 It's been a really interesting year and a very strange confluence of events that kind of led to this moment. I'm super excited about it because what I get to present to you today is the introduction of what I hope will be a major research clinic for floaters. I'm truly specialized for studying the effects of floating on the brain and also studying it in patients with psychiatric illness. And when I surveyed the whole literature of floating, there's really been very little work done in actual patients. There's been a whole slew of studies showing that if you're healthy, you go into a float tank, you're going to reduce the levels of stress and anxiety. That's clear, but actual patient work has been very little. And shortly after this time, a lot of things came together and now I'm actually going to have the chance to find the impact. And it's super exciting to have this opportunity. I think it's very fortunate to have it actually. So let me kind of paint the picture of how I got from working at Caltech last year and coming to a float conference and talking about doing research to find the team at the Lawyer Institute for Brain Research. Which, by the way, is not in Pasadena, but also Oklahoma, from a long way to a long. So let's start with the talk from last year. This is the human brain. This is the cortex. And so much of this brain, at least the external surface, is about processing the external world around us. And when you think about what happens in a float tank, you have a profound transformation of the processing in the brain itself. So, to begin, you knock out a large swath of the visual cortex. When you're in a tank, a single photon of light should be stimulating the visual cortex. So this is going to alter a large part of the posterior area of the brain. And if you have a well-calibrated tank that's soundproof, what you'll find is you're going to also knock out information that's coming into your auditory cortex. If the tank is big enough and you're totally still and you're not bumping into the sides of the wall, you'll have no tactile sensation at all. And so the somatosensory input is going to be dramatic. And sort of deeper in the brain, you have a whole set of regions that respond to the day-to-day fluctuations of the ground, kind of orienting their body in space. And the proprioceptive and the stipulated input that goes into those areas is going to be not there. And assuming you're not moving and fissioning in the tank and you're remaining completely still, a large part of your frontal cortex is devoted to movement. It's going to be at an all-time low. And assuming you're not speaking or chanting or singing while you're in the tank, although some people do that, your speech output sensors are also going to be at an all-time low. So you could imagine you have this huge surface of brain that receives input from the external world and all of a sudden it's all shut up. And you know, back in the days when floating was beginning, this was really an enigma. What would happen to consciousness when you shut off a large part of the brain? But it turns out there's a really rich layer of consciousness bubbling in the surface, but it's bubbling underneath the surface, really, in the areas of the brain that process the internal body, the viscera, the heart, the lungs, the gut, the immune system. All of these organs and systems are actually on a dedicated pathway that bypasses the cortex, goes into areas like the brain stem, and exert a profound effect on all of our life for consciousness included. And this is the area of the brain that unfolds with floating. You access it for the first time instead of being overshadowed by the external world. This becomes your world. This becomes your consciousness. This is a very interesting experience unlike anything you could have obtained in the world out here. It's impossible. The only thing you can do is to float. And that's what really attracted me to the whole concept of floating. So keeping this idea in mind that the internal world of the body, the concept in the field that's known as interoception, is extremely important to floating. This is how I ended up at the Lord Jesus. Dr. Martin Paulus was my mentor when I was an undergraduate U.C. candidate. Without him, I probably would not have pursued neurosciences at the very end. He was literally the person who got me interested in studying the brain. Now, Dr. Paulus is a psychiatrist, and he was working with a lot of patients, and while we were there, we were doing tons of study patients with anxiety disorder, patients with drug addiction, and we were using ephemeron as our technology to study the brain. And he kept finding in all of these patient groups the same area of dysfunction in the brain. It turns out it wasn't in the cortex. Once again, it was underneath in the areas that process the internal world of the body. And one of the things that made Dr. Paulus famous in the field of psychiatry is his proposal. He said he proposed that altered interoception is the primary process underlying the initiation of an anxiety state. Further testing of this model may lead to the development of novel treatments that attenuate this altered interoceptive prediction signal in patients with anxiety disorders. So all this work that I was doing with Dr. Paulus, and also with his colleague Dr. Murray Sting, was transformed into this idea that the critical piece to patients with issues dealing with