BLOG #4
A Natural History of the Senses
Touch
The author talked about how autopsies of the cerebellum showed that the monkeys who were kept in total isolation had brain damage. Since our school loves connections, I am going to take this opportunity to connect this to one of my favorite classes Ive taken at Wheaton College. In forensic psychology we learned about the reasons for our jail system. One of the biggest reasons why jail exists, is the attempt to rehabilitate it’s inhabitants and make them ready and better suited to be thrown back into our crazy world. However, we then went on to learn what solitary confinement does to the human mind. Ranging from hearing voices, to developing full blown mental disorders, all solitary confinement succeeds in doing is making the criminals more disturbed than they first were when they entered jail. This directly relates to the study of the monkeys and how not interacting with others can actually damage the brain. Obviously this means that by being in solitary confinement we are going against the natural order of things, or rather going against the natural and inherent reasons why we exist.
I feel as though most people would look at this and attribute the mental damage to the lack of conversation, but perhaps it is from the lack of touch. Like I talked about in my last blog, as humans we place such a huge importance on communication with others, but is touch not the most basic but important form of communication that we have? Before reading this chapter I must admit that I would have attributed the change in brain chemistry, (and not for the better), to the fact that in solitary confinement a person doesn’t have any verbal contact with anyone. However, now I am more apt to hypothesize that it is from the lack of physical touch. I think it is worth exploring and noting that the importance of physical touch may be most important at critical times during development, for example adolescence..and with certain people, like the individuals mother. This ties into my last blog post which talked about how there is definitely an observed and noteworthy difference between monkeys that were able to touch and interact with their mothers, than the monkeys that weren’t.
Good point. More and more people are coming to recognize solitary confinement as psychological torture, espeically for very young inmates, but do you really believe the purpose of our penal system is to rehabilitate? I know we give lip service to that, but the current structure of most prisons and prison culture makes rehabilitation almost impossible. Nor am I sure that most people believe the purpose of prison is to rehabilitate. May believe it is to punish or to remove dangerous people from civil society. Just saying.
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