The saltwater makes me so buoyant that I float without any effort at all. The darkness behind my eyelids is indistinguishable from the darkness of the tank. But I am naggingly aware of a line along my skin where water meets air. I think about this line, and whether I should be thinking about it.
To oblivion and beyond: art and science at the edge of consciousness
Some say that the experience of flotation is similar to meditation, and this is certainly reminiscent of meditation—the mind twitching and fretting like a puppy tied to a lamppost. But the sensory experience of floating is like nothing else. The only sounds come from inside the body: At some point has it been five minutes?
When I twitch my eyelids to check, the sound of the ensuing blink is a resonant boom. A rumbling begins somewhere behind my right ear, as if a truck is coming around the curve of my head, and as it thunders past, I realize an air bubble has been loosed from my hair. Suddenly, my left foot touches the side of the tank and my whole body tenses. I use my toes to push off, followed quickly by my right foot bumping up against the other side.
I have pushed too hard. After a few more bumps and gentle pushes, my body and the water make peace, and I stop fixating on the tank. My brain keeps asking my body, where am I? This is when I begin to get dizzy. This is wildly disorienting.
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B ecause flotation simulates the weightless conditions of space, NASA has used flotation tanks to train its astronauts. B ut before astronauts and the New-Age embrace, there were Cold War fears about brainwashing. The intelligence community suspected a powerful new mind-control technique. It was a psychological arms race that could only be run by scientists studying the human mind. Less well known is the fact that he attended a secret meeting at the Montreal Ritz-Carlton on June 1, , along with high-ranking representatives from the defense departments of three countries—Britain, the United States, and Canada.
At this meeting, the question of brainwashing was raised. Hebb, then chair of the Human Relations and Research Committee of the Canadian Defense Research Board, speculated that prisoners might be more malleable if placed into isolation with limited sensory input. The others were impressed.
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CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror , within the intelligence community, one stated goal of the research was to prepare soldiers taken hostage and subjected to mind-control techniques. Hebb published the results in a issue of the Canadian Journal of Psychology under the guise of a study on monotonous environments such as those experienced by long-distance truck drivers. A U-shaped foam rubber pillow helped dampen auditory stimuli, but an air conditioner in the ceiling remained on 24 hours a day, emitting a steady hum of white noise.
The students were allowed breaks to use the bathroom and eat meals, which many ate sitting at the foot of the bed. They were invited to stay as long as they liked, but most could not make it past two or three days. The results were startling. Finally, there were integrated scenes: Before going into the chamber, participants were given various tests and questionnaires, including one gauging belief in paranormal phenomena.
Realizing the implications of his work, Hebb soon abandoned the study of sensory deprivation, but flame had been put to fire. Seven years after the McGill study was published, articles on the subject had appeared in scientific journals, and behind closed doors controlling sensory environments had emerged as a way to soften prisoners before interrogation. This formidable potential was not lost on the CIA. The most expansive was the now-notorious MKUltra project, which used sometimes unwitting American and Canadian citizens as test subjects in a wide-ranging research program on mind control.
But the study became recognized as a landmark investigation into sensory deprivation. And sensory deprivation continues to be associated with torture, obscuring the fact that dramatic negative effects such as hallucinations, intense anxiety, and mental breakdown are not merely a result of restricted sensation, but of how sensation is manipulated and under what circumstances. I am reluctant to admit it, but some corner of my mind was vigilant for the onset of hallucinations.
For regression and psychological breakdown. For the dissolution of the self into nothing.
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I try to relax. Breathe slower and deeper. I try to release the tension in my legs and arms, to let my head drop into the water as it might drop onto a pillow. This is harder than you might think. My neck stretches a tiny bit longer. My head drops a fraction of an inch. And then I am stuck. Focusing on my shoulders, I think, relax. The tension maintains a vice grip. Goddamnit , I think, relax. What I did not expect: I become aware of the curve and stretch of each muscle, the pull of tendon and ligament. I notice the meat of my upper arms as distinct strips of flesh around a solid core of humerus.
I feel my ribs as what they are, a bone case for my organs. Cosmonaut of my own anatomy, I go deeper and become aware of stomach and gut, the spaces carved out for food and waste and fetus, all of it pulsing as the bone case yawns open, then draws shut, with every breath. How have I never noticed all this, before? W ait, did I fall asleep? I am suddenly aware of myself as a pinprick consciousness in a vast dark, where before I was not, which makes me wonder if I have just woken up.