anxiety is this interoceptive mapping of the internal body inside the brain. And if we could correct this, we could actually treat these illnesses. But up to this time, he hadn't figured out a way to do it. So I came back from the float conference, and I actually went down to visit Dr. Paulus on a collateral project we were working on, which was probably around maybe September or so, last September. And I explained to him the whole concept of float, and I explained to him that, you know, this could be your answer. And sure enough, being my original mentor, he was totally excited about this idea. And he turned to me and he says, it's really interesting because just last week, I got a call on the phone, and they'd like me to be the new scientific director who's in president for the Lawyer Institute for Brain Research. And as scientific director and president, he had the power to dictate a line of research. How are we going to go about treatments like that? And it turns out that's the mission of the Lawyer Institute. Their mission is to try to reduce the suffering of psychiatric illness by using all the novel technologies we have to study the brain. And they really passed us with thinking outside the box to come up with new treatments. They wanted to use all the state-of-the-art research that we have about neuroscience and transform it into a treatment. And this was a philanthropic endeavor by the Warren family. You can see Mr. Warren out there. And it's really near and dear to their hearts. They're truly investing in the idea of finding new treatments. And they put a lot of resources behind them. So for example, you see over in the bottom right there a high-powered MRI machine. We have two of those totally dedicated to research. And they've integrated it with a 128-channel EEG system that could make a sign of pain. And this is the only system in the world where you can do combined fMRI with EEG at a 128-channel. And they've also developed new technology where you can literally see the brain in real time as the activation is going up and down in a particular region. And then you can modulate your own brain activation. This idea of neurofeedback in a way that hasn't been done before. So there's a lot of great opportunities at the Laureate Institute just for studying the brain. How about studying patients with psychiatric illness? So it's a relatively new institute. In fact, what you see here is the Laureate Psychiatric Clinic in Hostel. It's a big hospital, one of the largest in the Midwest. And they're studying a ton of psychiatric patients, not just in the state of Oklahoma, but all the surrounding states as well. And this picture on the left is actually on Bing. If you go to Bing and look at their satellite images, this is what you'd find. And in fact, that's where the Laureate Institute is now. So Bing is a little out of date. This had to have been taken before 2009, because it was 2009 when the Laureate Institute was built. And now you can see the building and the photo on the right. It's a beautiful building. In fact, if you go onto the Google Maps and you take that little guide and put them onto the street view, this is the street view. And you can see the Laureate Institute right over here. It's a five-story building. And right now we've only built up the first two floors of the building. And we still have a lot of expansion to go. And behind this tree, on the first floor, overlooking this little lake, is going to be where the Flow Clinic and Research Center is, where we have a great chat. So the question you're all probably asking yourself is, Oklahoma? Trust me, I asked myself that a lot of times before I moved there last December. But it turns out, if you look back in history, the state of Oklahoma is remarkably progressive when it comes to floating. And this is something I didn't know until I got it. One of the world's first float tanks ever was built in Oklahoma City. And you guys might remember this picture, but it's the upright float tank where you're kind of floating in this weird space town. And this was Jay Shoei's float tank. Dr. Jay Shoei, who oftentimes gets kind of swept under the carpet in the history of floating, is such an important figure. Here he is at Oklahoma City V8 in his float lab. You can see the reel that's recording the patients who are in the tank. And he didn't just study patients. He studied NASA astronauts back in the 50s and 60s getting ready to fly to the moon. Some of the first female astronauts actually went to this clinic and NASA wanted to put them through a test to see how well they could handle that environment. And one of them actually could handle it better than any other. So Dr. Jay Shoei was a tremendously important researcher. He did a lot of great work. Some of the first TVG experiments with float patient came out of his lab. And one day, if the float employees will allow him, I'd love to come back and give a whole history lesson on Jay Shoei because he did a remarkable amount of work. Now, when you look back at why Oklahoma is a perfect place for this sort of float clinic, I think there's several reasons. One is the psychiatric hospital that we're attached to. Like I said, it's one of the largest in the Midwest. They get about 75,000 outpatient visits a year. Quite a few inpatient visits as well. And it's really the main psychiatric hospital for the entire state and all the states surrounding it. So you're going to get access