Charlie Brooker's screen burn
by Charlie Brooker / Saturday January 19, 2008
Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/tvradio/story/0,,2242225,00.html

Hey sexy. I'm stimulating you right now. Can you feel it?
No, really: when you're reading, your brain's constantly stimulated.
And it'll continue to be stimulated when you put this down and do
something else. Even if all you do is gawp listlessly at a tea towel,
the information keeps flowing in, and your brain keeps chewing it up.

And that's a good thing, because left to its own devices, it gets
fidgety. Switch the lights off, deprive it of stimuli, and after a
while it starts daydreaming. And if the lights never come back on,
the daydreams become reality.

Your brain transforms into the ultimate unreliable narrator and soon
you'll believe all manner of disjointed oddness. One minute you hear
the theme from Hollyoaks playing from nowhere, then you're INSIDE the
theme from Hollyoaks, which by now is full of colours, and they're
grinning at you, and then you realise you're one of them: you're a
grinning blob of colour that lives inside the theme from Hollyoaks.
Or maybe you're a mile-wide pool of pork-flavoured honey with a bus
and a hook for a face. Either way, you've gone bonkers.

That's the basis for this week's creepy Horizon (Tuesday, 9pm, BBC2)
special on sensory deprivation, in which six volunteers get slammed
up in the dark for 48 hours. How creepy? Way creepy. The experiment
takes place in a disused nuclear bunker; one of the men running it
can't be shown on camera "for security reasons", and we're told
research like this was abandoned 40 years ago when the scientists
conducting it decided it was "too cruel". It's the Fact Ents
equivalent of a horror movie.

Three of the guinea pigs are simply kept in dark rooms, while the
rest are made to wear eye masks that reduce the world to a grey blur,
headphones that pump a continual white noise drone into their ears,
and gigantic foam mittens so they can't even scratch their bums for
entertainment.

Meanwhile, a psychotherapist with an unnerving omnipresent grin
monitors their progress using night vision cameras, taking notes each
time they pace up and down, talk to themselves, or hallucinate. One
sits on the end of the bed watching snakes and cars and the
occasional human visitor; another (the comedian Adam Bloom, oddly
enough) strolls round a non-existent pile of empty oyster shells.

These laugh-a-minute sequences are interspersed with talking-head
testimony from former victims of sensory deprivation: a guy called
Parris who was locked in solitary for years for a crime he didn't
commit, and former hostage Brian Keenan. Parris invented a fantasy
world, then couldn't escape it; Brian was tormented by imaginary
music that wouldn't stop playing unless he bashed his head against
the wall.

It took them months to go that mad, mind. I reckon I'd get there
quicker. Lock me in there and within five minutes I'd be running
screaming round the room, pursued by a giant version of Joe
Pasquale's face on wheels.

Fortunately, the experiment isn't simply being performed for
entertainment. The show has a point to make.

After their ordeal, the volunteers are tested to see how susceptible
to suggestion they've become - and surprise, surprise, they're highly
malleable. The point being, any confession made by someone who's
spent the past few days swatting invisible monsters is likely to be
worthless. Nonetheless, sensory deprivation techniques are being used
around the world right now, at Guantanamo for example. It may not
technically be classed as torture, but the programme leaves you in no
doubt whatsoever that anyone sanctioning such treatment on a fellow
human being is a hateful pig of the lowest order.

Rumsfeld's retired. I wonder if he sleeps at night, and if not - and
I pray not - what self-made horrors he visualises as he lies in the
dark? Here's hoping they chase him through this night and the next.
From now until never o'clock.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/tvradio/story/0,,2242225,00.html