The Flotation Tank, Psychedelics, and the CIA (Part I)
Photo Courtesy of Art of Floating
This is my first stab at a two-part blog – but I can’t resist a tempting fork in the road. In this case, I have stumbled upon a few snippets of history that beg to be connected, perhaps for the first time.
I’ll start with the present, as represented in the image of a modern isolation tank. In this setting, an individual experiences perceptual deprivation by being suspended in warm water inside a tank where all external stimulation such as light and sound are eliminated. Flotation tanks are enjoying a resurgence of interest thanks to the practical benefits of relaxation and offsetting jet lag, as well as for the claimed mind-body enhancements of depth meditation and amplifying creativity.
Among many locales where the devices are found is San Francisco on the West Coast, and a company called The Art of Floating in Bloomsburg, PA (not far from the state’s capital city, Harrisburg), which claims to have the largest float center on the East Coast. All apparently base their techniques on the work of John C. Lilly.
Lilly (1915-2001), also shown here, is credited with establishing use of a flotation tank as a means of sensory deprivation. Lilly’s biography is quite a saga, from his days as a medical student (when he was a volunteer experimental subject in a protein deprivation study) through a career exploring the nature of consciousness.
While an undergraduate at Cal Tech in 1934, Lilly read Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, in which Huxley describes a fictional drug that provides pharmacological control and effects social conditioning. It is said that this concept inspired Lilly to change his major from physics to biology. He would go on to earn a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1942 with the intention of pursuing medical research rather than therapeutic practice.
His later explorations ranged from sensory deprivation experiments to research into potential human communication with dolphins (a topic next month in part II). And of course, like ‘psychonauts’ then and now, Lilly later sought extraordinary perception courtesy of LSD, ketamine, and other substances that came to be known as psychedelic.
Since 1954, Lilly’s name has become nearly synonymous with sensory isolation and the isolation tank with its arguable mind-body benefits, but a look back to Midcentury history raises a few questions. The previous year, on December 15, 1953, Humphry Osmond wrote to Aldous (who, the previous May, had experienced mescalin under the supervision of Dr. Humphry Osmond) reporting news from a psychiatric conference he had just attended in Montreal. There he heard a paper by the noted Canadian psychologist Donald O. Hebb.
“There was something very important at Montreal … Dr. D.O. Hebb told of how he had experimented with volunteers in a restricted environment. Young men were placed in moderately sound proofed rooms, with ground glass goggles, cotton gloves and cuffs to keep the hands away from their sides. Those who put up with this developed mescalin-like experiences. Hebb was astonished. This was literally the last thing he had expected ….”
Lilly developed his first isolation tank the following year, in 1954, while working for the National Institutes for Mental Health, a government-funded agency. Although Lilly’s name is associated with the floatation tank, and that is the usual date pegged for this innovation, it seems that ideas about sensory deprivation were wafting through the air around this time. Moreover, the spread of this research may have been connected to government work with interrogation. Funding, after all, made many studies into the nature of consciousness possible.
The aforementioned Dr. Hebb is quoted as speaking at a Harvard symposium on sensory deprivation four years later, in June 1958:
“The work that we have done at McGill University began, actually, with the problem of brainwashing. We were not permitted to say so in the first publishing ….”
Recent research has argued that Hebb’s sensory deprivation research was funded by and coordinated with the CIA (McCoy, 2007).
Judging by Humphry Osmond’s letter to Aldous Huxley, it appears that the idea of experiencing profound effects from sensory deprivation was wafting in the air by December of 1953. Osmond and Huxley had in mind mescalin-like effects and exploring the “inscape” known by mystics and adepts—to others (though I am not suggesting that Lilly was one of them) a practical application of sensory isolation was for interrogation, the unholy grail of Cold War research funding, perhaps alluded to in Hebb’s presentation in Montreal in December of 1953.
Today’s revival of interest in flotation tanks resembles the positive psychonaut legacy of exploring deep meditation and even creativity. This was what Osmond signaled as “important” in his letter to Aldous on December 15, 1953.
*(this item was sourced from Wikipedia, but I include it because the documentation is provided).
