 Thanks so much, Ashkahn, for having me. I got to say, the folks at Float On have really done a wonderful job. That was great. That lunch was quite spectacular, too. Did you guys see the people making smoothies with the bicycle? Only in Portland. Definitely. That's great. I'd also like to thank all the researchers who are here, including the past presidents from Iris. I think we all owe these people a tremendous debt of gratitude. They've courageously weathered the storm over the years. I got a chance to speak to several of them yesterday, and it's a hard field of research. It's not well accepted, which is unfortunate. I think there's so much potential here, and they've really helped keep this field alive over many, many years. Thank you, guys. I'm a researcher as well. I'm a clinical neuropsychologist actually at California Institute of Technology. This is the same place that John Lilly graduated from 75 years ago. I just learned that today on Wikipedia, so I didn't realize that when I first got there. In fact, I didn't even know about floating when I first got there. I learned about it earlier this year when an RA in the lab I'm at told me about this very interesting experience, and I had to check it out myself, and sure enough, the first time I was hooked. It's a fascinating technology, and like I said, so much potential. So what is a clinical neuropsychologist doing here? I'm not studying magnesium, I promise you. I've been spending the past 13 years investigating consciousness and emotion in the human brain, and I think this picture is really perfect for this setting, because in it you have a brain just floating, and the truth is from someone who studies neuroscience, everything that happens to us while we float is happening up here. And what's interesting about this picture is the brain is reflecting, but it's not the whole brain, because down here all you really see is this white region, which is the brain's stem, and I think this is the critical area of the brain that floating is impacting, and we'll talk more about this as I go on. But to begin, floating provides a window into the lowest reaches of our brain, a window that allows us to see the rhythm of our life, a window that allows us to literally feel the sentience, the flow of sentience, completely untethered from the external world. Now the rhythm of life I'll be discussing today is one of anxiety. It's a rhythm that constantly outpaces the beat of life itself, and importantly it's a rhythm that can be slowed down by floating. So let's give a brief background on what is anxiety. It's an integral part of human experience. All of us have it in some way, shape or form at some time in life. I think it's universal. It's helped humans adapt and survive in a rapidly changing world, and it's also a powerful motivating force. As my mom says, if it wasn't for the stress of a pending deadline, we would never get any work done. And for me this is definitely true. Procrastination leads to anxiety and stress, and that inevitably leads to you getting stuff done. Unfortunately our society is in the midst of an anxiety epidemic. Let me give you some statistics. It's the most common psychiatric condition. It's actually twice as common as depression. I didn't know that when I first got into studying anxiety, but it really is quite prevalent. It's twice as common in women than in men. About 40 million people in America are estimated to have an anxiety disorder. And over the course of life, about 25% of the population is going to have an anxiety disorder at some point in time. That's a large chunk of our population. Now there's a whole spectrum of anxiety conditions. There's generalized anxiety, social anxiety, post-traumatic stress, obsessive-compulsive disorder, specific phobias. Not on this list is panic disorder. I accidentally left it off, but curiously I think panic is probably the one anxiety disorder that could most easily be treated with floating. Now what's the difference between normal and pathological anxiety? I think there is a very big difference. In pathological cases of anxiety, you're going to have a persistent state of distress that lasts for many months. It's not just a matter of hours or even days or weeks. We're talking months. On top of that, it causes significant impairment in functioning. You're going to have difficulty at work. You're going to have difficulty with relationships. Just to show you how debilitating it is, I had some patients who I've treated who never left their house for months at a time. It was that severe. And it's not uncommon to hear stories of patients suffering for many years and sometimes even decades before receiving treatment. And in fact, only a third of patients actually do receive treatment. A story that really resonated with me is when I was at the VA hospital in San Diego treating patients with anxiety, I had a World War II veteran who had PTSD. And he was in his 80s, and he had only been diagnosed with it three years before. But it turned out he'd had it for the better part of six decades. He was having nightmares every night, panic attacks during the day. And the one thing that kept him going is he was a workaholic his whole life. And it wasn't until he retired where the symptoms really came to the forefront. So this is a condition that is quite ubiquitous. You see it amongst a large portion of our population, and it's growing. And this is the part that's so perplexing to me. You look at these statistics and you say to yourself, how, why? Why are we filled with anxiety? We're living in a place that most of us have all of our survival needs met. Think about it, we're born, we have a house to live in, a bed to sleep in at night, food at next door, we just go to a grocery store. When you compare the adversity we have to face to say our ancestors from thousands of years ago, it doesn't compare. Yet, we're filled with anxiety. So this is a conundrum that I think could be partially explained by the fact that our society has changed so much, we're constantly connected. This 24-7 connectivity is actually causing us harm, I think. And we're