 So let's begin inside the brain. You may not realize this, but in your head, your brain is actually floating in a warm bath of cerebral spinal fluid. And the outside surface of our brain, the cortical surface, is really responsible for mapping and making sense of the world outside. And so if you're in a well-calibrated float tank, not a single photon of light should be entering your brain, which means the entire posterior sector of the brain that's responsible for processing and creating our visual world suddenly doesn't have information coming in. Likewise, the area of the brain responsible for hearing and auditory processing shouldn't hear any outside sounds, except maybe the internal workings of the own body. And so much of what floating is is about the body. A large part of our parietal cortex and cerebellum is responsible for creating a sense of our body in space. But when you're floating, there is no space. It's limitless. And likewise, in a well-calibrated float environment, you lose sense of tactile sensation because the temperature is so well-calibrated. The air and the body and the water all match perfectly. And so you lose track of where the body begins and where it ends. Likewise, the areas of the brain responsible for taste and smell also aren't receiving any stimulation. So much of our lives is about movement and speech. The frontal cortex is really about that aspect. And floating is one of the few moments in life where we're not fidgeting, where we're not speaking and moving and incessantly and compulsively engaging in the world. We're just laying still. And so this entire swath of the frontal cortex responsible for planning and executing movements suddenly doesn't have to activate. It goes into a state of quiescence. And let's not forget the brain is not living in a vacuum. The tail of the brain, the spinal cord, also gets a chance to take a respite. Think about it, every moment of the day this poor spinal cord is having to face gravity. And then suddenly that's gone too. So when I first thought about floating a little over six years ago, as a neuroscientist I thought, my goodness, what a profound intervention for the nervous system. A nervous system that in modern society is being inundated with stimulation. Suddenly finds itself in this most unusual of circumstances. And I thought to myself, boy, all these patients I'm seeing every day with severe anxiety, with severe stress, whose nervous systems are on the fray, hyper vigilant, hyper aware all the time, what would happen in this environment? What would that do for their nervous system? And so 2013, my first float conference, I had an incredible meeting with Colin Stanwell Smith, really a prolific engineer in his own right. But he designs float pools, custom designs float pools. And I came to him in that 2013 conference and I said, Colin, make me a float pool that will do all this, but will allow somebody with severe anxiety or post-traumatic stress to actually go into it. And so Colin looked at me, he handed me a card, he shook my hand and he said, let's do it. And that's exactly what he did. This is an open circular pool. The room itself is soundproof, light proof, temperature controlled, humidity controlled. You have complete control over the lights. He created an infrared wave detection system. So if the person wants the light on, they could be floating anywhere and they just wave their arm. And suddenly when I would bring patients with severe anxiety stress into my float clinic, patients who were very resistant to this idea may be very scared and hesitant, may be very anxious. They would see this pool and immediately say, oh, I could do that. And it made me realize that this could be a clinical tool, a clinical flotation tool. And Colin and I have been talking about this now for the better part of five years and float away itself is now actually moving towards a clinical model where they're gonna be designing open float rooms for hospitals, for medical care settings. So patients can now access something that they were scared to do prior. So with this in hand, we decided to put it to a test. Let's see if this actually helps the patients, if it helps their nervous system, recalibrate. And the basic idea is it should really create a reset. One hour of floating in this pool should provide that nervous system that's on edge in a constant and chronic state of anxiety and stress to reset. So let's put that to the test because when I arrived here five years ago, no one had actually studied this in these patients. So we created a randomized controlled trial. We had 37 patients across the whole spectrum of anxiety, many with comorbid depression. And we also had a group of healthy controls. And they were randomized to either do what we called Earth, which is a fancy way of saying they watched BBC Earth. Kind of a neutral documentary, very pleasant nature scenes, something people oftentimes do to relax, right? Or they're randomized to float in the pool for the same amount of time, 90 minutes. Every patient did both. And a week later, they came back and crossed over to the other condition. And during the float and during the Earth condition, we were measuring things. This was not trivial. It took the better part of three years and tons of equipment, broken, to finally figure out how to do this. But we figured out how to actually measure EEG brain waves during floating. And I'm so excited because later today, Dr. Ricardo Gildecosta is going to present some of that data. We also figured out how to measure EKG and blood pressure while somebody is floating. And Dr. Tom Fine is going to be here tomorrow actually presenting those data sets. And then before and after each of these conditions, we were taking blood samples. And a little bit later, you're going to actually