to a whole slew of patients who are coming there for treatment. Now, when I was interviewing there, I spoke to all the main physicians and heads of the clinic and told them about my intentions to try to study this as a novel treatment. And all of them, without value, said I would happily refer my patients. So I think we're going to have access to a tremendous amount of patients. They also have the world-renowned inpatient e-disorder program. People will fly in from all around the country, especially mostly women with anorexia, to get treatment there. And unfortunately, we have very few treatments that are effective in anorexia and span. And so the head of this program was really interested in trying to use more patients as a potential treatment. So several other unique things about Oklahoma. We have the second highest rate of mental illness in the country. It's not clear exactly why that's the case, but about 22% of our population has some form in blender. Many patients with severe anxiety, which is really what's near and dear to my heart, including gut and PTSD, that we're going to have the opportunity to study. And also an abundance of drug addiction in the state. Methamphetamine and opioid addiction as well as nicotine addiction. So when you combine the fact that we have this hospital that's literally immediately adjacent to our research point of view. And also the fact that we're in a state that really needs some help. I think this is a prime opportunity to develop and test a flirtation-based therapy to help patients with anxiety, addiction and anorexia. And all of these conditions really are about intercepting the service. So I get to the institute and now I need to build this clinic. And this is a challenge. I have so much respect for everyone in this room. Because building a flow clinic is the exact opposite of the nothingness we're trying to achieve. I'm glad your close friend and colleague of mine, Jim Hefner, is the first one I heard to say this, and he's so right. To be quite frank, I didn't realize how much anxiety it would cause. I'm trying to treat him better. But I couldn't have known this without this man right here. He's always been the saving grace of this whole operation. This is a picture of me feeding him last year, shortly after the conference at the flow shop Dylan introduced me. And you can actually see Colin hand me this card. And this is the card that eventually led to me asking Colin to be the designer of our flow clinic. And Colin is really one of the world's premier engineers for flow systems. A truly brilliant engineer. He's been inventing things his whole life. In fact, back in the 60s, he was part of British aircraft corporations, a main engineering team that developed the Concord Super-Summit Channel. It's a great honor to have Colin designing the tanks. And last February, we had Colin come out to the institute, and you could see a whole group of people here. We got Colin there and his wonderful wife, Jeannie, my laboratory manager, Kelsey, and then Jim Hefner as well flew out for this. And we really kind of used this week to design and develop flow clinics. I spent a lot of time thinking over the past year, what would be the ideal tank for patients with psychiatric conditions. This is not a trivial issue. And the more I explored different tanks and actually tried to mount myself, the more I realized how important it is to give them a lot of space. I think space is truly critical. And in that way, Leonardo da Vinci got it right. I really do believe you want to be able to spread out the tank and not fill any form of plastic folding. We'll get into that in more of a little bit later. But it turned out Colin is one of the world's only engineers of a round foot. It's called a float-around. And this is quite a large tank. In fact, the tank itself is about eight feet tall. But the circular part of the tank is eight feet in diameter as well, so you can literally spread out in all directions. And he also makes an open-air version of this. And when you look at this open-air version, it's really no different than looking at a jacuzzi. And so this is precisely what our center is going to have. We're going to have an open version of this tank and a closed version of this tank. And the open version is really kind of the patients beginning to float. You know, they might have a lot of stereo pipes as they've heard about floating. They might have a lot of things that really fears that prevent them from going into a tank. And my hope is when they see this open version, they're going to quickly dispel all this fear and they're going to have no trouble getting into it. That's my hope. So, we started construction actually last June, the same day my doctor was born. And you can see here, this is going to be the future open room and the tank will be kind of in this form. And then right in the middle, we're going to have a large control room where all the physiological equipment is going to go. And then up over here is going to be the closed room. And it's well underway now up there, putting up drywall all the way to the decks. We're working on soundproofing everything. We have quite a few layers of drywall with green glue. And by the end we should have an STC rating of about 60, which should be very, very quiet inside that. And my guess is, in the next month or so, we should have operations at least beginning to unfold. Call an engineer here at the conference now