 two of my favorite subjects, flotation therapy and the crimes of the Central Intelligence Agency. It's weird doing these talks between two scientists. This in many ways is a talk about bad science. Fortunately, it's bad science that led to good science. So hopefully in the end it all balances towards the good. Unfortunately, I won't have time to get to all the topics I wanted to discuss, so we'll skip some slides. Sadly, I won't be able to talk about the dolphin assassinations and we won't probably hear how this all ties into JFK. If you want to hear about that, you'll have to listen to my podcast. No doubt at some point many of you have been asked, where do float tanks come from? Like many things in life, there's an official story and then the real story. The official story is that a scientist named John C. Lilly wanted to solve the question of whether the brain would shut down without external stimuli or if it would generate its own internal stimuli. So he built the first float tank to test this theory. Now I'm going to tell you a different story. Hopefully it's the true one. The CIA ran two mind control programs simultaneously in the 1950s and 1960s, Artichoke and MKUltra. Artichoke, headed by the mysterious Morse Alan, was very much an operational program. MKUltra, which was headed by Sidney Gottlieb, was more limited to research and development. Artichoke started first. Its focus was interrogation. Artichoke teams traveled the world giving POWs, suspected spies, kidnapped any enemy agents and whoever else, what they called the Artichoke treatment. This could involve drugs, hypnosis, electroshock, any methods available to the CIA. Sometimes, perhaps depending on the country where the interrogations were being held, the subjects were executed afterwards. Sometimes they were set free with varying degrees of amnesia about what had occurred. It wasn't long before someone thought, if we can force an unwilling person to divulge secret information, what else can we make them do? One Artichoke document asked, could we seize a subject in the space of an hour or two by post-hypnotic control, have them crash an airplane, wreck a train, etc.? Can we, long and short range, through hypnotic post-control, induce a subject to commit violence against another individual or induce a subject to murder another individual or group of individuals? Can we, through post-hypnotic control, create a condition whereby a subject would forget any such induced act after the subject is brought out of his conditioned state? Most records of Artichoke and MKUltra were destroyed by the CIA in 1973. Somehow a few boxes of files were overlooked. Their existence was leaked and some documents were released through Freedom of Information Act requests. There are also archives scattered in universities and other collections throughout the country that contain details of these experiments, some of which have not yet been brought to light. MKUltra and Artichoke both employed non-CI scientists to research mind control possibilities. Some of these scientists were aware they were working with the CIA and some were not. Donald Hebb, the father of sensory deprivation research, was aware. On June 1st, 1951, five men met at a Ritz-Karten Hotel in Montreal. They were Dr. Donald Hebb, Dr. Ormond Solant, both of the Canadian Defense Research Board, Sir Henry Tisard, a scientist from the British Ministry of Defense, and doctors Carl Haskins and R.J. Williams of the CIA's Project Artichoke. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the logistics of conducting covert research into brain warfare amongst the U.S., Canada and Britain. The enemy was the U.S. Sosaar in China and the communist worldwide. Once a few practicalities were worked out, the conversation turned to possible directions the research should take. Dr. Donald Hebb, the Canadian psychologist, had an idea. I'll now read from an inquiry conducted on behalf of the Canadian government in the 80s. Dr. Hebb suggested that an approach based upon the situation of sensory isolation might lead to some clues to answering the central problem that interested this covert research coalition. Confession, menticide, intervention in the individual mind, together with methods concerned in psychological coercion. Reflecting the CIA's ongoing effort discussed earlier to mentally reprogram enemy agents to carry out any mission even against their will, Hebb suggested that, by cutting off all sensory stimulation, the individual could be led into a situation whereby ideas might be implanted. The group liked the idea. Hebb was awarded top-secret Canadian defense contract X-38 for a study into the cognitive effects of decreased variability in the sensory environment. Hebb conducted his experiments at Allen Memorial Hospital at McGill University in Montreal. In the past, he had experimented on the sensory environment of rats. He discovered that rats raised in a more sensory-rich environment grew to be smarter and healthier than rats raised in an empty cage. For his new experiments, Hebb placed his subjects, male volunteers paid $20 a day, in a small room with a bed, goggles over their eyes, noise-blocking earphones, and cardboard cuffs over their arms. Hebb conducted different types of isolation experiments for years, but the brainwashing experiments went something like this. The subject would be given a choice. He could either listen to silence or he could listen to propaganda. In this case, it was audio suggesting the existence of ghosts or psychic phenomenon. He reported that subjects displayed an increased interest in these matters that did not exist before the experiments. One subject experienced a newfound fear of ghosts, another checked out books on the occult from the library, and another attempted to use telepathy to win at poker. Compared to other experiments done on behalf of the CIA, these were quite tame. The subject could leave at any time. Still, some of them describe the experience as torture. After details of Donald Hebb's experiments leaked to the press in 1954, he lost his funding from the Canadian