Sleep deprivation is basic to brainwashing, and as a torture. The techniques were described in 1950 by journalist Edward Hunter in the Miami Daily News in a feature on brainwashing (xi-nao, the Mandarin words for wash (xi) and brain (nao)) in China. ‘The process was meant to “change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet—a human robot—without the atrocity being visible from the outside.”’ ‘For the American soldiers trapped in the Korean prison camps, brainwashing meant forced standing, deprivation of food and sleep, solitary confinement, and repeated exposure to Communist propaganda’. Lorraine Boissoneault, ‘The True Story of Brainwashing and How It Shaped America’, Smithsonian Magazine, 22 May 2017; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-brainwashing-and-how-it-shaped-america-180963400/.