Altered States and Sensory Deprivation

The movie Altered States was eye-opening due to its nuance of being a paradigm of dichotomies: love and the quest for knowledge; religion and truth; primitivity and man; reality and a confused consciousness. In some ways, though, the commonality of all of these themes was that they followed a similar course as the main character’s deeper existential questions. These main motifs were what motivated me to continue watching Altered States, and by the end of the movie, I found that I had been submerged in these themes as they were dissected more and more. I found it interesting that one of the largest topics that the film tackles is the religious confliction that Eddie has from his youth. This carries into his adulthood, his career, and into his understanding of the connection it has with truth; especially in the scenes where he is attempting sensory deprivation in the flotation tank. There is an overlap with “religious delusions”, as he calls it, in which “the truth” is encapsulated by religious iconography, Armageddon imagery, and a profound sense of divinity within himself, too. This became immensely intriguing to me, especially as I found that this bled into the other motifs of his confused consciousness as he began to feel his reality become increasingly distorted. While following the premise of Eddie’s experimental study, I also appreciated the realism the film displayed of his life, his wife and children, his gradual distance from them and how this impacted his development as a character. The reason I was fascinated by this film’s take was because it depicted how his reality – not only as a conscious being, but also as a man with a life and responsibilities – can greatly affect both his underpinning of love and this tireless expedition to obtain greater knowledge and truth. All of these tied into the contrast of primitivity and man that Eddie, literally, embodied. We find that the difference was that, as a man, he was able to control the urge to not externalize (religious) hell, but as a primate, and with no limitations to his impulses, he was able to externalize this. With the aid of the Hinchi drug, he killed, preyed on the weak and displayed violent domination. My takeaway of this was that in the search for greater truth, he had to sacrifice an even greater part of his humanity. The mesh of all of these motifs captivated me along with the storyline, and it enabled me to ponder on these questions as well as my experiences that line up with them. 

Something as impersonal as variation/variability is hard to extract a deeper meaning from, but when watching and analyzing this film, its significance became clearer two-fold within objective statistics and personal senses. Firstly, variation is a fundamental unit within inferential and descriptive statistics; in which descriptive summarizes your data, and inferential is able to test your data’s generalizability to the larger population. When looking at it from this perspective, within statistics, the variability of the effects the Hinchi drug had was very dissimilar between Eddie and the Hinchi tribe. The Hinchi tribe used the drug as a ritual for thousands of years, becoming a regular practice of theirs with no physical or mental calamities to its people. With Eddie, however, he was described by his loved ones and colleagues as being on the brink of a nervous breakdown, which later became actualized. With this, I found that the implication was that this drug became individualized because Eddie did not have the intention to use the drug for cultural-ritual purposes, rather, he used it to assertively find truth amidst his own personal confusions. On the flip side, the content of his hallucinations provided the overarching lens of sensory variation that the drug had: deeply buried traumas and obsessions impeded the protagonist’s state of being, and therefore, his study. Due to the closeness that this study had on his significant others and colleagues, Eddie’s breakdown greatly affected these people around him—and we can see that, in a way, the variability within his senses transferred over to them, but especially to his wife, Emily. She was the only other person to have the same level of altered sensation, and we can elude it to the shared and intimate connection she has with Eddie. While Eddie was hallucinating about violent and hard truths to unravel, the effect this had on him lacked in variability with Emily. In totality, the film depicts sensory variation as both individualized and shared—the source of these senses are individualized, but its magnitude affects those that surround it.