Defense Board, and he quickly picked it up again from the Central Intelligence Agency. This also spurned a huge interest in sensory deprivation experiments, with over 200 scientific papers being released within the next decade. A source of funding for Hebb's research that was not the CIA was the Rockefeller Foundation. Hebb's grants were handled by Robert Swayne Morrison, director of biological and medical research at the Foundation. He was also a member of a state department sponsored research group on psychological warfare called Project Troy. Morrison was the source of grants not only for Hebb, but also his infamous colleague Dr. Ewan Cameron. On the right there, we'll talk about him soon, as well as Alfred Kinsey, the famous sexologist, and Norbert Wiener, the famous cyberneticist. He also funded the work of a young brain scientist named John C. Lilly. Ewan Cameron was the director of Allen Memorial Hospital at McGill and had been its director since the founding. He conducted experiments on behalf of CIA under MK Ultra Subproject 68, which was a study into the effects upon human behavior of the repetition of verbal signals. Cameron had a multi-step process he called depatterning and psychic driving. First, he subjected his psychiatric patients to Hebb-style sensory deprivation for weeks at a time. Then he included coma inducing drugs also for weeks at a time and played loops phrases into his subjects earphones while also administering electroshock, LSD, and various other drugs and treatments, so-called treatments. The idea was to wipe the mind clean and reprogram it. He had some success with the first part, but not the second. Some patients were reduced to a near vegetative state from which they never recovered. Three hundred people eventually sought compensation from the Canadian government for Cameron's experiments. John C. Lilly had first written to Robert Morrison in 1951 looking for funds and advice. He was making major breakthroughs in brain research using implanted electrodes to record electrical signals and display their locations on a machine called the Bavitron. Morrison suggested Lilly apply to work at the National Institutes of Mental Health, and there he would be awarded a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to continue his brain studies. By the mid-50s, he had discovered the Lilly wave, which was an electrical pulse that could stimulate brain tissue without damaging it. He was soon able to induce a wide variety of mental states in monkey test subjects such as fear, anger, happiness, sexual excitement, and others with electrical stimulation to key parts of the brain. At some point, for reasons that are not explicit, Lilly was sent to McGill. On April 10th, 1954, Robert S. Morrison noted in Rockefeller Foundation records that John Lilly, who is temporarily at the National Institute of Mental Health, has been sufficiently excited by his visit to Donald Hebb on Robert Swain Morrison's recommendation that he has undertaken to repeat the human isolation experiments with a somewhat different technique. That technique would become known as the Lilly method or the wet method of sensory deprivation. Subjects were suspended completely below the surface of the water and given a breathing apparatus. In 1956, Lilly enlisted the help of J. Tomage Shirley, who came to the National Institutes of Mental Health from Texas. He had been a captain in the Army Medical Corps and instructor of Army neurophysiology at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Shirley helped Lilly refine the tank and breathing apparatus. He, like Lilly, took to the float tank experience and saw therapeutic possibilities in it. Other researchers were more interested in the military applications. In 1952, a neurologist named Maitland Baldwin was also conducting sensory deprivation research at the National Institute of Mental Health, right next door to John Lilly. His method was simple and brutal. He built a sound and light proof box, locked a soldier in it and waited to see what happened. After 40 hours, the soldier began, quote, crying loudly and sobbing in a most heart-rending fashion. And he kicked himself out of the box. Baldwin conducted this experiment on behalf of Morse Allen of the CIA's Project Artichoke. He reported to Allen that his technique could break any man, no matter how intelligent or strong willed. And that prolonged sensory deprivation of this sort would certainly cause irreparable damage. Allen was pleased. He wanted to push the experiments further and propose conducting terminal experiments to which Baldwin agreed. If Allen could provide the subjects, this proposal was shot down by one of Allen's superiors, fortunately. Another CIA-sponsored researcher interested in sensory deprivation was neurologist Harold Wolf in the middle there. Wolf was an expert on migraine headaches. He suffered from them, like John C. Lilly did, and he thought that sensory deprivation could have some potential for treating them. Wolf also happened to be good friends with CIA director Allen Dulles. He had treated Dulles' son for brain damage sustained during the Korean War. In 1953, Dulles commissioned Wolf and his Cornell associate Lawrence Hinkel to conduct a massive study on all available information on brainwashing, including classified agency files. He also commissioned Wolf to conduct research of his own. This resulted in the human ecology project, which morphed into the Human Ecology Fund, a major front for MK Ultra funding. As part of his research, Wolf even offered to conduct terminal experiments for the agency if they could provide the subjects and means of disposal. In 1954, a grad student named Leo Goldberger joined the Human Ecology Project. He had been a student of Hebb's and had been a subject of Hebb's first sensory deprivation experiments. In 1991, he wrote an essay about his experiences working under Harold Wolf, from which I'll now read. In retrospect, there are several peculiar events during my two years with the Human Ecology Program that ought to have aroused my suspicion that things were not what