“patient,” was made to strip and climb into the water, which was gradually heated until it matched his body temperature. For some the cutoff point came at twenty-eight, for others at thirty degrees Celsius. Once the test subject’s body temperature was reached—signaled by an upraised arm of the freely floating “patient”—one of the assistants attached the paraffin mask. Salt was then added to the water—not potassium cyanide, as was attested by those who had already been through the “loony dip,” but ordinary table salt, in amounts large enough to allow the “patient” (also referred to as the “drowning victim”) to float just below the surface without sinking. Breathing was made possible by the metal tubes protruding above the water. That, in essence, was all there was to the test, the scientific name for which was the Sensory Deprivation Experiment. Blind and deaf, without any sense of smell, taste, or touch (after a very short while the water ceased to exert any sensation), lying with arms folded on his chest like an Egyptian mummy, the “victim” was soon submerged in a simulated weightless condition. For how long depended on the subject’s endurance.
It looked harmless enough. Yet when a man was subjected to this condition for any length of time, he became susceptible to the strangest sensations. The experiences of past test subjects were amply documented in textbooks on experimental psychology; yet while nothing prevented one from reading up on them, the experiences themselves were too varied to be of much help. One-third of the candidates were lucky to last three hours; five or six hours was considered exceptional. Perseverance had its rewards, too, as the summer training assignments were awarded on the basis of the class grade list: the one with the highest grade was assigned a “special” mission, rather than a routine assignment at one of the many circum-Terra stations. But there was no way of predicting who would “tough it out” and who wouldn’t; the “dip” was designed to test severely the subject’s psychological stability.
Pirx got off to an auspicious start, disregarding the fact that he unnecessarily kept his head underwater before the mask was installed. In the process he consumed a quarter of a liter of water that, as he now had occasion to verify, was treated with ordinary salt.
Once the mask was in place, his first sensation was of a slight buzzing in the ears and of being immersed in total darkness—his eyes were kept forcibly shut by the mask’s tight fit. He relaxed his muscles and was gently buoyed by the water. Then something unexpected: an itching sensation in his nose and right eye. Now what? He couldn’t very well scratch through the mask. Hm. Nobody ever reported having an itch before. Maybe this was to be his own special contribution to experimental psychology. He rested, perfectly poised, the water neither warming nor cooling his naked body. Before long it was completely lacking in any sensations. One wiggle of his toes would have told him they were wet, but he also knew that hidden in the ceiling was a video recorder and that every twitch of his body meant a minus point. By monitoring himself internally, he was able to distinguish his own faint heartbeat. Soon the discomfort passed; even the itching abated. Albert had installed the metal tubes so adeptly that he could hardly feel their presence. For that matter, he was slowly being divested of any feeling: a vacuum, the more alarming for being so painless. He was losing all sense of spatial relationship, of the position of his arms and legs; only his memory told him where they were. He tried to calculate how long he had been underwater with his face imprisoned in white paraffin. To his surprise, he discovered he hadn’t the faintest idea of how much time had elapsed since his submersion in the “loony dip”—and he’d always been able to guess the time to within a few minutes’ accuracy.
He
It looked harmless enough. Yet when a man was subjected to this condition for any length of time, he became susceptible to the strangest sensations. The experiences of past test subjects were amply documented in textbooks on experimental psychology; yet while nothing prevented one from reading up on them, the experiences themselves were too varied to be of much help. One-third of the candidates were lucky to last three hours; five or six hours was considered exceptional. Perseverance had its rewards, too, as the summer training assignments were awarded on the basis of the class grade list: the one with the highest grade was assigned a “special” mission, rather than a routine assignment at one of the many circum-Terra stations. But there was no way of predicting who would “tough it out” and who wouldn’t; the “dip” was designed to test severely the subject’s psychological stability.
Pirx got off to an auspicious start, disregarding the fact that he unnecessarily kept his head underwater before the mask was installed. In the process he consumed a quarter of a liter of water that, as he now had occasion to verify, was treated with ordinary salt.
Once the mask was in place, his first sensation was of a slight buzzing in the ears and of being immersed in total darkness—his eyes were kept forcibly shut by the mask’s tight fit. He relaxed his muscles and was gently buoyed by the water. Then something unexpected: an itching sensation in his nose and right eye. Now what? He couldn’t very well scratch through the mask. Hm. Nobody ever reported having an itch before. Maybe this was to be his own special contribution to experimental psychology. He rested, perfectly poised, the water neither warming nor cooling his naked body. Before long it was completely lacking in any sensations. One wiggle of his toes would have told him they were wet, but he also knew that hidden in the ceiling was a video recorder and that every twitch of his body meant a minus point. By monitoring himself internally, he was able to distinguish his own faint heartbeat. Soon the discomfort passed; even the itching abated. Albert had installed the metal tubes so adeptly that he could hardly feel their presence. For that matter, he was slowly being divested of any feeling: a vacuum, the more alarming for being so painless. He was losing all sense of spatial relationship, of the position of his arms and legs; only his memory told him where they were. He tried to calculate how long he had been underwater with his face imprisoned in white paraffin. To his surprise, he discovered he hadn’t the faintest idea of how much time had elapsed since his submersion in the “loony dip”—and he’d always been able to guess the time to within a few minutes’ accuracy.
He
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