not quite realizing yet how much harm, but I think some of these statistics are giving us a preview. So one of the things that immediately came to my mind about floating is what a way to disconnect. And I think this is going to be a big portion of its effect with anxiety. Now, what is anxiety? Let me give you my general preview about what I think it is. It's a future state experienced in the present moment. Or to rephrase, anxiety transforms the present moment into an anticipated future. I've had many patients who will tell me that they're sitting in bed at night. And they start thinking about something they have to do the next day. And their brain starts spinning, and the next thing you know, they can't go to sleep at night. Yet, if you look at the signals that are coming in through their body, they're warm, they're under a blanket, they had a nice meal before bed. They should be in a state of calm, but yet they're feeling like they're about to be attacked by a saber-tooth tiger. So really, anxiety is about a future state. This is an important aspect of it. It hijacks the verbal mind, creating racing thoughts and endless worry. It induces physiological stress and arousal in the body. And this is a vicious cycle that could lead to permanent homeostatic disturbance. Now, what do I mean by that? Okay, so we experienced some stress and anxiety. It goes up. We have regulation that goes on in our brain that immediately tries to calm it down. It calms back down, and then all of a sudden, a minute or two later, something else comes up, and then you get stressed out again, and your heart starts beating, and your blood pressure goes up. And then it has to come calming down once again. If you keep doing this, all that regulation takes a lot of energy, and it tires the brain out. And so there's a process called allostasis that actually shifts your baseline from one of calm and relaxation to one of anxiety. And so instead of having this come down period, now you're in a perpetual state of anxiety. And finally, anxiety drives compulsive action in a futile effort to resolve this homeostatic disturbance. Keep in mind the need for control both over yourself but also your environment is a fundamental feature of patients who have anxiety disorder. And this is often manifested in these compulsive behaviors. So just taking a look at this list, I see a number of areas where flotation could help. Starting with this, anxiety being a future state. When you're in a float tank, you're immersed in the present moment. It hijacks the verbal mind. If you could teach yourself in a float tank to focus on the body in some way, shape, or form, you're not going to be in the verbal mind shatter. And this is an important property that I think helps treat anxiety. It also induces physiological stress and arousal, and as I'll show you, this is one of the most replicated findings in the literature. When you're in a float tank, signs of stress and arousal come down to some of their lowest points. And finally, it drives compulsive action. If you're staying still in a float tank, it's the exact opposite. So I think there are a number of ways that floating could help anxiety, and it could definitely help in all four of these domains. The one domain I'm not sure about yet is that when you have all these symptoms of anxiety, it culminates in behavioral avoidance. And this is probably the feature that binds together all of those different anxiety disorders. And when you're avoiding life, you're missing out on opportunity. So now that we have a little background on anxiety, let's get into the brain. This is the cortex. Much of our cortex is dedicated to processing and making sense of the external world. And coordinating all of this activity is the thalamus that Dr. Bruno spoke about earlier. But when I first took a look at this brain, after I got out of my first float session, I started thinking, what happened in there? What was going on neurologically speaking while you're in a float tank? And I think quite a bit actually. First of all, you have a large swath of brain tissue dedicated to processing vision. In fact, this whole area back here has tons of different detailed visual maps of our world. And when you're floating, all this input's gone. Likewise, if you have a good float tank and you don't have any residual sounds coming in from the outside, your auditory cortex in this region is also going to receive very little input. Your tactile sensation processed in the somatosensory strip is going to be at a minimum. On top of that, a very unique aspect is you are floating. And all the gravitational forces that you're having to counteract every moment of the day are basically taken care of by the bed of water that you're floating in. And so your brain's proprioceptive systems, kind of embedded deep inside the parietal lobe and then also up here. And then also down here in the cerebellum, are going to basically have their work taken care of by the water itself. Assuming that you're not moving in the tank, a large chunk of the frontal cortex, which is really dedicated to motor movement, is also going to be quite calm. And assuming you're not speaking, the brain's main speech areas are also going to be calm. Now this doesn't even include the fact that if you have a very nicely regulated temperature in the tank, your skin temperature is going to fuse with the outer world. And we have tons of thermoregulatory regions in the brain and also thermosensation regions in the brain that are going to get a relax finally, because you don't have to constantly adjust temperature throughout the day. So when you're in a float tank, those regions will also become quite quiet. Now just taking a look at this, it doesn't take a brain scientist to realize that's a lot of cortical real estate. Most neuroscientists study the cortex as their main area. I think they're missing out on a huge portion of our consciousness. And floating, in fact, gets rid of this whole layer pretty much. There's just a few regions right here and right in here that I'm not exactly sure are being directly impacted by the lack of