 I want to say thank you very much for having me and to Ashkan and Justin for introducing me to Ashkan. As I say, I'm a historian so it's a real treat to come to an event like this and meet this whole community. We've been especially welcoming and very unique kind of environment. So, as I say, I'm a historian. I work on the Cold War brainwashing scare and its influence on psychology and psychiatry during this time. And today I'm going to take a close look at the tank isolation experiments developed by John Lilly and Jay Shirley at the National Institute of Mental Health in the 1950s. So together they developed a method of vertical isolation in fresh water. As this illustration shows, subjects wore a mask and breathing apparatus and would lie either face up or face down and supported by rubber floats. So this method is kind of widely regarded as the origin of the modern day flotation tank. But it also has this more controversial history related to questions of brainwashing and mind control in the Cold War. And just to give an example of this relationship, I'm just going to show a short clip from the 1963 film The Mindbenders. There's several films based on the life and the research of John Lilly, films like Altered States, The Day of the Dolphin. But I think this is probably the first. The method here is pretty accurate, kind of reasonably accurate as to what they were actually doing. But as you'll see, the effects kind of drift into the realms of science fiction. Now by isolation, we mean the study of what happens to a man when you take away all sensation. We want to know what happens to him if he sees nothing, feels nothing, tastes nothing, hears nothing and smells nothing. We want to know what happens to the body and particularly to the central nervous system when a man is put into this complete isolation, into the sort of conditions that may well be experienced in space flight. To do this, we invented a perfectly simple piece of apparatus. When a man is submerged in this tank of ordinary water at blood heat, all sensations over a period of time can be reduced to a minimum. He is utterly isolated, lonely, bewildered. Studying his behavior under these conditions, we found we had stepped into a new and frightening world. We seem to be dealing literally with the physics of the soul. The report for Colonel Bogey Longman called it at the time. It tallies with several others read later to scientific confidence held in America on the effects of the reduction of sensation. Longman seemed to go through four distinct stages. Irritation. After the first hour of relative quiet, even boredom, he became childishly irritable, abusive and even comic. Knees up, knees up, knees up, mother brown, bloody stupid down. Within another hour, we had reached a long, curiously lazy melancholy stage. Starved of sensation from the outside world, the surface of the skin itself grew a sensitivity quite beyond normal experience. He played with the water, feeling his right hand to be the size of a dam with a stream bursting through. This extra sensitivity seemed to promote a sequence of erotic hallucinations. Then all sensation vanished, and after two or three hours he seemed to lose confidence in himself as a man. Please, please, it's not fair. It isn't. Please let me out. Panic was the third stage, the voice of the trapped monkey, the wasp beating against the glass, the man on the rack. After five hours without sensation, weightless and disorientated, he was in a state of complete nervous collapse. At last, the comfort and blessing of hallucination. After seven hours in the tank, he vanished into a world of his own. This stage that gave me my clue. Listen, I recognize this. How long has he been in? Nearly eight hours. It's fantastic. It'd take months of solitary confinement to reduce a man to this state. Even if he were kept awake half the time with lights and all the rest of it. You've come into my country. Don't you see? You've been missing something here. This is an experiment on the fringes of brainwashing, indoctrination. No wonder they were after sharp ache. We could persuade long men into anything. Now I'm damn sure of it. Not just persuading them to scratch his right ear. I mean change his most fundamental beliefs. So, great. I don't know if we can have a show of hands for anyone who's had a float experience like that. So, when this first, the critics and audiences saw this film, they claimed that the whole brainwashing element was too far fetched. And this was much to the dismay of the filmmakers who felt they'd based their screenplay on scientific research recently carried out in Canada and the United States. I think this evokes two questions. First, how does this technique come to be seen as being so dangerous in the late 1950s? And second, how has it transformed into something so different that it laid the foundation for modern-day tank isolation? So, to start off, I think it's briefly a good idea to kind of gloss over this idea of brainwashing in the Cold War. Although the concept wasn't really entirely novel, the term brainwashing was introduced to the public in 1950 by a journalist named Edward Hunter. Hunter claimed that Russian and Chinese Pavlovian psychologists had developed powerful methods of manipulating men's minds. So, although a few scientists took Hunter's extreme claim seriously, the term brainwashing resonated with widespread anti-communist sentiments in the US and the ideological conflict that characterized the Cold War. So, we tend to look back on this period as an era of paranoia and conspiracy. But this paranoia nonetheless has a legacy not least within the disciplines of psychology and behavioral science. So, it's within this climate of concern about brainwashing that the history of sensory deprivation begins in 1951 at a secret meeting in a famous Montreal hotel. Present at this meeting were several intelligence officials, scientists and psychologists, and this man on the left, Professor Donald Hebb of McGill University. The minutes of the meeting revealed that the discussion centered around the question of brainwashing and non-coercive interrogation. Hebb then proposed that completely removing sensory or perceptual stimulation, a sort of techno-scientific solitary confinement, might place someone in such a position that they would be susceptible to implantation of new or different ideas. So, shortly afterwards, Hebb receives a grant of around $30,000 for a three-year study on the effects of perceptual deprivation. And they devised an experimental situation that looked