I hit a low point recently. Kicking goals! The Scientists kept me awake after everyone else was asleep, and I’d been woken before the others as well, so I was utterly exhausted and incapable of keeping my eyes open, let alone writing. It is very frustrating when your waking hours are unproductive – if I could work or even read I wouldn’t mind, but the body has limits. The body is brilliant at passive resistance and it turns out it is very difficult to reason with jelly. (more…)

I want to start this post saying “It’s day three in the Big Brother House…” but truth be told, we can’t agree if it’s sometime Tuesday, sometime Wednesday or possibly still Sunday afternoon. (more…)

Dreams are prepared, captivated senses of commercials- life is a dream ..TB

Start of exploration in shapes, letters and numbers. (more…)

Quite a lot happened after my USB was taken away last “night”, but I was in no fit state to record it. Jenn and Thom went to bed first, while Fee and I stayed up for the late shift.

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Have you noticed any associative changes between smell, taste, and memory? 

Chris

There was an absence of smells, except for of course my art materials. You could smell the food wafting through the door but the food itself was quite bland, although edible. I think as you get more tired, your brain starts playing tricks with your memory. But then a lot of the drawings I created were memory scapes and some of the works were from dreams I had whilst in the experiment.

Thom Buchanan

I missed smells! I found the lack of smell and sound in the lab unpleasant, although it was very calming. My short term memory was shot by the end of the week, but long-term memories came floating up, and I found myself growing quite nostalgic. A lot of our conversations in the last couple of days were fed by sentimental recollections from childhood, but it’s hard to say whether that was because memory was stimulated or because we were emotionally vulnerable. Probably a bit of both.

Jennifer Mills

After a short dip in the Mariana Trench of sleep – my greedy brain went straight for the deep stuff – I was woken several hours before the others and had some time to myself to write in the quiet. That was bliss. I worked some more on the vague story I started on the first day here. It’s creepy and impressionistic and I imagine it will become even less coherent as the week progresses. So far I have been pretty upbeat on this adventure, so the writing is doing its job and carrying the dark. If I don’t dream in my sleep, do I dream on the page? (more…)

How have your feelings towards the scientists tasked with waking you/preventing you from sleeping changed?

Is fatigue starting to override social niceties?

Sean the Bookonaut

Hi Sean! My feelings fluctuate pretty wildly. It helps that all of the scientists are lovely people. If they were more authoritarian it would be easier to resent them, but instead they say please and thank you and talk about how nice baby pandas are. In some ways this is worse, because they have a gentle firmness which lulls you into compliance, and then I am annoyed with myself for being so obedient. That dependence relationship makes us vulnerable. Before the last sleep period I was kept up after the others and was so tired and miserable, pacing to stay awake. The scientists are the ones who end our suffering, as well as our captors.

Jennifer Mills

I love the scientists. Partly by inclination, mostly because they’re all so patient and nice to us. And they bring us food. I’m pretty sure it’s not Stockholm Syndrome.

Speaking for myself, I came into this with a willingness to trust the people working here, and that’s a pretty good baseline to start off from. I’m here because I want to be, and so are they. We all love our jobs. There’s no conflict on that level.

That said, our jobs are different, and we Subjects (and perhaps the scientists too) do keep an informal league table of who is the meanest. “Meanest” being a deliberately provocative term for the person least likely to let us bend the rules a little. We are always wanting to hang out when we shouldn’t. We are always grizzling about the PVT. We are always wanting to work when we should be sleeping, or vice versa. We are always playing music when we testing begins. Someone has to make us do what we agreed to do when we signed up for this, and identifying those best at this task is important if we’re going to make any progress at bending the rules and getting away with it.

Choosing your battles, all that. There’s nothing to be gained by being mean. Also, they’re working on weird shifts too, so we figure they’re going through what we’re going through. Only with more chocolate.

Sean Williams

The scientists were wonderful. I think as a coping mechanism to the delirium from the sleep deprivation/change of sleep pattern, I found myself laughing at everything or making a joke in an attempt to make it more an enjoyable experience instead of a repetitive clinical one. I think as well because in the ‘real world’ I’m generally fun loving and easy going, it’s not in my nature to be rude or narky even if I was feeling frustrated especially when the testing would interrupt my art flow.

Thom Buchanan

With no direct exposure to the external weather events, can you gauge any of the changes due to minor fluctuations in air pressure?
The relationship between sound, pressure and temperature is something the human body can be attuned to in a multi-sensory sense – are you at all aware of vibrations that may exist on the threshold of your perception?