hear the results of the inflammation changes that are happening pre and post float from flux. So much to be learned from this particular study. The first thing I wanted to see though is, let's take this group of very severely impaired patients, patients who are unemployed because of their anxiety. Patients who couldn't face the world because of their post traumatic stress. And let's see if floating actually provides some degree of benefit above and beyond what sort of a more simple form of relaxation like the earth condition. This is what we found. Serenity and relaxation significantly increase. Muscle tension and state anxiety significantly decrease. And much more than the earth condition as you might expect. But this was important because these are patients, right? This is the anti-anxiety effect of floating. It's a yin and a yang, right? You don't just reduce the anxiety, but you get this tremendous uplift of mood. The serenity piece is so important. Let's not forget, we're not just reducing symptoms of mental illness here. We're enhancing mental wellness. And I think this is a very important demonstration of that. And the other aspect, which psychiatry and psychology, I have to say, has completely missed. Is look what the largest change downward is. Muscle tension. Think how much of our stress and our anxiety is being held unconsciously within the muscles of our body. And that seems to be what floating is reducing above and beyond anything else. And when we asked patients where they were feeling that, we gave them these little somatomaps and we had them trace, say, where did you feel your muscle tension before the film and after. And you could see most people are holding their muscle tension right around the spinal cord, right? All those muscles in the back, trying to account for the forces of gravity. And then even after the film and during the film, if they're sitting down watching it, yeah, they feel a little bit in the butt, you could see that. Prefloat, it was the same thing. That sort of upper and lower back right along the spinal cord. But during the float, this is what the patients reported. So all of that tension in the back, the upper back and the lower back, just disintegrated during the float. Interestingly, this was only their second float. And a lot of people in their first few floats do complain of some tension in their neck. And sure enough, we did see that. My guess is by float three or four, that would dissipate as well. So clearly, one of the active ingredients of floating is its removing tension in the body. And it's not just the skeletal muscles of the outer body, but embedded within us, deep in the vasculature of our body, are smooth muscles. What's happening to those muscles when somebody floats? Well, we actually could measure that objectively with blood pressure. And so if it's removing outer tension, what about inner tension? Take a look at this. That's diastolic blood pressure over the course of this 90-minute session. At baseline time zero, everyone's starting at around the same. By about 10 minutes into the float, even five minutes into the float, you've dropped 10 points in diastolic blood pressure. That's a tremendous drop. By the way, those shades of red and blue are 95% confidence intervals. These aren't subtle effects. When you study things like physiology, you rarely see effects this large. And it was immediate and rapid and it lasted the entire float. On average, a 10 to 15 point drop in diastolic blood pressure. For every single person we've tested so far, it seems to be almost a reflexive response of being in the water. And tomorrow, Tom Fine is gonna talk about this in terms of perhaps vasodilation. All of those blood vessels are dilating because of this warm bath. It wasn't just blood pressure, though. We looked at EKG, heart rate variability. And we see a pattern, but in the opposite way. Heart rate variability improves during the float. And for those who don't know what heart rate variability is, tomorrow, Tom is gonna give you a very long explanation of it. But what I could tell you is, high frequency heart rate variability is about as pure of an indicator as you're going to get for the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the part of our autonomic nervous system that's really responsible for relaxation. And sure enough, right away, you see floating give you a big boost in high frequency heart rate variability, suggesting that we're getting a very strong relaxation response. And once again, those are 95% confidence intervals. These were highly significant effects. Another thing we did with this study is we wanted to know how long these effects were lasting. It's one of the most commonly asked questions I get. Doctor, I go in there, I float, I feel good for an hour, is it gone? And I said, well, let me look in the literature. And I looked in the literature. And there hasn't been a single study looking at how long do the effects of a float last after it's over? It's purely anecdotal. So we set people home with a smartphone and essentially ping them every so often after their float for that same day and then the entire next day. For about 32 hours, we were pinging their smartphone asking how they're feeling. And this is what we found. So from baseline to immediately post float time zero, you see this drop in stress and anxiety. You continue to see it at two, eight, and even 20 hours post float. Once again, 95% confidence intervals. These are highly significant effects, even at 20 hours. This is the next day the person's gone home, they've gone to sleep, they've woken up, they're still feeling reductions in stress and anxiety the next day. By about 26 to 32 hours, it starts getting back to baseline. Same thing with serenity. In fact, even larger distance between the