NIELSEN: Yes, because no meaningful research has been done on a community in sensory deprivation.
There’s no sense of time, no future or past. People go to sleep when they’re tired, get up when they’re awake. There’s no day-night cycle. There’s no telephone, no mail, no bills to pay. It’s freeing. You pay attention to what’s inside yourself–like people in a monastery–and to others around you. The information inside–I call it the voice of God–is inside each of us but we don’t know how to turn off the chaos of modern life long enough to hear it. There’s no pressure to talk. Living in such close proximity, the only privacy you have is in your own mind.
The people. The pole is nothing; it’s 360 degrees of flat white ice with a blue sky in the summer, and in the winter it’s black for six months. What’s important is the journey, living there and surviving it. It teaches you so much because it’s so extreme, even its beauty. After a while, you see shades of blue, gray, crystalline in the flatness; the ice is carved by the wind. You learn that the essentials are food, shelter and companionship. We’re pack animals, we depend on each other, we need to help each other. And we need to occupy our minds, we need to explain primal questions. Modern life is too complex; you feel empty inside because you don’t have time to chill out and have real, meaningful relationships. As a doctor and a mother, I never had time to think.
There was nothing to see or do, nowhere to go. I liked the simple life of having a little less than you need, but it was difficult to have water rationing–it’s expensive to make water and electricity there. We could only have two 2-minute showers a week.
We just didn’t talk about certain things; we allowed people to have their secrets. There was no physical privacy, you could hear everything that was going on. Having sex was hard. One person told me they waited until the fans came on! Everyone pretended not to hear anything. Only once our local gossip columnist wrote about someone that the sex was so good, even the neighbors had a cigarette!
We need terrible adversity to know what we’re made of. Without that you could live a whole life and not know yourself or your strengths. As a caregiver, having people care for me was a freeing experience because it made me less separated from humanity. I have a new appreciation of people who care for the dying.
No, I was sad to die; there were all the things I wanted to do. I’d planned to travel with Reza, my Bangladeshi friend, on $3 a day. I was able to accept death–it’s hard for an American to not fight back but I don’t see things that way. I don’t believe in fighting cancer: you get the best doctor and treatment possible, then you trust them. I handed myself over like a slab of meat. As a doctor, I know it’s a tossup. Good people die, mean people survive. But it was very hard for my family. As a doctor, I’ll pay much more attention now to the exhaustion and pain of caretakers.
I have a 50 percent chance of living five years–I’m obsessed with percentages! I may not have much time left so I try not to live someone else’s life.
It’s a strange twist of fate. We’ve been doing this since the ’50s and until now, we’ve not had a doctor getting sick.
I’ve always had a dream to start a hospital in Africa. I’d like to work with people who are putting videoconferencing equipment in places where there aren’t any consultants so local doctors can be connected to outside consultants. Modern technology’s going to save us. In the Information Age, we have to learn to control it and not let it destroy our humanity. We need to keep a spiritual balance.