and they're going to fly back Oklahoma with me where we're going to start the process of installing the tanks. This is going to take several months because we're actually going to be outfitting the tanks with tons of different bells and whistles, different physiological equipment, different control panels so we could adjust temperatures, both with the water and at the air and calibrate things so they're very precise. And by the end of it, I'm convinced it will be the Rolls-Royce afloatation tank and makes the column really. So I'd like to spend a moment talking about this because I think it's relevant for a lot of people here in the audience. You know, a lot of the float centers and places around the country and the world cater to a lot of healthy people and I think that's great to need that. But when you're starting to work with patient population, it's important to really consider what goes into it. And being a clinical psychologist myself, I have to really spend a lot of time thinking about these things. And I can tell you there's really two things you need to start thinking about if you want your center to be able to help patients with, say, severe anxiety and claustrophobia is really one of them. I think this is one of the single biggest deterrents to get patients with anxiety into a float tank. And I think it's in general a deterrent for a lot of people in the healthy population as well. And so it's important to be conscientious about how you create your tanks. You really want to get rid of the claustrophobia part and I think the open version of the tank where you're in a room that's totally sound through to life and the tank has no room for ceiling to the other. No sense of enforcement. That's going to be critical for patients. And the other aspect is control. Patients with anxiety in particular need to feel like they're in control. And so you don't want to immerse them into the float experience right away. Really what you want to do is you want to create a sanctuary. You want this to be their time to explore their inner stuff. And one of the things you have to realize these patients have been systematically running away from themselves for most of their life. So you can't just roam them into a tank and assume that they're going to be okay. You have to give them a chance to explore at their own pace. So one of the things we're going to do at our center is make sure that they have complete control of the environment. If they want to have the lights on, they could... We're going to have a whole nice set of LED lights where they can choose the color that they would prefer to have on. And then eventually, hopefully, the load of the curves should go into the full immersive float. If they want to have a music plane or nice quiet sounds, they can have that going on throughout the float and then hopefully they'll reach the point where that could be silent as well. And we're now in a full intercom system where the whole time we're going to be able to hear them. If anything goes wrong, we can quickly go and help. We're going to have psychiatrists and psychologists there. So if any negative experiences happen, we're prepared and ready to handle them. And another part of previous century is they need to feel safe in their room. This needs to be their room for, you know, the few hours that they're there. And we thought about that. So what we decided is everything's going to be there. Right next to the float room is their own private bathroom. We're going to have this great open shower. And literally, they can stay there as long as they want. We don't want them to sit down recently. We really want this to be dictated by the patient. So, behind creating a sanctuary, we have to put a lot of thought into the water quality and the air quality. I think this is, unfortunately, something we haven't looked into as much in the floating field. We care a lot about water quality because this is one of the regulators in this. But no one's talking about air quality. In fact, you know, this is probably the most dangerous part of the float. So, for example, take chlorine. Chlorine is well-expected in almost every, you know, swimming pool and spa, in fact, a lot of states demand it. But this is a horrible idea, I think, for a floating lab. When it mixes with organics, you get very dangerous by-products in the air. Things like chlorophobe, even cyanide. And you don't want patients inhaling this in an enclosed environment. So I really think it's incumbent upon us as an industry to educate the regulators and make them realize chlorine is probably not the best idea for disinfecting and sanitizing this environment. I think ozone may have some potential, but once again, breathing in ozone is very problematic for the lungs. And I haven't seen it in a test today looking at how ozone as a water treatment actually goes into the air and whether or not it can be caused. We need to do those studies. So what we decided is we're going to go with something that is really one of the safest ways of disinfecting the water and also the safest on the air itself, and that's hydrogen hydroxyl. When it breaks down, it just breaks down the water, it's totally harmless. But it's also a very, very powerful sanitizing. And when you combine it with high-powered UV, what you end up producing are these hydroxyl-free radicals. These are very, very powerful, powerful oxidizers. In fact, it has the second highest oxidation potential