The question of what a person becomes during a period of isolation this extreme — whether the person who arrives at the end is meaningfully the same person who departed at the beginning — is one that psychology does not answer with a single response. Research on long-term solitary confinement, on polar expeditions, on submarine deployments, and on other forms of extended isolation consistently shows that people change during the experience. They develop coping mechanisms that would not have been present before. They lose certain social capacities that atrophy from disuse. They form relationships — with animals, with objects, with imaginary presences — that would seem aberrant in a normal social context but are adaptive in an isolating one.
Alvarenga’s relationship with the bird he kept on the boat — the one that was still alive when he arrived at Ebon Atoll — was, by the account that emerged from reporting after his rescue, something more than a pure food reserve. The bird was a living presence. It was not the same as human company, but it was not nothing. In a universe with no other living things that responded to him, a tethered bird that moved and made sounds was a form of company that human beings will seek in the absence of anything better.
## The Scurvy Question and What It Reveals About the Diet
Of all the medical questions raised by Alvarenga’s survival, the scurvy question is the most instructive about the nature of his diet and why it sustained him when simple protein intake would not have been sufficient.