external input. So here's the external world. How do you take something from the external world and translate it to your internal world? Now, how does a little spider that's crawling across the floor cause you to jump? It's just a little spider that's light reflects into your visual cortex. And you see this shape of eight little legs and then all of a sudden you're back. Well, it turns out we have a whole set of brain regions called the limbic system that's really important for translating external information into your internal world. I've tried to highlight some of them here. What you see is you have the cingulate gyrus that wraps around into the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and then wraps backwards into the hippocampal area and then finally the amygdala and you could kind of see the amygdala right there. These regions are critical for forming memories and associations, okay? They take these memories and associations from the past and they make predictions about the future. And so these regions by consequence are going to be very important for anxiety. They're very important for triggering future-oriented states. But one thing that's interesting that I discovered in my dissertation is these aren't the brain's causal source for emotion and feeling. Even though most textbooks will tell you, oh, it's the limbic system, that's emotion and feeling. No, what these regions are doing is they're taking information from our environment and trying to translate it into an impact on our body. They're trying to make a prediction about a future state. The causal source of emotion and feeling in the brain happens here in the internal world. Everything from pain to our entire cardiovascular system to our gastrointestinal system to our immune system gets processed up into the brainstem as its first order of business. It then goes through the thalamus and then translates into a map right here in this region called the insular cortex. This is the areas of our brain responsible for representing our internal world of the body. They're the most critical regions. Now one of my most proud moments in graduate school is when I convinced one of my mentors, Antonio Demasio, that it's not actually the insular cortex that's critical for emotion and feeling. I studied a lot of patients who had damage to this region and it turns out they still could feel. They didn't lose sentience or awareness of their own emotional state. As Dr. Bruno showed you earlier, you could have anencephalic children who are entirely missing their cortex and all they really have is the brainstem and hypothalamus and just with the brainstem and hypothalamus you could show basic emotional responses and likely feeling as well. This is also something that you don't see in textbooks. Oftentimes textbooks will say that the brainstem is important for basic life functions but it's not just basic life functions. It's critical for forming the foundation of our consciousness. One way I like to look at this is it's not that this is the area of the brain that's involved in unconscious processing. It's at its under consciousness. When you're floating this area of the brainstem is disentangled from the whole cortex that's been shut down. So it's really under consciousness. It's not unconscious and this is where sentience begins and ends. It forms the backdrop of our entire life. All of our basic life processing happens here but all of the foundation of our consciousness does as well. So what's been done on floating and anxiety? There's quite a bit of research to show that you could have a significant reduction in stress and anxiety when measured from pre-to-post-float. As you all know in this room through direct experience, floating induces profound relaxation. But importantly, all these studies that I've cited here were mainly done in healthy people. People who aren't suffering from an anxiety disorder. So we know that floating actually reduces anxiety and people who generally don't have a very high level of it to begin with but it still causes a reduction. A meta-analysis of 27 studies showed a large overall effect size for stress reduction. And that's important so it's not just a little bit of stress reduction that's happening in a float session. It's quite a bit. There's been a number of studies to show a decrease in blood pressure as Dr. Fine talked about yesterday and also decreases in heart rate. And finally, there's been some studies showing a decrease in cortisol and other stress hormones. So this is all very promising. When you look at this, this is a large body of work. There's quite a bit of replication happening. And it does suggest that going into a float tank will reduce anxiety when you're just a healthy, non-anxious person to begin with. What happens if you have some issues of anxiety? So there's a study done in 2006 that showed decreased stress and anxiety, about a 30% overall reduction following 12 float sessions that was maintained for four months. And this was done in 35 patients who had what they called stress-related pain and burnout depression. So once again, not exactly anxiety disorder but definitely issues related to anxiety. Interestingly, there are no sex differences and no significant improvement with additional sessions as well. Another study showed that after only seven float sessions on average, patients who had generalized anxiety disorder reported significant improvement in symptoms when assessed about seven months later. This was a rather poorly controlled study. The patients were a rather heterogeneous group, but nevertheless, some indication that this should work even in patients who have anxiety disorder. And then another interesting study that I read about in one of Dr. Sudfeld's papers, I haven't been able to track down the actual paper itself, so maybe someone could send it to me. But between one to six float sessions, we're able to cure bouts of flying phobia in four pilots. Dr. Sudfeld has some studies in chamber rest showing that that's quite effective for helping with snake phobia, but they've never been able to replicate it or as