Originally Posted by M Levac

About neurosis. I think it's a sort of trauma. Things learned during trauma stick. It's very hard to get rid of loop thoughts developed during trauma. I imagine the constant thinking about food must have stuck with these subjects, long after the experiment ended. The loop thought here would have been something like "hungry, can't eat, experiment, hungry, can't eat, experiment, etc", on and on every second, day and night for the length of the experiment. It's a very short loop, easily learned at first and easily remembered. Once the experiment ended, the "can't eat" and "experiment" parts of the loop disappeared, but the "hungry" part obviously stayed because it's a natural part of our thoughts, it just became more prominent due to the neurosis resulting from the initial loop during the experiment. The trauma of neurosis amplified the otherwise benign hunger, maybe in both amplitude and frequency, but probably mostly frequency.