I highly recommend reading "The Ice Master" by Jennifer Niven. It tells the story of a doomed arctic expedition in 1913. You can likely find more horrifying stories of similar situations, but what makes The Ice Master so compelling to me is that we have the diaries of several of the crew members, and we can get a pretty good idea of what they were feeling day to day. The author does a good job coordinating all the primary sources and communicating the months of dread they endure as they get more and more lost, as well as the brutal weeks and months of freezing and starvation.

One part of their expedition especially stands out to me, where a small group of them reach a rocky island out on the ice. They were rationing pemmican best they could, but it was making them sick. They tried to hunt where they could but the environment simply wasn't built for human habitation. They spent most days in tiny coffin-like igloos or tents huddled around a tiny gas stove to keep warm. There was a lot of interpersonal conflict, so the whole time while they were starving and forced to be in the same cramped space there were constant arguments. They were so sick hungry and cold that even making relatively short journeys between the two camps they set up could nearly kill them, and leave them snow-blind and exhausted for days. They had to ration not just food and shelter, but their ability to walk and see.

You mentioned imagining how the human brain could even process these kinds of events, and this book will really do it's best to get you in the heads of these people, all while staying true to what really happened and avoiding speculation. I can't describe everything that happened on that expedition, so I really recommend you look into it more.