they seemed. The first was an intense interest Dr. Wolf showed in my experience as a subject at McGill, something I only casually mentioned once. He wanted every detail, and eventually he urged me to duplicate the experimental setup at the hospital using more drastic stimulus reduction technique provided by water immersion. This was a technique developed by John Lilly, whose frontier brain research at NIH was of intense CIA interest, but who apparently had refused their approaches because he found secrecy inimical to the scientific process. Little did I know that Dr. Wolf's desire to grill me about my sensory deprivation experience was triggered by his preoccupation with brainwashing techniques of interest to the CIA for whom he was preparing a comprehensive report. Goldberg and his team attempted Lilly-style sensory deprivation trials, but he came to the conclusion that the breathing apparatus and the water pressure also applied too much sensory stimulation, so they opted for the Hebb method instead. Goldberg left the Human Ecology Program after a few years and went on to conduct both sensory deprivation and LSD research for the National Institute of Mental Health. These studies, he says, were for completely benign purposes. Not everybody at the National Institute's mental health viewed the sensory deprivation work that was done there as totally benign, including the director Robert Felix. In what I speculate to have been a propaganda move to stroke public fears about brainwashing communists, Robert Felix testified before Congress that techniques had been developed at NIMH that could quote the NIMH, and that it would break anyone. Felix's testimony was reported in a sensational New York Times article from which I'll now read. You guys are going to like this. This is Felix to Congress. He is placed in a tank of water at body temperature upside down and he floats, said Dr. Felix. Now, this is a most comfortable feeling for an hour or two. It is the most relaxing thing. It is like floating in air. It is like going back before you were born. For the first two or no sensations except this mask on his face. He hears nothing. He sees nothing. He feels nothing. He can't tell which is right side up and whether his right side up crosswise or whatnot. The first hour or two of this is rather comfortable. It is the most delicious sensation and the subject very frequently goes to sleep. In about an hour or two, he wakes up and then finds his thoughts are going over and over, sort of like a closed circuit. He will get on some subject and go over it and over it. The reason of this is deprivation of outside stimuli and part of the reason that you or I do what we call logical thinking is that there are things that feed in through some source, some reception source, ear, nose, eyes, skin, whatnot, so that these things feeding in orient us and tell us what we are thinking and give us stimuli for additional thinking. Skipping down. Is this a form of brainwashing? Ask Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Republican of Maine. Yes ma'am it is. Dr. Felix replied. It is part of brainwashing. Once you have cut these off and have cut them off long enough that the person is completely disoriented and disorganized, then if you feed back information for this individual to have, and this is the only feed-in he gets slowly or sometimes not so slowly, he begins to incorporate this into his thinking. The problem is that this can happen to any person some sooner than others, but you can break 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. The article then continued with a few quotes from Lily, who told the paper that the purpose of the experiments was to conduct basic research related to mental disease, how it starts, and how you might stop it. The difference between the experiments and brainwashing, and it is a major difference, this is Lily's talking, is that the subject in the tank or air conditioned box knows that at any time things get too tough he can leave, Lily said. Now towards the end of the article it states, as a practical means of interesting American psychiatrist in this subject, Dr. Lily is assembling results of all experiments on human volunteers that might be akin to brainwashing. The sensation caused by Felix's report to Congress and by the New York Times article led Lily to write a letter to Donald Hepp, apologizing for the negative publicity that had been brought to their work. Hepp replied, dear John, communication received, contents noted, I hasten to reply. Relax, old boy, no misunderstandings around here, no apologies called for. What had happened was clear enough to us and to others. Forget it. Now skipping down. And as far as any brainwashing reference is concerned, the only way it can have any protective value for those who might need it sometime in the future is by letting all the public know, since we can't tell who may be in for it in the future, that it isn't so fearsome that they don't go nuts and will recover, thus cutting down the fear element at least. As ever, D.O. Hepp, D.O. Hepp. The New York Times article noted that John C. Lily was assembling results of all experiments on human volunteers that might be akin to brainwashing. That sounds very much like the project Harold Wolfe and Lawrence Hinkel were working on for the CIA at exactly the same time. Throughout 1956, Lily served as a moderator for a series of symposiums on brainwashing. 