control condition and serenity. Think about this. These people came in miserable. I witnessed this because I was talking to them before and after their float. They were not happy people. Yet one hour of lying in that pool created serenity that lasted an entire day. That is not something to write home as, oh, no big deal. Most of these patients go home with a prescription pad, right? Something like Xanax or Ativan, a benzodiazepine. If you take one of those, you're gonna start feeling stress and anxiety again four to eight hours later. Not 20 hours, four to eight hours. So we're outlasting the classic benzodiazepines by two-fold if you're still feeling some of these anti-anxiety and serenity effects 20 hours later. That's incredible to me, you guys. So clearly this notion of a reset has some legs. The data is supporting it. One hour in a simple intervention like this could take a stressed and anxious nervous system and at least reset it for a day. That's impressive if you could reduce suffering in that reliable of a manner. How is it happening? Think about this, you're just going in a pool. I take showers all the time. I don't feel the effect of a shower 20 hours later. You know, I've got a massages even. That feels good for the day, but usually the next day I don't feel it still. Why is there a residue from this experience? It really got me thinking hard. And it got me thinking about what else is coming into the brain? If you reduce all of this, is anything being enhanced? And this is what I think is the most important part of floating actually, interoception. The brain's ability to sense the internal world of the body. This is the signal that's being heightened and amplified during a float. And this is why last year I told you guys, stop calling floating sensory deprivation because now we have data to show, in fact, this is a form of sensory enhancement, but of the internal world. Take a look at the somatomap tracings of where people felt their heartbeat pre-float and then during the float. My goodness, that looks like hurricane Irma over the heart. People are feeling it all over. They're hearing it in their ears. They're feeling it in different parts of their head. The heartbeat becomes a key part of the float experience, right? When you ask people to rate how intense did they feel their heartbeat or their breath? They felt it significantly more intensely than in the control condition. And likewise, they were paying attention to it too. We're gonna talk about that in a second, but keep in mind, I didn't give them any instructions before the float to pay attention to their breath or pay attention to their heartbeat. I didn't even tell them they would feel their breath or heartbeat. This was just naturally induced by the float environment. We gave them the multidimensional assessment of interoceptive awareness. And sure enough, attention regulation and self-regulation were significantly enhanced during the float. Attention regulation is the ability to sustain and control attention to body sensations. So for example, one of the questions says, I could pay attention to my breath without being distracted by things happening around me. Self-regulation, the ability to regulate the stress by attention to body sensations. When I was caught up in thoughts, I could calm my mind by focusing on my body and breathing. Boy, what does that sound like? That sounds like meditation. So after each of these floats, I interviewed the patients. Many of these patients have never meditated in the day in their life. They had no idea. Some of the patients had tried meditating and they failed. In fact, there's been several meta-analyses published over the past two years showing when you try to teach anxious patients, people with full-blown disorders, how to meditate, how to be mindful. The effects are very small. It's not clicking. Take a look at what our patients were saying about this. Here's one patient who had tried meditating before. Meditation is no fun. It's not easy and I don't wanna do it. But that was so much easier. It was much easier because you're perfectly relaxed. You're not sitting there going, do I gotta sit? Do I gotta lay down? Like when you try to meditate a lot of times, it's kind of like, oh my, I mean, I can't even for a minute meditate. Well, and all that is truthfully is just trying to focus, to still your mind and focus on your breath and that kind of thing. Way easier in there. Subject 15, yeah, even on the survey, I didn't really know how to explain it. I really felt I was one with my heartbeat and I could hear it, but it wasn't like the anxiety kind of experience is when I'm having an anxiety or panic attack. So it wasn't a negative thing. It was a very in tune with myself kind of feeling. It's a lot different than anxiety and depression. Subject 24, having the level of anxiety that I have, sometimes I don't have to be floating in a tank of quietness to feel my heartbeat, but it wasn't a panic feeling. It wasn't like noticing that my heart was racing kind of panic. It was just there, just aware of it. And then finally, subject 30, in there just being so much more body aware is very different for me. The only time I usually notice my heart as much as when I have very high anxiety. Matter of fact, I've been to the hospital a few times in the past thinking I was having a heart attack when it was really just anxiety. During the float, I would notice my body some. I could feel my body, but I felt so relaxed. It was almost like at times, my body was one with the water. I could work with these patients. I remember being at the VA hospital, working with veterans who had pretty severe PTSD and trying to teach them how to meditate to just focus on their breath for a second. And I would do this week after week after week and it just wasn't