A Brief History of Floating

Let’s do a thought experiment.

Is consciousness dependant on the external world or is it created by your brain without the need for the external world?

If you were a scientist or a philosopher in the 1950’s this was all the rage. Enter Dr John C Lilly , an M.D. with a background in experimental neurophysiology who stumbled upon this question while trying to understand the electrical activity in the brain.

While working at the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), Lilly decided that in order to solve the debate, he needed isolate the mind from external stimulation.  This was done strictly from a scientific approach. In order to study a system all influences to and from the system must be controlled/eliminated to rule out their influence. Seems pretty straight forward, the problem is that no one knew how to do it.

Luckily the National Institute of Health was looking at the metabolism of underwater swimmers in a soundproof chamber. Basically it involved swimmers submerged in water inside a giant cylinder of water.  Lilly combined this chamber with a mask that blocked out all light and held the floater upright.  It eliminated a lot of the swimmers senses, but looked anything but relaxing.

Lilly realized that in order to create a full sensory deprivation experience that 5 major factors needed to be eliminated/controlled:

People:  no worries of being interrupted or engaging in social roles. The tank was created for 1 person at a time.

Light: up to 85% of perception, learning, cognition and activities are mediated through vision

Sound: vibrations=sound. These vibrations can warn us of danger and soothe us in song. Filtering out the important details in a given situation requires a lot of energy. Sound needed to be controlled.

Gravity: Physiologists have estimated over 80% of the brains energy is devoted to counteracting gravity. Even subconscious distractions need to be controlled

Temperature:  The body is constantly trying to maintain a healthy temperature in a process known as homeostasis. The tank needed to be in sync with body temperature.

So what happened?

Back to our thought  experiment now. After a few hours of floating Lilly quickly realised that the brain did not need external stimulation in order to remain conscious. Almost paradoxically, floating allowed him to access new information not from the outside, but from within.  He went on to describe the feeling of floating as the most profound relaxation that he had ever achieved.

Lilly found himself exploring uncharted territory of the human experience.  Traditionally you were either conscious and awake or unconscious and asleep. Lilly discovered that there was a spectrum of consciousness and that in these “in between” states he was able to relive past memories, experience waking dreams and even hallucinate in such detail that it could be mistaken for an experience outside the tank.

Like many new scientific discoveries, his work was rejected by the scientific community at first.  This did not stop Lilly from his research and by the 1970’s he had created a model of the floatation tank similar to those found today. Laying replaced standing, salt water replaced fresh water, and cultural leaders, artists and authorities were the first to experience floating outside the scientific community.

It wasn’t until a shy computer programmer attended a seminar by Lilly that tanks began to become accessible to the public. Glen Perry was working for Xerox at the time and had a phobia of speaking to multiple people at the same time. He expressed this to Lilly and after going for his first float he was able to address a group of people without discomfort. Perry eventually met Lee Leibner an educator who was using floating as a tool to help hyperactive and learning disabled children and together they crafted the one and only Samadhi tank .