Michael Mechanic

A 2008 BBC reenactment of Donald Hebb's isolation experiments

The experiences of prisoners held in solitary confinement—the despair, the disorientation, the hallucinations—are well documented, but laboratory observations of isolated human subjects and the profound effects of extreme confinement are exceedingly rare, in part because such experiments might have trouble getting past institutional review boards these days. But that wasn't the case during the '50s, when Donald O. Hebb, a professor of psychology at Montreal's McGill University, set out to study how sensory isolation affects human cognition.

Hebb had previously examined the effects of visual deprivation in rats as a doctoral candidate at Harvard University. In 1951, he secured a $10,000 grant from the Canadian Defence Research Board to expand his research to human subjects. The results were dramatic. Depriving a man of sensory input, he soon discovered, will break him in a matter of days.

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See more MoJo coverage of solitary confinement.

Hebb's experiments went well beyond the level of isolation prisoners typically experience in solitary. He offered male graduate students $20 a day—excellent pay for the time—to stay in small chambers containing little more than a bed. "It would be a bit more than a meter wide and a couple of meters long, probably enough for a table or something," recalls Peter Milner, one of Hebb's former graduate students who is now an emeritus psychology professor at McGill.

At the time, Milner was working on another project for Hebb, but he saw the sensory deprivation rooms firsthand. "They were given food by human beings, and also when they needed to use the washrooms and things they would be escorted there by other human beings. So they weren't completely alone," Milner says. He recalls watching as the subjects were led down the hall to the bathroom clad in frosted-over goggles. "They wore goggles and earphones and [there was] some sort of noise, just white noise, from a loudspeaker," he says.

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Illustration by Joe CiardielloCraving Ethiopian, the novelist Michael Chabon—plaid shirt and jeans, man purse made from upcycled inner tubes, signature locks cropped to where he might pass for some mere literary mortal and not the author of a half-dozen bestsellers—strolls up a sidewalk not far from the Oakland-Berkeley border, where he lives with his wife, author Ayelet Waldman, and their four kids. This scruffy stretch is the setting of Chabon's new book, Telegraph Avenue, a Tarantinoesque romp following the struggles of two families, one black, one white, as a megastore threatens the husbands' vintage-vinyl shop, Brokeland Records, and a clash with an arrogant doctor lands the wives' midwifery practice in jeopardy.

Chabon was only 24 when he published his first hit novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, followed some years later by a second best-seller, Wonder Boys, which was later made into a movie starring Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire. Over the next 15 years or so, Chabon cemented his rep as a genre-busting—mystery, sci-fi, young adult, comics—master of language and crafter of metaphor, winning a Pulitzer prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and creating an alternate Jewish homeland in Alaska for his fabulously unique novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. His swashbuckling Gentlemen of the Road (working title: Jews With Swords) is set in 10th-century Khazaria while Summerland, intended for younger readers, sends us leaping among baseball-obsessed parallel worlds under threat from a dark character called Coyote. Back in Oakland, between mouthfuls of doro wat, the author tells me of his presumed kinship with Harriet Tubman, his "big internet problem," and why he considers himself a failure. No, really.

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