 A lot of what people do is want to come in and talk and to share. Now words are extremely powerful and really a lot can happen from being well heard or being able to communicate, but words can only go so deep. And why the float experience is so powerful is we go below the cortex, we really go to these deeper subcortical areas of experience. Now in the old days it was thought that the brain was a black box, now we go into the black box. Really I'm going to share kind of a brain based approach, not because it's the only way to look at our existence and our consciousness, but it's a powerfully useful one in that even back the ancients, Hippocrates talked about how really the brain was an organ of so much of our experience. And I love Emily Dickinson's poem, the brain is wider than the sky for put them side by side the one the other will contain with ease and you beside. And now as a doctor Feinstein's describing we have access to FMRIs and technology that we can start to go into that black box and start to understand what's going on in the brain in ways we've never had before. And with this we're having an emergence of new technologies with a deeper understanding of our nervous system and of our physiology where with the onslaught of sensory overwhelm with all the amazing things our material world and sensory world can bring us we're realizing that it can often be stressful when we get exposed with too many sensory experiences and thus the interest I think the growing interest into going into the void into experiences that are not so sensory dependent. There's also an emergence of a variety of different therapies from you know tapping techniques to eye position brain spotting techniques to the use of color to the use of sound to the use of eye different patterns of eye movements that are really largely sensory based and for people who are working to eliminate suffering these these sensory based modalities really supercharge the psychological and deep work that we can do. And it comes down to I think one of the fundamental areas is any change of sensory inputs modifies a slamic function for those who heard my talk last year I'm going to talk a little bit more about the thalamus because it is the center of the brain literally the thalamus is the center of our brain kind of the inner organizer orchestrators that takes in all of our sensory data whether it's what we hear what we see what we're tactilely feeling or even our position in space all of the senses with the exception of smell at least our physical senses go through the thalamus and then are reintegrated and sent out to other parts of our brain and researchers are talking about how as in the past the sensory the thalamus was only thought of as a sensory gating mechanism or a sensory directing mechanism that that actually plays such a central function and the reason I'm even bringing this up is it just tells you that senses light sound your position your sense of being in space your position in space go directly into the very center of your brain if you want to get in somebody's brain going through the senses or blocking the senses and allowing the person to experience more directly their experience themselves is one of the most profound ways that we can change a brain experience this this simply shows that within the thalamus on the right there there's a map there's a correlation between salamic nuclei and literally all the areas in the cerebral cortex and so the thalamus itself is a map of the brain within the brain so again the sensory input that comes in can really shift accessing all the range of the different areas of the cortex cerebral cortex and so we have a place where there's an integration of how we think how we feel how we sense how we experience that inner perception that interceptive perception of our heart rate and different bodily functions and muscles as well as how we relate to our external world all is very much connected to our thalamus I mean and one of the wall things is is that actually ten percent ten times more information from our cerebral cortex will come down from that outer thinking cap in our cerebral cortex and go to the thalamus versus the other way around so the thalamus is this great collector of our all of all that higher cognitive functioning and I don't know if I showed this last year but I was pleased to find in a recent neuro anatomy textbook for behavioral disorders and these are professors at Dartmouth Medical College they reviewed all these references over the last eight years you know looking at 40 journals to find even the primary source material anything they thought relevant to brain function related to behavioral and psychiatric disorders and they wrote a book to help people in the mental health profession understand it of all the things these guys know they only mention one area of the brain the thalamus is the only area of the brain that they devote a chapter to because they feel it relates so critically to to people's experience of wellness or being out of balance and and why the thalamus is so cool for us floaters is that's the sense that's the sensory connection that's the sensory gateway that's what allows the experience of whether we're tuning into kind of the outer world or tuning into ourselves that when we shift the amount of sensory input going in we start to change the thalamic rhythms that help to regulate our brain if you want to really go deeply into thalamic cortical rhythms this is a neuroscientist wrote this book who really does a really good job of it he talks about thalamic cortical dysrhythmias where if people are dealing with anxiety disorders or people are dealing with certain types of pain or depression or you know other types of challenges that oftentimes there's these thalamic cortical dysrhythmias these waves that tend to typically organize the brain in a balanced person but in somebody who is out of balance these rhythms are kind of out of balance and and so I really do believe in one of the areas of research I would love to see is if we could actually measure thalamic cortical