clicking. Their mind, their nervous system wouldn't allow it to occur. Yet, one hour in this pool without any training or instruction in mindfulness, mind you, and they're accessing the state spontaneously. That is incredible to me. And I think this is an aspect of floating we should be talking about. It's so conducive for training and teaching people experientially how to access mindful states. And this is no longer just theoretical. The data I just showed you were published last month in biological psychiatry. And a few months before that, we had another study come out in plus one, the public library science. And all of these studies could be freely downloaded and read by you guys on a brand new website that we're launching just for this conference, clinicalflotation.com. It's not just these studies, you guys. I put together a repository of every peer reviewed float study I could find that dealt with clinical issues. Going back to the 1960s with Jay Shirley, into the 1970s and 80s with Tom Fine and John Turner and others, all the way up until present day with these papers. It's all there on the website. Feel free to use it. It's a resource for you. If you have clinicians or medical providers or researchers coming into your float center and they ask you, what do we know about the science behind floating? You don't have to remember any answers. Just send them there. It's all on it. And so I'm not gonna get into this second study, the plus one paper, because last year's conference, I spent a lot of time talking about it, but I just wanna highlight a few points from this other study. The first point is we studied 50 patients across the whole spectrum of anxiety. We had PTSD, we had generalized anxiety, we had social anxiety, we had panic disorder, we had agoraphobia. And here's what the pre and post anxiety ratings look like in that entire group of 50 patients. We were 50 for 50 in terms of anxiety reduction. And in the world of clinical research, when it comes to psychiatric and psychological conditions, I have not seen something that works that reliably. And the more severe your anxiety, the greater the decrease. It didn't matter what your condition was. It didn't matter what gender. It didn't even matter if you were taking medications. The anxiety reduction was a large effect irrespective. When you compare the whole group's level of anxiety reduction on the Spielberger state anxiety inventory, you see this large baseline difference between the anxious people in another group of 30 healthy, naive floaters. But look at post float. Look at where the anxious patient's anxiety level is going. It's not just a small reduction, but it's actually going down into healthy, normative levels. That was another, I think, very important finding of that study. And these were experienced patients. We asked them, tell us all the different things you've tried in life to help you reduce stress and anxiety and relax. Almost three quarters of the sample had tried anti-anxiety medications. Many had tried other techniques, including meditation. A lot of these patients, you would call them treatment resistant because they tried two, three, four, five different things and it just wasn't working. After the float, we asked every patient, how did the relaxation you experienced during and after today's float session compare to the other relaxation techniques you've tried? You could either say, I experienced more relaxation with floating than any other technique I've tried. Floating was equally as good as the other techniques I've tried, or I experienced more relaxation with the other techniques. And here's what those 50 patients said. This is a highly experienced sample of people who are suffering and not getting better with the currently available therapies and modalities. And one hour in the float pool gave them more relaxation than they'd ever felt in their entire lives. That's incredible. So it got me thinking, how is this working? There must be some theoretical construct that could help explain it. And last year I started talking about Joseph Wolpe's theory of reciprocal inhibition. If a response antagonistic to anxiety can be made to occur in the presence of anxiety-evoking stimuli so that it's accompanied by a complete or partial suppression of the anxiety responses. The bond between these stimuli and the anxiety responses will be weakened. Joseph Wolpe had never heard of a float tank and he's no longer around. But if he knew what floating was doing, I think he would say we met the requirements almost perfectly for that first sentence. If a response antagonistic to anxiety can be made to occur. Boy, talk about an antagonistic relaxation response. Try being anxious when your blood pressure is down by 10 points, your heart rate variability is up, your muscle tension is totally evaporated. Yet, what are these anxious patients reporting that they feel during the float? Their heartbeat, their breath, the very sensations that they often feel when they're anxious. There's a strange paradox, right? You expose somebody with anxiety to the very sensations that are linked to anxiety, but yet in the context of relaxation, a new association may be formed. This could have real-life implications, you guys, that go way beyond the 20 hours that we're seeing. This could go into the real world. This could transcend the float tank, right? And we're already starting to see anecdotal evidence of this. So let me give you an example. I have a person who floats in my clinic regularly. She had terrible anxiety when it came to giving speeches. Anyone felt that, your heart palpitating when you're in front of a crowd? She said ever since she's been floating, she's not bothered by this anymore, and she could public speak pretty much anywhere. It's totally changed that for