How long have I been in the tank? My right shoulder twitches. My left calf muscle. Muscles are releasing like the first raindrops of a quickening spring shower. It is both exhilarating and utterly relaxing. Here, beyond conscious control, is the previously unattainable physical release. The muscles along my spine elongate and a subtle ache lodged in my back for months finally disappears.
But how can I describe this other feeling, being utterly present while also being outside my body and outside time? Of being connected to everything and nothing? The only way I can describe it is that floating feels like being meditated. As if the tank does it for you, from the outside in. T he average brain is an electrochemical organ that generates as much as 10 watts of electricity, enough to power a small light bulb. This electrical activity can be recorded in the form of brainwaves that have higher or lower frequencies and amplitudes, and the four most common—beta, alpha, theta, and delta—roughly indicate levels of arousal.
Beta waves are short and fast and associated with day-to-day levels of activity, such as reading a book or navigating a busy city street. On the other end of the spectrum, delta waves are long and slow, associated with deep sleep. EEG recordings have shown that during flotation beta and alpha waves decrease, while theta waves increase, patterns of brain activity typically associated with sleep or meditative states. While there are different distributions of brainwaves across different brain areas, decreasing beta and alpha waves are broadly associated with lowering states of arousal.
And while theta waves occur throughout the brain during wakefulness, they characterize the first stage of sleep. Coupled with subjective reports about flotation, these patterns point toward a hypnogogic state, that liminal zone where conscious control of mental processes begins to loosen its grip, when you stop engaging with the outside world and turn inward, just before falling asleep.
The first flotation tank was built in the mids by a researcher who had a lifelong fascination with states of consciousness. John Lilly, a brilliant and wildly unorthodox researcher then studying sensory deprivation at the National Institute of Mental Health NIMH , invented an upright flotation tank in which a subject could be fully submerged like a scuba diver.
The suit he designed is reminiscent of scuba gear, with the addition of a rather terrifying-looking hood and blackout mask to restrict vision see A Breath of Fresh Air. At first, Lilly experimented on himself and fellow researchers, and he quickly realized the discomfort of the hood and the fear of drowning were aggravating distractions.
He decided to ditch the suit and redesign the tank so a subject could float horizontally, with their face out of the water. Lilly, who was friends with such luminaries as Richard Feynman and Buckminster Fuller, lost a great deal of credibility in the scientific community when he left NIMH to follow his own dubious research programs, which included taking massive amounts of LSD and Ketamine sometimes while floating , giving LSD to dolphins, and trying to communicate with extraterrestrial life.
At the edge of consciousness: automatic motor activation and voluntary control.
H appeared before me: Subsequent research suggests there are states of arousal that fall between conventionally categorized states such as sleep and waking, supporting his intuition that there are multiple states of human consciousness we have yet to fully explore. And sleep, as anyone who has used the popular SleepCycle app knows, is composed of multiple levels of arousal serving many functions, which we have yet to fully understand.
He came out and said, every day since I was very young, I meditate four or five hours a day, and the level of meditative depth that I experienced in the tank was such as I can only manage maybe once or twice a year. Recently, he has used REST to help people quit smoking. He believes REST has clinical advantages over meditation. If you have a bad experience all you have to do is get up and walk out.
Highly experienced meditators show dramatic increases and synchronization in gamma waves, a type of brainwave even shorter and faster than beta waves, which have not been found in the brain during flotation. One had his children threatened at school. They had their houses and automobiles vandalized, et cetera. So that drove quite a few people out of the field, not surprisingly.
But research may be picking up, due partly to the recent resurgence of commercial float centers like the one I visited in Chelsea, or the one recently installed in a yoga studio just 20 blocks uptown. In Sweden, researchers such as Annette Kjellgren, Sven Bood, and Torsten Norlander have been conducting larger, well-controlled studies that show REST is clinically effective on conditions such as stress, chronic pain, and hypertension.
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Subliminal modulation of voluntary action experience: Amna El Hassan , Keith A. Josephs Current neurology and neuroscience reports Complementary roles of cortical oscillations in automatic and controlled processing during rapid serial tasks Silvia Isabella , Paul Ferrari , Cecilia Jobst , J. Allan Cheyne , Douglas O. Cross-modal effects of auditory magnitude on visually guided grasping. Gal Namdar , Tzvi Ganel Journal of vision References Publications referenced by this paper.
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