rhythms which is possible and see if after the float experience people literally have a more balanced brainwave state not just during the dive not we know that brainwave slowed down when a person's in a sensory-free environment we know you go more into alpha and theta the slower creative brainwaves the relaxation brainwaves but when you come back out that beautiful experience that most people really cherish when they get out of a float is they see the world with new eyes things seem more colorful things seem clearer there's a settling effect there's almost like the lens has been cleaned and you're back into the world and you're experiencing it a little brighter a little more directly I think that's the tune up of the thalamic cortical rhythms as well as other things but that might be one area of research worth looking at now the topic that I'm going to be talking about is related to pain perception now for people for anybody who's suffered with chronic pain or acute pain you know that when you're in the midst of very strong pain very little matters your world can narrow down to such a strong degree that the pain can take over and and and there's a range I really think in the same way that there's so many flavors of pleasure so many different experiences of pleasure in the world there's an equal diverse amount of pain in the world meaning you can experience pains in so many different ways and so there's not a singular pain when we talk about pain pain is colored tinted by our emotions by our experiences by our previous histories by the people close to us or the people who aren't close to us that we want there in so many ways our experience of pain can be shifted and and so one of the interesting things is this was up you can see the author Linus who's that neuropsychologist who talks about thalamic cortical dysrhythmias they actually identified certain thalamic cortical dysrhythmias related to certain types of complex pain and other scientists are starting to detect brainwave patterns related to pain when a person's actually you know to be able to tell just by how the brain's operating when it's a person's in pain or not and again you know I'm I'm sharing here the reason I'm sharing this information is I think that it is nice to have some model perhaps or some way to to to think about why would going into a sensory reduced or you know sensory completely minimal environment why would that affect pain but that's a that's a not an uncommon experience how many of you have gone into a float and and have either initially noticed pain that you did not even was there when you first got in and it could have been subtle pain you were holding and then during the duration of the pain the float that pain was able to dissipate or be eliminated in some way yeah I think it's a really common experience where we're really seeing a range of different experiences happening within a floating session in the parades had talked about the name Samadhi begin being given to their tank center there's tank business by John Lilly years ago well out of Patanjali's eightfold yoga you can see Samadhi is is a deeper state of absorption into the object of meditation so one merges with the contemplative focus but earlier down the road we see Pratyahara and what most people think of as yoga as asana the asanas which are the yoga positions you know that people get into but Pratyahara is considered the next step in developing a deeper self realization and that's going in looking at how senses how do we move our experience of being so sensory connected so that we can go into a deeper contact of ourselves this is what motivated me to build my first flotation tank I was a student of yoga at the time and I thought well geez you know rather than spending you know 20 years doing all of this other stuff what if we can start to reduce you know the sensory input to be able to experience these deeper meditative states a lot quicker and so now we do have the technology the consciousness technology and of various forms in this various ways to achieve that Mahatma Gandhi had said not to have control over the senses is like sailing in a rudderless ship bone to break the pieces on coming in contact with the very first rock and and when we are in in difficult psychological states it's oftentimes our sensory experience that gets blown out of proportion we get we we we we lose focus or we get we you know we start to experience things sensory in a different way as well as what's going on inside us and so again being able to go into a sensory isolation environment allows us to go back in and and really reset our relationship first within ourselves and and before going out back into the sensory experience and really the primary three senses that that dominate most of our brain functions are visual sense or auditory sense in a vestibular sense of course the visual is cut out because of the darkness the auditory we do our best to minimize the sound and the vestibular is oftentimes a sense of body position and one of the beauties of floating is there really your sense in space can be really altered and and really minimized so all three of the areas can be dramatically reduced I'm going to put a plug in for my book I just got published in February it was a five-year project and well thank you it doesn't have anything to do with floating but it does have to deal with the ocean evolution and a relationship with lights molecules especially in earth's earliest form micro-energy which is the most prolific species of organisms on earth now oftentimes people are experiencing over or under sensory stimulation so an under stimulation could be a example of someone who's just kind of spacing out and really in kind of you know in their own world over stimulation can be somebody who is so acutely connected and overly sensitive in their hearing or in their touch or even in colors and and and so what we're really looking at is how to develop an optimal stimulation band this optimal stimulation band is our relationship to our outer environment is our relationship to our world and and if