next to chlorine. Better than chlorine, better than bromine, better than ozone. So really the combination of UV with peroxide I think is the ideal setup for both water quality and air quality. And we're going to be looking into all of this. So hopefully, like I said, this fall we're going to have operations up and running at the Float Clinic and Research Center. And there's a lot of experiments. I'm having trouble sleeping and I'm thinking of all the great things we're going to be able to do in the coming weeks. And I think it really falls into two domains. Floating in the brain and floating in the body is going to be the research part of it, the sort of basic science. What's happening in the human brain during the float experience? We're going to have a pension-annual EEG system that's wireless and water-based that will allow us to actually study this during the float. And as I showed you earlier, we have an MRI scanner just down the hallway. And we're going to be able to put people in and measure their brain activity both before and after a float and try to understand how the circuits are altered in the brain by this profound experience. We're also going to have a lot of different physiological equipment to measure things like blood pressure, heart rate, cortisol, we even hope to measure some things dealing with magnesium. And this will give us a very clear idea of what's happening in the body. And hopefully it's going to be a collaboration with Dr. Fine who's done some of the seminal work in this matter. We're going to be able to both replicate some of those great findings with the reduced blood pressure, the reduced cortisol, and also expand on the patient population. And I think this is going to be really the critical step to getting the floating on the map and the medical things. We need to do randomized controlled trials. These are the same trials that all the pharmaceuticals use when they come up with their antidepressants and their anti-anxiety bills. But it's unfortunately the only way you're going to get your therapy, your treatment, accepted in the medical community. You have to do these randomized controlled trials. And one of our goals at Liger is to actually do these trials with patients with anti-anxiety addiction in the MRI. And I think floatation by itself has a tremendous healing properties and I think we could all agree about that. But I think when you're dealing with patient populations, you're going to have to actually go above them beyond just the floating experience. And by combining the float experience with different types of treatment, including the paracetamide exposure therapy, where you expose people to the perturbations in their internal bodies, or by a feedback where you let them try all things like their blood pressure, or the data waves, or even meditation combined with floating, could be very, very effective. And this is the sort of thing that we hope to explore at the research center. And then, so much of psychiatry is always about getting rid of symptoms. You know, we're really focusing psychiatry on mental illness. When you think of work illness, we're missing something, right? Where's the focus on mental wellness? And I think floating is a chance for them. People come out of the tank, you know, going from a negative five back to zero, and they're, oh, it's pretty good. People come out of the tank and they're, ooh, I mean, they're filled with life. And this is a great chance to do long term follow-up to figure out how long this effect lasts for. And how to, you know, translate the real world, the external world. And I think that doing this sort of long term follow-up is going to give us a sense how is this a treatment compared to all the gold standard treatments that they're currently up? And by the way, those gold standard treatments aren't very effective. So my hope is that we could actually do this research in a way that will be accepted by western medicine and hopefully will be doctors all around the world to start referring their patients to us. But we have to do the research first. That's true. So in the midst of an anxiety epidemic, something I spoke about during last year's conference, the West is finally coming on board with Eastern treatments and philosophies that have been around for thousands of years. So much so that Broke this year, Time Magazine came out and called it The Mindful Revolution, which, you know, it's kind of a funny title because anyone who's tried to do mindfulness in everyday life will find this extremely difficult. I think a lot of patients that I've worked with when I try to get them to just stay focused on their breath and medicine find this to be one of the hardest things in life to just stay still. There's so much distraction in our work. 24-7 connectivity. We're in such a neat time where we're constantly feeling this need to go and talk, and we're never just still. And so trying to teach people mindfulness is very, very complicated. But fortunately, I think we have a technology that teaches you just by experience. You don't have to do anything when you're inside a book. You could take somebody who finds mindfulness extremely difficult and put them in a one-hour session and they're going to come out and they're going to understand what mindfulness really means. So my proposal to you sitting in this room is instead of a mindful revolution, let's all together start the flow of revolution. Thank you guys.