1956 was also the year that Wolfe and Hinkel completed their classified report for Alan Dulles. Both Wolfe and Hinkel attended these symposiums and presented research which mostly concerned communist methods of brainwashing, more adequately defined as coercion and indoctrination. It was at these brainwashing symposiums that Lily presented his earliest papers on sensory deprivation tank research. Two years later, the first symposium on sensory deprivation was held at Harvard Medical School and sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. Lily was there as a member of a roundtable discussion group. Donald Hebb was also there, as was Leo Goldberg. Another interesting attendee was Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics. It was at this symposium that Lily supposedly asked the other researchers how many of their subjects wanted to try sensory deprivation again. None did. Lily wrote in his biographies that he started to grow wary of conducting research that could be used for nefarious intelligence purposes at the National Institute of Mental Health. Before leaving, he was asked to report on his brain search to a panel of military intelligence officials. Lily agreed, provided that he would be free to republish his report openly. This request apparently landed him in hot water with his superiors and led to a number of inconveniences which cemented his decision to leave the NIMH. Lily did not ultimately publish the report that he delivered to the military brass, but there is an unpublished, undated paper in his archives that may in fact be that report, and its contents are quite startling. The title was Special Considerations of Modified Human Agents as Reconnaissance and Intelligence Devices. Lily writes, recent work hints that if a person is physically and socially isolated by a group long enough that, A, his motivations are altered even radically, B, his orientation from past objects, including persons, of intense interest can be shifted to present, to presently acting objects chosen by the controlling group, C, such interest includes hate as well as love, and D, he tends to absorb information from selected signals sent into him on demand in a way which can profoundly influence subsequent thinking and behavior. Apparently under these conditions there can be an injection of outside data into the inside generators with some reprogramming developing. Cameron, that's you and Cameron, has shown that even under less drastic conditions psychic implants can be induced by verbal, emotionally important statements repainted many times from a tape and exert profound effects for the next few weeks of thought and behavior. In section 2, electrical stimulation of the brain, motivation control. In recent years it has been shown to be practical to stimulate basic motivational states by direct electrical stimulation of the brain. Profound and intense states of fear, panic, terror, pain, nausea, fatigue, intense non-sexual and sexual pleasure and of trance, sleep and coma can be induced by the stimulation of appropriate zones of the brain. A technique for covert and relatively safe implantation of electrodes into the human brain has been devised. The animal work has been closely followed by the work on the human. Using such techniques one has push button control of the totality of motivation and of consciousness. One can control a person where he lives in intensity and in time with relatively simple methods. Combined with isolation and an interrogation team such methods probably can be cannot be was stood by even the strongest personalities. Extract relating present day work with small numbers of electrodes to a future with many one can visualize the visual control or the future control not only a motivation but of the detailed instant to instant thought and pre-thought processes themselves. With hundreds of electrodes and with electrical stimuli distributed among appropriately appropriately in time patterns probably thoughts can be controlled and experienced as if voluntarily self-controlled. If present theory is correct this message with 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. The ultimate uses of such techniques in the military sphere seem to be obvious. Okay and I've gone past my time but I'm just going to hit a few more points here. After this the CIA ban on a project 119 MK ultra sub project 119 which provided funds for a study conducted by redacted to make a critical review of the literature and scientific developments related to the recording analysis and interpretation of bioelectric signals from the human organism and activation of human behavior by remote means. Okay this is the dolphin stuff I don't get to talk about. It would have been cool. Okay so the Kubark CIA manual was published in 1963 and this basically summarized brought together a lot of what they learned from project artichoke. They believe that the current sensory deprivation research supported the following theories. The more complete the place of confinement the more rapidly and deeply will the interrogate be affected. Results produced only after weeks or months of imprisonment in an ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no light, which is sound proofed, in which odors are eliminated etc. An early effect of such an environment is anxiety. Interrogator can benefit from the subject's anxiety. As the interrogator becomes linked in the subject's mind with the reward of lessened anxiety, human contact and meaningful activity, and thus with providing relief for growing discomfort, the questioner assumes a benevolent role. The deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject's mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it upon itself. At the same time the calculated provision of stimuli during interrogation tends to make the regress subject view the interrogator as a father figure. The result normally is the strengthening of the subject's tendencies towards compliance. And as you can see, the Kubark manual and practices therein are still in place in places such as Guantanamo Bay. Meanwhile, there were more sensory deprivation studies being carried on, some under the auspices of the CIA, others not. I hate to leave it out on negative note, but that's about the end of my presentation now. If you want to hear more, come check out my podcast, Deep State History, and I've got a Patreon page for it. And I'll just scooch through these slides here. That's Jolly West. Actually, Jay Talmad surely went and worked for him. Very interesting character indeed. There's Jack Ruby. I wasn't kidding about the JFK stuff. And there's John Lillian again. And thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Come talk to me later if you want to hear more.