we if we don't have this optimal relationship to our sensory world we either tend to retreat from it or we tend to do things to the extreme to try to you know experience more stimulation and so for each individual there could be an optimal stimulation band and again I think this is an area where we're sensory looking at how to give people sensory shifting experiences can be very powerful now the when we go into the deeper brain we look at the brainstem and the thalamus and the radio to the cerebral cortex you can see pain is part of the thing that comes in from from our from our peripheral going through our spinal cord up into our brain and literally the level of a rosal can affect not can affect the intensity of the experience of pain but the brain also has capacity to shift to different areas within the brain now one of the technologies that have been used with pain reduction has been biofeedback as well as stress reduction and some of the early research at st. Elizabeth's hospital where where I had been involved at one point found that 80% of patients rated rest in this term rest would be equivalent to floating because we had a floating chamber as more effective and only 20% rated biofeedback is more effective meaning they found they could get the benefit so much quicker so much more directly than than using some other using a biofeedback method and if you look at the role of the thalamus with pain you find that in chronic pain research the thalamus is been identified as one of the main areas where pain is really registered it's interesting that pain and sensory experience are so connected but it's really not so surprising the first experience of touching a hot stove is connected to pain for for most healthy systems and so it's not surprising that that in order to protect us as pain can oftentimes do or sometimes do which is his primary initial goal it's going to be connected to the sensory experiences so that we don't damage ourselves and so the thalamus has two main prime areas for pain there is specific areas that are identified so if you pinch your finger you're it actually signaling the the map of your body the finger map within your cerebral cortex area sensory mortar cortex area is actually being directed through the thalamus to that area but then if if you've had a really bad day and you've you know been just eating you know way too much caffeinated stuff or just you know not getting much exercise or whatever in your systems all gnarled up and you start to have a headache that headache is going to go through the moon because your your your rows the level is so high and so if your rows the level is so high your experience of pain is going to be so high and so pain can be the thalamus controls both of those areas create directing the specific area as well as the general arousal area and in research that's been done we laid the chronic pain they actually were able to identify different pathways relating to cognitive and emotional control of pain quite well and they tended to involve the thalamus as well so our emotions have such a big effect on our experience of pain this is the technical stuff we're almost through this and so one way that the emotions can affect us is it's considered there's two pathways through the thalamus one of the pathways we'll say the low road is when we see something our thalamus can go directly to the amygdala or directly to the emotional centers and say get out of here or just react so quickly the other pathway is who are sensory evaluators and so it can go through the cerebral cortex and start to say well that is kind of an interesting looking snake it's at a certain distance away and it doesn't look like it's a poisonous snake so let's see you know let's spend a little more time starting to look at it and that's where the cognitive appraisal factor comes in and so we have these two in these two pathways through the thalamus that can go emotionally either to a direct reaction kind of a survival place or it can actually go into more of a contemplative place and these are all linked to our sensory inputs and so what I like to think of is when we go into a flotation environment and we take out that initial sensory input if we have old patterns that were reactive hot those hot hot triggers within our psyche so to speak those those high those irritable hot quick emotionally reactive places everybody I think knows what I'm talking about that when you're in a sensory environment or sensory free environment you're you may experience that initially it may come up but then you have the opportunity to be able to not react immediately to because you really can't react so then the brain goes well there's no immediate danger so let's kind of process this and your brain is actually able to process it at a different level and ultimately hopefully change those reactive triggers so they're not so linked to the sensory the way the person looked at me or the way the person sounded or you know this person you know has this characteristic or whatever it is we have a lot of sensory based triggers and so this is one way that we can start to eliminate those quick hot sensory based triggers as well now one of the sensory based triggers is related to our experience of pain when I was in India this is a particular Sufi sect that actually demonstrates their ability to to overcome pain by poking things through their body and and I know in India I saw ceremonies where people would take these like shish kebabs and put them through the pectoral muscles put it through their tongue put it through you know pull out their their part of their neck all the you see them they were like little porcupines but they reported they didn't experience any pain or minimal pain and oftentimes there was in this case there's a lot of bleeding but oftentimes there's not as much bleeding as expected and the wounds tended to heal very quickly and part of this is the way that they're doing this because of particular religious reasons or faith reasons and the people who've studied this kind of phenomena find that if a person