Sensory Deprivation

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Sensory Deprivation
One of the more controversial and underground studies in the medical/psychological field is “Sensory Deprivation”. Which is artificially produced deprivation of all of the five physical senses – hearing, smelling, sight, taste, and touch (McGuffin 2). Some people are born without certain senses or lose them later on in life through a traumatic experience, or certain diseases such as diabetes. People who have been deprived of a certain sense for example sight, notice that their other senses have grown more acute. They can hear sounds, and smell things that other people with all of their senses cannot. Imagine that you were deprived of all five of your senses and you were left with nothing but thought? Would you be able to reach parts of your subconscious mind that you never knew existed?
There have been many experiments done on sensory deprivation for various reasons.
Experiments were done on the astronauts of the Mercury and Apollo programs to simulate the isolation of space that they would encounter on the way to the moon (Snow 95). Solitary confinement at maximum security prisons may be considered a form of sensory deprivation. Experiments were done in the late 1940’s at McGill University in Canada for research on behavioral science. Research was also done in the1950’s at Harvard Medical School on the importance of environmental stimulation.
In 1949, Donald O. Hebb mentioned in his book “The Organization of Human Behavior” the early sensory deprivation experiments done by M.V. Senden, A.H. Riesen, and Hebb himself in 1947-48 on students at McGill University in Canada (Browfeild 6-7). At Harvard Medical School during their earlier experiments students were paid to lie in a small soundproof cubicle in a comfortable bed for twenty-four hours a day. The students wore goggles that only allowed minimal light to pass through. They also wore cotton gloves and cardboard sle...