior. Along with work pursued by other investigators, such as fellow symposiast, Austin Riesen, much effort was devoted to understanding the role of early life experiences on brain development and behavior in a variety of organisms. Some of that work is reported in the various chapters of this book and it remains of interest.
However, what Hebb and his colleagues, along with others whose work is represented in the volume, also pursued was the role of sensory deprivation and its psychological consequences for adult humans. Using several variants of sensory deprivation or isolation, the investigations reported here showed the fundamental importance of sensory and social stimulation for normal psychological functioning. That is, participants in these studies were found to suffer a surprising range of impairments during and after the period of deprivation. These included psychotic thinking, delusional states, inability to think clearly or to concentrate, deficits in performance on many intellectual and motor tasks, hallucinations, paranoid ideation, somatic complaints, time/space disorientation, and high levels of anxiety. Many participants also experienced impairments in social functioning that endured after the period of deprivation. As Jerome Bruner noted, in remarks prepared for the published volume, the research on sensory deprivation revealed a marked human need for richness of both sensory and social stimulation, as well as a vulnerability to psychological manipulation by their absence. Bruner concluded his remarks by stating, “later sensory deprivation in normal adults disrupts the vital evaluation process by which one constantly monitors and corrects the models and strategies one has learned to employ in dealing with the environment” (p. 207).
As noted above, the research and conclusions reported by the investigators in the chapters of this volume remains highly interesting. To date, little historical research has been conducted on the scientific work here represented. As a historian, I suggest that such research would be richly rewarded and would add greatly to our understanding of an important body of work that continues to have influence in our own day. In addition, we would gain much from understanding the social relations of scientists and society that was so vital to the conduct of this research. On this note, I turn to another aspect of this work that is worth mentioning.
Almost all of the research reported in the volume was funded by either military or intelligence agencies. The Office of Naval Research was the primary funder of the conference and of several of the investigators whose work is represented here. As many readers of this bulletin know, ONR was one of the most important, if not the most important, funders of basic, experimental psychological research from 1947 into the 1970s. The Defense Research Board of Canada was the primary funding agency of the research on sensory deprivation conducted in Donald Hebb’s laboratory. The other major funding source represented in this volume was the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry. This fund was a front organization for the Central Intelligence Agency. I do not know how many of the researchers who received money from the Fund knew that it was CIA money. What they all did know and did report was that one major interest for their work was to understand the “brainwashing” reports coming out of China and Russia. That is, their work was meant to explicate the possible processes whereby a normal adult human being could be induced to believe and act contrary to their normal state of conscious functioning. Recently, some scholars have also suggested that military and intelligence agencies may have also used these very techniques as part of intelligence gathering efforts.
What we do know is that in the current “war on terror,” as the Bush administration labeled it, psychologists and others have used psychological techniques in ways that can only be described as torture in the conduct of so-called national security investigations. One inference we can draw from this volume and from our present situation is that we cannot afford to be naïve about either our research or its possible uses. That is, there is always a moral dimension to all that we do, and for that, we are responsible.
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