like this. As you can see, the subject is placed in a small chamber, they hear the sounds of a white noise generator, their arms are enclosed within cardboard tubes to restrict movement and tactile perception, and their eyes are covered by a pair of translucent ski goggles, which only allow in diffuse white light. So, they're left in this state of perceptual monotomy for up to three days at a time for which they are paid $20 a day. So unsurprisingly, a few subjects managed to stick it out, and by far the most widely reported results were the unusual visions and hallucinations subjects claim to experience. These range from simple dots and geometric shapes to full-blown lucid imagery. So, it was great to see all the artwork and poetry kind of inspired by flotation yesterday, and this kind of some early work that could be seen as being inspired by sensory deprivation. These were done by an artist from McLean's magazine in 1954 in attempt to recreate some of the imagery described inside the chamber. So, this included these eyeglasses wandering down a street, this man in a bath, spaceships, and perhaps the report which remained most iconic to these experiments, a line of squirrels with sacks over their shoulders marching purposefully. Now, the second finding was linked to the question of brainwashing itself. During some of the experiments, subjects were given the option to listen to propaganda records. These records presented evidence in support of paranormal phenomena such as the existence of ghosts. According to Hebony's students, the effects of the propaganda were the only ones that showed signs lasting beyond the experimental period. Two weeks after the test, quote, a number of the experimental subjects, unlike the controls, went to the library to borrow books on psychical research, mind reading, and so forth. There were spontaneous reports of being afraid of ghosts late at night. One man even reported that he was trying to use telepathy as an aid to playing poker. So, it should be pointed out that these results have since been criticised heavily and in terms of both their methodology and the way they were reported, but nonetheless, this was how they were reported, and they helped create a kind of buzz around sensory deprivation research in the 50s and probably contributed to its downfall as well. Well, not its downfall, but its decline in the late 70s, early 70s, sorry. But initially, the McGill results were all classified. But in 1952, before any official publications had been made, Hebony received a visit from a neurophysiologist named John C. Lilly. So, at this time, Lilly's scientific career is very much in the ascendancy. Already by 1952, he studied both physics and biology, trained as a doctor and a psychoanalyst, taken an amateur in professional interest in radio and communication systems, worked on high-altitude research for the military, and had begun pioneering work using electro-stimulation to map the brains of macaque monkeys. So, here you have this kind of 37... Probably better to go back to the other image. You have this kind of practical and intellectual polymath. He's just been appointed the head of cortical integration at the National Institute for Mental Health, and he's proposed to carry out an ambitious project to explore the relationship between the brain, the body and the mind. I think Lilly's ambition as a scientist is only superseded by his self-confidence. He wants to be this Darwin of the 20th century. When one colleague compliments him that he's one of five, or perhaps ten people alive, who could carry out such an ambitious project, Lilly replies, I would like to meet the other four or nine sometime. The majority of Lilly's lab is dedicated to this electro-mapping work on the brains of monkeys, cats and later dolphins. But he also dedicates two modules of his lab and a portion of his research budget to human isolation research. And using borrowed equipment builds his first water isolation chamber. That's not it, by the way, but I don't have any images. But it operated towards the same principle. So, there are various reasons why John Lilly took up sensory isolation so enthusiastically at this moment. For starters, isolation is an important practical approach to science. If you want to test the effects of a single stimulus on the behaviour of an animal, for example, you have to isolate it from other stimuli. But the McGill experiment showed that the human or the mammal brain is not simply an organ of stimulus and response as cognitive and perceptual activity persists without stimulus. So Lilly is immediately drawn to the question of what is this sort of non-stimulus-driven consciousness and what does it consist of? But it would also be naive to think that Lilly and his superiors weren't also interested in this question of brainwashing and mind control. In autobiographical writings, Lilly has been open about having to brief government agencies about his work and claimed that it was military interest that led to his decision to leave the National Institute of Health. But apart from these memoirs, we know little about the relationship shared between Lilly and military intelligence. There are, however, some surviving documents from the 50s that illustrate his willingness to align his research with military interests. Perhaps kind of the most interesting or disconcerting paper he writes is entitled Special Considerations of Modified Human Agents as Reconnaissance and Intelligence Devices. So Lilly describes how his tank experiments show how isolation can be used to make a subject absorb information on demand and reconfigure or reprogram the internal generators of the mind. He goes on to discuss how this could be combined with electrostimulation to gain push-button control over the totality of motivation and behavior, and he states, if present theory is correct, this method will lead to master-slave controls directly of one brain over another in greater or lesser degree. The path is a possible one, but the quantities of control achievable are to be determined experimentally. So this report was written in 1957 for a group of military and intelligence officials, but Lilly's isolation research had also been discussed in 1956 by the former NIH director Robert Felix at a hearing in Senate. When discussing isolation, Felix claimed that this method explains how brainwashing works, as when cut off from stimulation, subjects uncritically absorb information fed to them as if it is their own thoughts. And he goes on to say, you can break down anybody with