Inside The Black Room - Studies Of Sensory Deprivation - Jack Vernon

 INSIDE THE BLACK ROOM - JACK VERNON

What needs to be noted from the start when it comes to reading Inside The Black Room by Jack Vernon is when it was first published, which was 1963. The significance of this is apparent when Vernon says 'There are many who claim that if a person was deprived totally of sensory stimulation his brain would cease functioning. This altogether reasonable belief holds that sensory stimulation, in addition to having its normal function of bringing information to the individual, serves to keep the brain active, alert, and alive'.

Vernon was a Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, New Jersey, and little did he know that there was another professor by the name of Peter C Lilly who would a few years later be developing a flotation tank that would enable a person to attain total deprivation of all sensory stimulation and prove that once deprived of all such stimulation the brain would in fact go into interstellar overdrive - particularly when combined with lysergic acid diethylamide. It's interesting because it goes to show that Vernon's psychological investigations were not only being guided but dictated by the scientific tools available to him at that time as in the use of a dark room instead of a flotation tank.

This, then, is what Vernon's book is about: An investigation into the results of locking up numbers of willing subjects in a darkened and sound-proofed room for long periods of time, denying them almost all sensory stimulation. Would their knowledge or memory be impaired? Would they be open to the influence of propaganda? Would they lose all sense of time? What hallucinations might they suffer? And what would be gained from answering such questions and to whose advantage? In a world concerned with space travel, solitary confinement and brain washing to ask such questions is vital, Vernon replied. All this, particularly in regards to brain washing, perhaps not coincidentally just a few years after the Korean war when the subject of indoctrination was all the rage.

Another interesting point that Vernon raises is his surprise at how long his subjects would spend asleep when in the dark room, adding he was also greatly surprised to learn that Yuri Gagarin had been able to sleep during his space flight around the earth. And yes, it is surprising. When entering into an experiment to spend time in a dark room you'd think the subjects would be curious and somewhat excited themselves, so much so that they'd be unable to sleep. And as for Yuri Gagarin on one of the greatest achievements in human history - and he slept through some of it. Can you imagine?

Whilst asleep in the dark room a common trait was for the subjects to remember long-forgotten childhood experiences and to realise and understand the effect of those experiences upon their behaviour as an adult. Professor Peter C Lilly in his experiments would find the same. It was the stuff of Freudian analysis. The stuff of Solaris, even.

Is there a difference between hallucinations and vivid daydreams, Vernon wonders? Utilising the definition of a hallucination as identified by an early nineteenth century French psychiatrist called Guiraud who specialised in the hallucinations of the mentally ill, Vernon establishes that there is and that a good percentage of the subjects entering the dark room experienced them, which included 'seeing' wallpaper patterns, cartoons, flickering lights, geometrical shapes and even fully integrated complex scenes.

Is spending time in a blacked-out room devoid of all sensory stimulation comparable to Orwell's Room 101? Vernon suggests that it is, with many of the subjects resurrecting and encountering their innermost secret fears in much the same way as the political prisoners in Orwell's 1984 were forced to do so. Which puts in mind the Taliban prisoners who when captured by US Forces following 9/11 were bound and blind-folded and flown to Guantanamo, which must have put them in a serious state of disorientation.

At the time, the photographs that came out of the Taliban prisoners on their knees in orange jumpsuits, their hands bound and their eyes blind-folded were quite shocking but in hindsight only because we had never seen anything like it before. Again, in hindsight the US Military would have known exactly what it was doing and was all part of a process of intentionally disorientating the prisoners so they would be more susceptible to questioning. In essence, it was all part of breaking the prisoners down via the US Military's modern day version of Room 101. All part of a process developed in part from the studies conducted by Professor Jack Vernon as presented and discussed in this book, Inside The Black Room.

John Serpico