[Pnews] "Isolation Devastates the Brain": The Neuroscience of Solitary Confinement

[Prisoner News]

http://solitarywatch.com/2016/05/11/isolation-devastates-the-brain-the-neuroscience-of-solitary-confinement/ 



  "Isolation Devastates the Brain": The Neuroscience of Solitary Confinement


    Carol Schaeffer <http://solitarywatch.com/author/carol-schaeffer/> 
    May 11, 2016

Dolores Canales can’t seem to find her way around like she used to. She 
has spent her whole life in Anaheim, California, yet says she gets lost 
even in her hometown. She feels that her 20 years in prison, and the 18 
months she spent in solitary confinement, has resulted in a permanent 
change to her sense of space and direction.

Research indicates that extended isolation can not only significantly 
alter the structure of the brain, adding to research that has long 
indicated the extensive psychological damage caused by solitary 
confinement. At a panel discussion last month at the University of 
Pittsburgh School of Law, part of a two-day conference on solitary 
confinement 
<http://law.pitt.edu/events/new-event/international-interdisciplinary-perspectives-prolonged-solitary-confinement>, 
neuroscientists testified to the degenerative neurological effects of 
isolation.

“The brain is comprised of 100 billion cells, 500 trillion connections,” 
said Dr. Huda Akil, distinguished professor of neurosciences at the 
University of Michigan. “It is an organ of social function. The brain 
needs to interact in the world.”

Akil is a specialist in the effects of emotions on brain structure, 
particularly the effects of stress hormones. According to Akil, stress 
hormones can make dramatic changes to the hippocampus, the “concierge of 
the brain.” The hippocampus controls how our senses are translated to 
the rest of our brain, and is in charge of our relation to outside space.

Stress hormones have been shown to “rewrite your DNA program,” and 
rewire the brain, said Akil. These hormonal effects on the hippocampus 
change space perception and directional positioning. The “internal GPS” 
of the brain is disturbed, depth perception is altered and where the 
body lies in relation to other objects in space is uncalibrated.

For Canales, an activist and leader of California Families Against 
Solitary Confinement, this rings particularly true. She says her sense 
of space is permanently altered. “You should see my apartment. When I 
first moved in, I couldn’t stand not being able to see the door.” To 
this day, she says, friends tell her that her small apartment is set up 
like a prison cell.

Canales was confined to her cell twenty-two hours a day. “There, I had a 
window. The guards would take me out to the yard every day. I’d get to 
go out to the yard with other people,” she recalled. Canales knows that 
she escaped the even harsher conditions suffered by people in supermax 
prisons such as Pelican Bay, where her son, John Martinez, was confined 
for more than a decade. But being in solitary confinement still took its 
toll. “I would wake up in the middle of the night, my heart pounding,” 
she described. “I’m not just saying that so people think I was 
suffering. There’s a real anxiety.”

Other survivors of solitary confinement attest to similar feelings. 
Robert King, one of the so-called Angola 3, was held in solitary in 
Louisiana for 29 years, living in a box measuring just 6 by 9 feet for 
23 hours a day, until he was released in 2001. He told the BBC in 2014, 
”It is off to the point where I get lost even when I am walking just 
around the corner from where I live.” The disorientation he and Canales 
both describe is consistent with damage to the hippocampus.

Albert Woodfox, another member of the Angola 3, was held in solitary 
confinement for 43 years and was released February, 2016. He has a hard 
time knowing what is a product of solitary confinement and what is a 
natural part of aging, and his transition has in many ways been too 
recent to accurately observe.

Yet Woodfox contends that there is a clear shift in readjusting to a 
world of social interaction, that has deep physical impacts. 
“Physically…I’ve found there is a different rhythm to being free than 
being in prison,” he said in an interview. “The way you walk, the way 
you converse with other people, your awareness of your senses. It’s so 
much more intense than when you’re in prison. I had to learn how to pace 
myself because I was burning way more energy in society than I was in 
the prison cell.”

Akil is quick to note that brain imaging studies of people in prison are 
lacking. The history of abusive experimentation on prisoners has led to 
current bans on using them in medical studies. So the data is, in some 
sense, limited. But she insists, “What we do know about the brain 
suggests that there is a definite change from solitary confinement.”

According to Dr. Michael J. Zigmond, University of Pittsburgh professor 
of neurology, studies of solitary confinement in mice indicated that 
overall there was a measurable difference consisting of simpler neurons, 
fewer connections between those neurons, and fewer synapses in the brain 
compared to socialized mice.

At the conference, Zigmond described the experiment, which separated 
some laboratory mice into “shoebox” housing and others into an “enriched 
environment” where they were able to interact with other mice and were 
given freer range of movement and exercise equipment.

“This model of an ‘enriched environment’ is of course nothing like what 
would be actually enriching [to an animal],” he said. “But it is a 
marked difference in the small, cramped and isolated shoebox containers. 
“The way the housing is set up is very much like many solitary housing 
arrangements,” he said, with stacks of small containers each containing 
a mouse. They may be able to sense each other’s presence, but cannot see 
or interact in any way. Meanwhile, the larger box where the mice are 
free to interact suggests a model for representing general population in 
prison settings.

But in order to conduct these experiments, Zigmond has to get special 
permission from animal care boards, as extended isolation is carefully 
regulated in animal experiments as cruel conditions. “It is clear to 
animal care boards that solitary housing is unacceptable under express 
circumstances.”

Studies on humans and primates are rare, largely because they are 
considered inhumane by most major research groups and universities. 
There are examples of research from the middle of the 20th century, 
which prompted many reforms in experimentation ethics.

As an example, in 1951 researchers at McGill University paid a group of 
male graduate students to stay in small chambers equipped with only a 
bed for an experiment on sensory deprivation. Students were to be 
observed for six weeks, but not one lasted more than seven days. 
Students dropped out of the experiment after being unable “to think 
clearly about anything for any length of time,” while others reported 
hallucinations.

In another notorious experiment from the 1950s, University of Wisconsin 
psychologist Harry Harlow placed rhesus monkeys inside a solitary 
chamber. Harlow found that monkeys kept in isolation wound up 
“profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for 
long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating 
themselves.” Most readjusted eventually, but not those that had been 
caged the longest. “Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the 
animals socially,” he wrote.

Akil notes that the power of social contact helps remodel the brain and 
relieves stress. But the stress hormones never really go away, never 
leveling out entirely. “The longer [people] are kept isolated, the worse 
it gets,” she says.

“Isolation devastates the brain. There is no question about that,” said 
Zigmund. “Without air, we will live minutes. Without water, we will live 
days. Without nutrition, we live weeks. Without physical activity, our 
lives are decreased by years. Social interaction is part of these basic 
elements of life.”

Canales and other advocates at the conference expressed hope that the 
growing body of the evidence on the neurological damage caused by 
isolation will provide new ammunition in  the battle to end solitary 
confinement. She has no doubt as to the lasting effects of solitary, 
based on her son’s experiences and her own. “There is an intensity that 
I can still describe to this day. I get overwhelmed if it rains. 
Everything is intensified.” she says. “I could be walking and think 
about what it’s like to be in that space where you can’t even see color. 
I get overwhelmed thinking about all the people that can’t feel the 
rain, or the sun. That are stuck in there.”

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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