feels safe either because of their connection with God or their guru or their teacher or whatever it is or their own powers they don't feel pain so these people are not registering pain and if you actually measured their brain waves we wouldn't likely see the type of pain signals that would be seen in somebody who was just inflicted and wasn't you know emotionally prepared for this kind of experience you know some other images the Sundance of the Native Americans and and some I think Malaysian ceremonies but again these are people who are in a state of mind where what would be normally very painful for the average person is no longer a painful experience simply because I'll move it I see it's a little too much for some folks sorry so some people aren't even experiencing the thing just from century looking at the experience you know is experiencing all sorts of emotion right and so that just shows you how much a sense a sensory experience not even a real experience but something to just perceive from your senses can have such a profound experience in your body so one of the things that happens is we can look at rest working at a level of maps or schemas where these Islamic maps can be shifted whether they're emotional maps or physical maps and support healing at that level here's an example of where the brain stem you can see there's a map of the head arm body leg location mirrored in the thalamus head arm body leg location sent out to to the area of the brain the cerebral cortex that maps our experience where it becomes conscious so that's where it becomes a conscious experience of our body but below there's these maps that literally if you can shift the map at that deeper thalamic level you can actually shift the experience a conscious experience a person has a pain in their body there's this research showing this related to subcortical structures that literally the thalamus is very much involved with acupuncture the benefits of acupuncture can be seen as a subcortical benefits from a neurological standpoint there's some good research on that we I started this last year but even with some float research out of Europe they actually showed that when a person is floating they can and and they're the particular classical acupuncture meridians of the body are being stimulated that people in an isolation environment actually can experience more of what that flow that pathway is compared to somebody who is being stimulated by acupuncture outside of the tank and so I think again it kind of refers to this deeper thalamic pathway our experience of pain is very much an experience of the emotional message we assign to it as as well as the meaning we have of it clearly there's physical aspects of pain so not all pain is experienced is not just explained by mental emotional factors but there's a huge component of how we assign an experience of pain and one of the persons that had inspired me to take a new look at pain was Milton Ward he wrote a book the brilliant function of pain many years ago and he spoke about pain not to be avoided at all costs not to be something to be you know suppressed but he felt that if one can actually look have a new relationship with pain that you can actually uncover a level of wisdom to your experience or use oftentimes the pains in our life as a guidepost to make necessary changes and and for most people who haven't been struggling with chronic pain for you know a long long period of time but maybe have had more episodic experiences of pain um the um the experience of being able to um find a way to communicate with your pain try to figure out what's what the message that pain has can be a very profound um one and the most direct way one of the one of the most direct ways to do that is to go into a flotation environment where you have little to interfere with your experience your physical experience Norman Shealy who was one of the great pain researchers he described that the ideal place to teach people pain management techniques was literally where they had an experience as if they were floating kind of you know gently above their body and and and he would you know and when I read that passage it just reminded me so much of the flotation experience because besides becoming more aware of maybe where we're caught where we're holding on what are some of the patterns that are emotional hotspots it can also allow us if we're willing to listen and to spend time with the distrustful aspects of our of our float experience because not every float experience is a positive experience and for some people they go through and through a process of of experiencing what doesn't feel right um and if one can actually go through that process then you really are unable you are able to go far deeper into looking at what may be the deeper purpose of of that pain and then also gradually shift the maps that might hold the pain whether the emotional maps or whether they're the eslamic maps and and obviously it's not going to be a pain relief for everybody but for a lot of people it allows an avenue to work with pain that most people don't readily have the challenges is what is really figuring out what are going to be the best protocols to really work with and I'm talking chronic pain patients in the tank for a lot of people just the experience of floating enough oftentimes can be a spontaneous shift in their experience of pain but for other people it really may be that they may have to have a frequency of sessions maybe five floats in a week you know then followed by four floats next week followed by three floats next week you know gradually tailoring off to get the type of intensity to be able to really shift the patterns that are so embedded within their nervous system but that really has you know that's really a clinical question that you know will really have to be looked at but for people who just want to have a more direct experience of their relationship with their body and of their relationship with pain and their emotions the floatation environment is an ideal place and a very safe place to begin thank you