Chris

This bunker is incredibly well insulated and temperature controlled and I haven’t noticed any temperature/pressure changes – my body temperature is lower when I am tired and that is very noticeable. We suspect they are playing some kind of white noise at us to mask any external vibrations. Before my last sleep I was hearing all kinds of sounds inside the hum, sort of auditory ghosts, but they told me more about my own mental state than the outside world. I am much more attuned to internal signals than external ones.

I have definitely noticed the lack of smells in here, especially when they glue the electrodes on us because the conductive gel they use has a scent like petroleum jelly. When Thom was painting with acrylics earlier I went to his room and inhaled deeply, like a cartoon animal after a pie. It’s clear the scientists are controlling our exposure to scents. The food is very bland too, so perhaps these things have an effect on sleep/wakefulness. It’s unpleasant being so under-stimulated. Just like I miss bright sunlight, I have a yearning for a really robust and complex odour.

Jennifer Mills

I was thinking about atmospheric influences while lying awake the other “night”. I’d just heard a sound that reminded me of how ceilings shift when wind rushes over a building’s the roof. Or it could have been the structure flexing in the heat/cold—but that seemed less likely. So yes, I’d say that I did just once get a sense of what’s happening to the atmosphere around us.

On the whole, though, I feel completely oblivious to what’s happening to outside. There are multiple doors separating us from the Adelaide air. The air-conditioning is relentless, and although it feels hotter or colder sometimes, I know that’s just my body reading it differently. There’s no way to guess if it’s going to 45C when they let us out, or the same as it was when we went in (I’m hoping for the latter, obviously).

Where I live, just up the road, I’m used to some pretty weird frequencies as the big trucks brake on Glen Osmond Road. I’ve listened for anything like that, but heard nothing. The only sound that penetrated the walls came from fireworks—huge gunpowder explosions happening in the sky directly above our heads. Anything less than that, I suspect, has no chance at all.

(I took a tour once through the underground NORAD base in Colorado. Being in here is not dissimilar. I know the world is only metres away in certain directions, but it certainly doesn’t feel like it.)

Sean Williams

I hated the temperature it was 21 degrees at all times particularly as I am not a big fan of air-conditioning and as I got more tired it felt like my body was colder and it was uncomfortable. I speculate that there was white noise coming through a speaker and I could hear the building cracking. We were in dim lighting all the time and after awhile your mind just gave up trying to work out what time of day it was. I think after awhile you become hypersensitive trying to hear/sense/feel things that you normally would in daily life, like a couple of times I thought I heard my phone ringing which was impossible as the scientists took our phones off us. I was yearning for the outside particularly the horizon and fresh air especially as all the images I was creating was from an outside realm and not a reflection of the isolation and enclosure (hamster run) that I was in, sort of a portal to the outside world. I guess it really made me question how in tune I was with my environment and how sensitive I was to fluctuations in sound, temperature and pressure.

Thom Buchanan

Downstairs its just like any normal day here, but I doubt its very normal for you. My question is, have you thought about trying to escape yet?
Or if not escaping, trying to cheat the lockdown by finding out what time it is?

Stuart 

Funnily enough one of the first things I did when I got here was make a bolt for the door.
Fortunately, it was caught on camera (see the end of my latest blog post, called “we are cyborg”).

Fee Plumley

Nobody has tried to escape. I am a little disappointed in myself for being so compliant. But in truth, it is really fun in here, more like an insane sleepover than a prison. Oh, we have a few strategies of resistance, but I can’t say more – Big Brother is watching!

Jennifer Mills

What time it is outside is constantly on my mind. I would never cheat, but I am always on the lookout for clues: who says what as they enter our space (“Good morning”—possibly a ruse); how my body is feeling (warm might mean it’s daytime, according to my biological clock); and so on. It’s hard to believe that any sound could ever penetrate these thick walls, but we did fireworks the other night. That gave us a vague reference point—it must have been dark outside, but what time on what night? Not enough to spoil the experience, I hope. (Unless this was a clever ruse too. It’s easy to fall into paranoiac thinking in here.)

Sean Williams

I didn’t want to escape; I was there for a reason and wanted to test myself by sticking it out until I had to bail (early). It was nice to have a break from the world and time was a weird concept in there. We the subjects (the band) always questioned what time it was and theorised what time and day it was but we didn’t ask anyone. The whole experience was disorientating with how they structured the sleeping and eating regiment and if I hear the world consistency again I’m going to explode.

Thom Buchanan

“Day” 3 (that’s what I’m rolling with)

– hot pack and magic cream = essential! Chilli too- all this pain and suffering for SCIENCE- if I had a dollar for every time I used the word “chocolate” . . . – Fee is redesigning the PVT machines

Well, the story is deadlocked, so let me tell you the story of how I came to be in here.- or explain TM

Sean Williams