her, and it was just by this mechanism. Could you guys think of another instance in life that might induce a lot of arousal where you feel your heartbeat pounding away, yet if you let that feeling get in the way, you'll utterly fail? Think about a last second situation where the adrenaline's pumping, your heart is palpitating, everything's on the line, everyone's looking at you, people are in your face, and you need to focus with precision to execute. And that's what this guy, Steph Curry, does so well. Another thing he does well is he floats. There's been commercials about this, there's been interviews, he regularly floats, and it's not just for the relaxation benefits. It's because when he's on the line and somebody's in his face, look at him. That guy is cool as a cucumber. And he scores more often than not and wins the game and the championship as his team has done many a times now, ever since they started floating. They're not the only team, though. The Chicago Cubs in 2016 won the World Series, the first World Series for the Cubs in 108 years. And that year of 2016, they so happened to be the first major league baseball team to put float tanks in their locker room. How about the New England Patriots? They started floating before any other sport teams. Tom Brady has a float tank in his house. If you guys remember the 2016 Super Bowl, this was one of the greatest games in the history of Super Bowls. And it was in Houston, so obviously they don't have access to their float tank in the locker room. So they started floating around the city of Houston before the Super Bowl. And the Patriots come out and I'm kind of excited, boy, could they win this game? And third quarter comes around and they're getting crushed, 28 to three. And I'm thinking to myself, boy, maybe they shouldn't have floated right before the game. They're too relaxed, come on, you guys. But then they begin in that third quarter to have a 31 point comeback, the largest comeback in Super Bowl history. And right at the height of that comeback, when they're down by eight points, Tom Brady throws a pass to Julian Edelman that is just impossible to catch. And if they don't make this, they may not win the game. And Julian Edelman was one of the biggest floaters on the team. He was actually interviewed by ESPN the week before saying he was doing regular floats before the Super Bowl. And suddenly this pass comes and goes down in history. And one of the greatest catches in the history of the game. Three guys, pummeling him, trying to get the ball and somehow, someway, he could zero in and focus in and make the catch under all of that pressure. Is floating helping him? Is his ability to cope with that adrenaline pumping? Helping him in these little situations that make or break an entire championship game? That's my sense. And you're gonna continue to see this because I have inside information that there's now over 30 professional sport teams with float tanks in their locker room. So let's wrap up. Let's wrap up with Joseph Wolpe's theory of reciprocal inhibition and what we know and what we don't know. The first hypothesis is that floating will reflexively shift the nervous system into a physiologically quiescent state, one that's antagonistic to anxiety. And I showed you today evidence of reduced muscle tension, lowered blood pressure, improved heart rate variability, and decreased exposure to all external triggers of stress and anxiety. Hypothesis two, floating will enhance cardiorespiratory sensations, the very sensations that have been associated over the course of life with the experience of anxiety. And I showed you data today, indeed they were enhancing these sensations. Hypothesis three, through a process of reciprocal inhibition, floating will suppress anxiety responses leading to an acute reduction in the experience of anxiety. We were 50 to 50, 50 for 50. Everyone's anxiety was coming down. So these first three hypotheses, we now have strong support with some of the data we've been collecting. But there's a fourth hypothesis that Wolpe's theory articulates and it may be the most important one. Over time and with repeated exposure, floating will lead to sustained reductions and anxiety sensitivity, your sensitivity for those internal sensations like your heartbeat and your breath. And the bond between cardiorespiratory sensations and the experience of anxiety will be weakened and a competing association will be formed, one that links the experience of cardiorespiratory sensations with relaxation instead of anxiety. This hypothesis, if true, is going to explain why floating may have effects that last longer than 20 hours, that transcend into the real world, into those fourth quarter situations or public speaking or whatever the patients want to do to engage in life. And this is the hypothesis that the only way to know if it's true is to perform a longitudinal randomized controlled trial where patients float multiple times and then you follow them for months or even years. While I'm pleased to announce you guys, I spoke to the National Institute of Health yesterday and they told me and they think they're going to fund the first NIH Float Grant to study this exact question. So five, six years ago when I first arrived at the Float Conference, this was just a dream. It's just an idea and now we're finally getting going. We're finally going to get the test what I think is the most important hypothesis of them all. And then the neat part is if this is true, it's not just going to help people with anxiety. Floating could help a lot of people cope better and adventure out beyond their limits. In fact, I think floating could help the entire human species transcend to even greater heights and accomplishments where there are no limits, not even the sky above. Thank you guys.