far as I know they haven't tried to replicate it in flotation rest. So that's it. In my search of the literature, reading through all the studies I could find, this is all I was able to come up with in terms of issues directly related to anxiety type disorder. If somebody else out there knows of other studies, please send them to me. You could see me afterwards in my emails, Jay Fine at Caltech.edu, and I'd love to learn more about it. Likewise, all of you in the audience probably have anecdotes of people you know who suffer from anxiety, who've benefited from floating, and maybe some of you as well. Please let me know those stories because I'd like to hear these anecdotes as well. When I scoured the literature, this is really all I could find, so there really hasn't been much done on it. So I'd like to spend a little bit of time talking about some of my ideas for future research on how I could use flotation tanks to help treat anxiety. I think first and foremost, the last slide should convince you we have a desperate need to do randomized controlled trials. This is the sort of experimental design that we're going to need to prove to the medical industry that flotation is an effective treatment for anxiety. If you want doctors to be prescribing this to their patients, or psychiatrists or psychologists to be using this to treat patients, this is step number one. So one of my first goals is I'd like to start setting up some of these RCTs as they call them with anxiety disordered patients. Now when I was looking through the flotation literature, I kind of realized that there's not much control about what happens inside the tank. It's kind of like fight club. First rule of fight club, there is no rules. So people who just take a patient who has anxiety and say, oh, go into the tank, see what happens. And I think this is good. It does have its virtue, and it could be helpful without any instruction whatsoever. But I think if we're going to seriously consider creating a treatment for anxiety, we have to structure it. There has to be boundaries from which people can explore their inner world. And one area that I think could be structured is we could look at the specific effect of meditation while inside the tank. You could give people specific instructions to attend to their breath. You could give people specific instructions to be non-reactionary. And I think these two ingredients, attending to the breath and being non-reactionary while inside the tank, are going to be critical for helping patients with anxiety. Oftentimes when you're in a deep meditative state, the time you feel the most profound sense of self is when you're completely still and your awareness is completely captured by the sensation of the breath. And this is quite the opposite of anxiety, which is a state where your attention is immersed in the verbal chatter of your mind and your behavior is compulsive and reactionary. So you could see that with these specific instructions going into the tank, it could be rather beneficial for someone who actually suffers from anxiety. Something that Dr. Borey spoke about yesterday is combining flotation tank with some other pre-existing treatment. Something that I'm particularly interested in is exposure therapy. This is one of the most effective treatments for anxiety disorder, and I think you could really combine it in an effective manner using the flotation tank. And then finally, I think there's the possibility for collaboration. I mean, one of the things I've been quite touched by is how open-minded everyone is here. Apart from the research field, most people keep their doors closed. They don't like to talk about their studies. Collaboration is a lot more difficult, but I think with this mentality, we could really advance our research. The sheer number of new float centers means we're going to have a whole slew of patients. And when you think about the fact that 25% of people at some point or another are going to suffer from a full-blown anxiety disorder, that means a lot of patients coming to you may have anxiety disorder. So we should definitely start a discussion about ways that we could collaborate and foster this research. Truth is, this is just the tip of the iceberg. I think we're at the beginning of a resurgence in floating. I think we're at the beginning of a resurgence in floating research. And I hope to see it continue. Over the relatively brief history of humanity, there have only been a handful of individuals who really got it. People who understood the ubiquitous nature of anxiety and suffering, but who also understood that internal peace and happiness is within everyone's reach. In 483 BC, some historians claim that Buddha's last words to his disciples before he passed away was, be a light unto yourself. The ancient Greeks were famous for the phrase, know thyself. Although I would argue that it wasn't Plato or Aristotle or Socrates who actually understood the meaning of this phrase, but instead it was a philosopher by the name of Epicurus. He created what's known as Epicurianism, which is a philosophy really focused on removing anxiety from life. Quite revolutionary for that time period. One of my favorite books is Voltaire's Candide. This is a young man who tries to find the meaning of life by exploring the world. And after all of his adventures and trials and tribulations, he reaches a conclusion at the very end that the meaning of life is we must cultivate our garden. And then most recently the late Michael Hutchison, who in an interview in 2002 said, you're in a place where there's no inside and no outside, no center and no edge, no past and no future just now. This space is essentially formless, limitless. He called it pure consciousness. So in conclusion to paraphrase Buddha, Epicurus, Voltaire and Michael Hutchison, I would say that flotation tanks shine a light onto thyself so that one can better know thyself and thus tend to the needs of thyself, a process that will ultimately allow any willing participant to access pure consciousness. And that my fellow floaters is the exact opposite of anxiety. Thank you.