Since I had read the article about it in the New World Notes, I’ve wanted to go and have a look at it. Today it’s what I did, and flew to Sedig to go to the ‘schizophrene’ experiment by myself. The least I can say is that it was pretty troubling, not so much at first, but more so after a few minutes. I had to wear a badge – which was used to stream the ‘voices’, in fact – and even though they were all in English (of course), it was indeed pretty disturbing.

Voices keeping on telling how ‘evil’ I am, that ‘I’ am just a scumbag… whispers, highlighted words in the newspaper, underlying suggestions of death, troubled reflections in the mirror, changes of ground, and all of this in such a sudden manner usually that it really contributed to surprise me (in the “what the hell?!” meaning of the word, hum…). The clinical environment adds a lot, too, to the whole feeling of insecurity and of being ‘lost’. Of course, one has the opportunity to get out at will, yet I wanted to do it till the end, and stay a litttle longer after this, just to see how it was.

I’m not going to list everything in here, as to not spoil it for potential readers, nor post more images, but yes… it takes its full meaning only after some time. Maybe it’s just me (not being a native English speaker usually causes me to need more time to ‘understand’ spoken things, and the voices were part of this), or maybe it’s this way for everybody… I have no idea. I just know now that it’s extremely disturbing, and also, oddly enough, helped me in getting a better grasp of something I thought I knew before, yet without knowing that much about it.

Somehow, it reminded me of A Beautiful Mind a lot. A lot.