White Torture

[zellerzone]

             White torture is when you isolate a prisoner dressed in white, in a white, soundproofed, constantly lit room,

                                isolated from all stimuli, even the sounds that we normally refer to as silence.

                      In the white absence the prisoner is broken down, thought and focus hindered, you hallucinate.

                           Encompassed in the white you lose your personality and the history of your personality.

by Ella Moe

[zellerzone]

The all-encompassing, all-devouring white light.

[zellerzone]

There is a video on YouTube about torture methods. I haven't watched it. I've only read the comments, which popped up in a search for "experience white torture" Most of the posts are quite lame, but there was one (now deleted) in which someone claimed he had done it to himself as an experiment. He had painted a room in his house completely white and got someone to lock him in. He spoke of hallucinations, both auditory and visual. Rhythmic sounds. Random sounds. People in the room with him. When he was let out after five days he said it felt like thirty.

[zellerzone]

Something to wear.

[zellerzone]

"I read one report of someone who had suffered various 'creative' tortures at the hands of a third-world dictatorship - including electrocution etc. And he said the nastiest was when he was forced to spend many weeks immobile in solitary confinement in an entirely white, padded (ie. noiseless) room with silent guards dressed in white, and only white food (eg. rice) served on white plates. Literally broke his brain. Permanently."

[zellerzone]

Found at:  

 http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/the-white-room 

"The silence of the room was as important as its emptiness. Special nurse Satu K., the doctor’s right-hand woman, watched over the construction work diligently, and made sure that the sound insulation was not skimped on. So the dripping of a tap, or the gurgling of drains was never heard in the room.

For toilet visits, Satu K. has come up with a special solution, with Padima’s blessing: the lavatory bowl is flushed from outside the toilet. When you have done your business and cleansed your hands on soft wipes you have removed almost soundlessly from a packet, all you need do is shut the door and press the button on the doorpost. The toilet will then flush. But only if the door is shut tight.

It has not been possible to eliminate the flushing noise entirely. If you prick up your ears, you will detect a subdued sucking sound from behind the door. It sounds like anxious inhalation.

The sound insulation on the outside door to the vestibule is of recording-studio standards. The layers applied to the walls absorb any extraneous sounds and knocks, creaking and cracking."

[zellerzone]

I love how in the Ella Moe quote you start out as the jailer and end up the prisoner.

[zellerzone]

McGill experiment, 1950s

[zellerzone]

Close-up, showing the translucent gaggles that blurred the subject's view of his white-clothed self and his totally white surroundings.  

[zellerzone]

So. here's my personal white torture cocoon. It's made from a papasan chair and the frame of a second, broken one. It faces a white-painted alcove illuminated by floodlights. I wear white tights, a white thermal top with white knitted cotton gloves sewn to the sleeve ends, a couple of white nylon stocking-washing bags over my head, and a cheap white painter's coverall. A translucent white cloth covers the whole thing.

[zellerzone]

"here he was, plunged into a whiteness so luminous, so total, that it swallowed up rather than absorbed, not just the colours, but the very things and beings, thus making them twice as invisible."  

-Jose Saramago

[zellerzone]

For Project X-38, Hebb constructed a grid of four-by-six-by-eight-foot cells, each air-conditioned and sound-proofed, then recruited volunteers, whom he paid twenty dollars a day to lie in the cells, where they were subjected to “perceptual isolation.” Over their eyes, the subjects wore frosred plastic goggles that prevenred “pattern vision.” To reduce tactile stimulation, they wore cotton gloves and elbow-to-fingertip cardboard cuffs. Over their ears, a U-shaped foam pillow. The cells were outfitted with observation windows, as well as an intercom so that the research team could communicate with the subjects. Hebb instructed his volunteers to stay in the cells for as long as they could.

Initially, Hebb had regarded Project X-38 lightheartedly, joking that the worst part of isolation for the subjects.would be the meals prepared by his post-docs. When the results came in, though, he was stunned: the subjects’ disorientation was far more extreme than he’d imagined. One volunteer, upon completing the sudy, drove out of the laboratory parking lot and crashed his car. On several occasions, when subjects took a break to relieve themselves, they got lost in the bathroom, and had to call a researcher to help them find the way out.

Most startling were the hallucinations. After just a few hours in isolation, nearly all the subjects saw and felt things that weren’t there. First they would see pulsing dots and simple geometric patterns; these grew into complex isolated images floating about the room, which then evolved into elaborate, integrated scenes playing out before the subjects’ eyes—“dreaming when awake,” as one participant described it. One participant reported seeing a parade of squirrels marching “purposefully” across a snowy field, wearing snowshoes and backpacks, while another saw a bathtub being steered by an old man in a metal helmet. In a particularly extreme case, a subject encountered a second version of himself in the room; he and his apparition began to blend together, u til he was unable to discern which was which. “It is one thing,” wrote Hebb, “to hear that Chinese are brainwashing  their prisoner on the other side of the world; it is another to find, in your own laboratory, that merely taking away the usual sights, sounds, and bodily contacts from a healthy university student for a few days can shake him, right down to his base; can disturb his personal identity.”

On Tuesday, May 19, 2015 at 10:52:24 AM UTC-4 zellerzone wrote:

McGill experiment, 1950s

[zellerzone]

The stuff about Hebb’s McGill experiments I just posted is from _Underground_ by Will Hunt