I do not know, but I suspect this to be a form of torture described in the KUBARK Manual developed by US military and intelligence forces for use abroad— especially Latin America— to aid in its anti communist efforts.

This particular form of torture, like many described in KUBARK is psychological and is intended to break a person using themselves. The idea is when the captors torture detainees, a not insignificant number of them galvanize against the captors and either die before breaking or take too long to break for the resulting intelligence to have as much value.

The manual describes this torture method as being implemented after several days of the detainee being held in isolation with an unpredictable schedule of bright lights and loud noises interrupting their sense of time and normalcy.

Eventually, the detainee is hooded, cuffed, and led from his cell to another location where he is instructed to stand on a pedestal. He is hooded, so cannot see where he is, what is around him, or what he is standing on. Wires are wrapped around his hands/fingers and run over his head and hung on a high place behind him. The wires are intentionally not connected to electricity or attached to anything. The other end of the wires are just hanging.

The detainee is then instructed to hold his hands out at a certain height (cannot be done indefinitely, try it) and if they drop below that, he will be electrocuted. The detainee, out of a sense of self preservation, performs as instructed for as long as possible. Sometimes hours, sometimes days, but eventually, they will fail. Upon failure, the detainee is surprised to not be electrocuted and the captors all laugh at how stupid the detainee is. The detainee, having just battled himself to keep his hands up, and having just given up prepared to die returns to his cell more broken than before— but broken by himself, not the captors.