this. I don't care what their background is or how they have been indoctrinated. I'm sure you can break down anybody with this. So the 1956 hearing was reported in local and national newspapers, and it is these reports which inspired Alexander Kennedy to start writing his script for the mindbenders. But probably what's kind of most interesting about these claims being made is it's really difficult to square them with the first-hand experiences Lilly was claiming to have inside his tank. When Lilly wrote to Donald Hebb about the recent fallout of publicity in 1956, he said that people are apparently rather frightened. I find that they do assume that one goes nuts under these conditions, which of course is a lot of nonsense. Indeed, the experience described by Lilly was not one of cognitive breakdown, but instead of cognitive enlightenment, and he described what Freud and Roman Riland had called the oceanic feeling and discovering, quote, a new inner security on a deep and basic level. And this is not unique to Lilly. In 1956, a Texan psychiatrist named Jay Shirley was made an assistant on the isolation project. Shirley has given a technical task to perfect issues with the mask, but he also trains himself to use the tank. And like Lilly, the Velops is very unique passion for the experience, which he records in a diary. So this diary is kind of a fascinating reading in itself. It sort of reveals the kind of politics of working at the NIH at the time and at the University of Oklahoma. But above all, it reveals this intimate relationship the scientists developed with their tank work. Shirley often describes carrying out spontaneous or unplanned exposures. He doesn't tell Lilly, and sometimes he does it at night. His tank experiences are after all different. He discusses major frustration that he can't reach the same levels of disinhibition or the vast accumulation of energy Lilly had described. And he bemoans his inability to think creatively rather than technically about scientific questions. But in spite of these problems, he does experience vivid fantasies and isolation and becomes passionate about the tanks for therapeutic potential. He claims that three days in the tank could be the equivalent of three years of psychoanalysis. In a later entry, he notes his revelation that this is the most important work he will ever do and must devote his whole life to it. And that's kind of what he does for the next 15 years. So during the five or so years that they worked together, Lilly and Shirley had taken isolation work in a very different direction from the original brainwashing studies carried out at McGill. At the heart of this change is their unorthodox commitment to self-experimentation. So through repeated exposures, Lilly and Shirley familiarize themselves with the stressful aspects of the situation, such as an overly tight or a leaking mask, unexpected audio or visual stimuli, and the stimulus hunger that they described. Importantly, they developed an approach which placed experimental control in the hands of the subject rather than the observer. As they described in a paper given in 1960, maximum ego freedom and voluntariness is achieved when the subject is attenuated not only from their physical environment, but also from their social environment. Quote, subjects should choose their own times for beginning, ending, and the total duration of explosion, as well as the control of whatever restraints, voluntary inhibitions, and supports are needed. Privacy also implies trust and respect for the ego of the subject on the part of the observer, i.e. the elimination of any observer encroachment, exploitation or invasion of each experience in the future indefinitely. This approach through isolation experiment is almost the reverse of the approach begun at McGill, or the one described by Robert Felix at the Senate hearing in 1956. The model of the mind is the same, the apparatus and the technology are the same, but the approach has shifted from one of how can we isolate the mind to feed in external information, to one of how can the mind be isolated, isolated mind be protected, or even liberated from its external world. So, those who are familiar with Lily's later work will see how these ideas laid the groundwork for his concepts of the human mind as a programmed and reprogrammable bio-computer. And the metaphor behind his most famous book, The Center of the Cyclone, this sort of quiet state of consciousness at the center or devoid of one's own anxieties, drives and stimulus world. In the 60s, Lily's writings clearly resonate with our cultural ideas and the rhetoric of the emerging psychedelic movement, which promote approaches to mind alteration, which privilege disassociated states of consciousness, uninhibited by previous conditioning, learning and social consensus. There isn't much time to talk about the experimental work surely continued at the University of Oklahoma. But he goes on to build this sort of $20,000 tank which he calls the Cadillac of isolation tanks on something near like 300 subjects through the tank. Some of them sort of interesting characters, like Jerry Cobb who was a potential astronaut, female part of a group of astronauts. There was a sort of campaign to get them a group of female astronauts into space. But I just want to point to a diary entry he makes in 1956 where he simply notes, he had a thought. John wants to know how much of his experience was fantasy. I do too. I think this anticipates a juncture in both of their work, whereas John Lily became increasingly interested in phenomenology and the ontological significance of altered states surely instead chose to interpret tank experiences within a more traditional psychoanalytic framework while retaining the values of ego, freedom and exploration which the pair had developed together at the NIH. Just to briefly conclude, I want to emphasise that the Cold War brainwashing scare had an important influence on John Lily and Jay Shirley's work, not just on the development of tank apparatus, but also the theory and approaches they took to isolation. Historians often describe the early Cold War as an era characterised by concerns about agency, autonomy and the fragility of the self. I think the early work at the NIH of John Lily and Jay Shirley gives one example of the conflicting ways Psi professionals imagined these concerns, developing one approach which imagined isolation in the service of controlling human minds and another which imagined it in the service of the self and human potential. Thank you very much.