 First of all thanks for inviting me it was a bit of a surprise I haven't floated for it's either 39 or 40 years so and I miss it actually so it was an interesting invite. This talk is a rerun we have to roll the clock back to the 1970s this is the state hospital in North Dakota that entire entity including the farm you see behind it is the state hospital the slaughterhouse the power plant all the buildings that entire thing is the state hospital they had about 2,000 patients back then the state hospital actually predates the state and this this actually is a photo off of the asylum project which tracked insane asylums throughout the United States and the history of that but when we went to work there in the 70s it very much resembled the movie one flew over the cuckoo's nest in fact for those of you who remember the movie these could been pulled off of the movie except the color on the right hand side kind of gives it away as a little bit of a modern picture the three beds in the small room were in fact very common overcrowding was the nature of the institution and it was really an awful place it's not like they didn't do therapy and for any of you who are a little bit squeamish I'd like close your eyes for a moment the upper left is electroshock the lower left is lobotomy the upper right is hydrotherapy and hydrotherapy actually was a lucky thing for us because when they renovated the wing of the building for our lab we got the old hydrotherapy area which no longer was being done after psychiatric medications came around they cut down on the use of some of the older more well they were kind of insane therapies actually hydrotherapy they would take boiling water in a in a tub and stick a big felt pad in it and squeeze all the water out and then lie it along the spine of the individual and they would basically become have a heat stroke essentially so if you're manic they would do that to you if you were under activated they would shoot you with hot and cold water jets I mean it was really an awful circumstance and then obviously the lower right is the cell and quite quite often people were housed in the cell during the day 1970s changed the hospital rather dramatically first of all the courts ruled that unless you're really a danger to yourself or others you couldn't be forced to stay in a hospital and that essentially let a whole bunch of people out you have to remember there were wards full of people that all that was wrong was them as Parkinsonism but there was an entire word full of them and they weren't a danger to themselves or others they just needed care so and drugs for behavioral management had come about they discharged the bulk of the people in the state hospital system during the 1970s the population in California was dropped by a factor of two basically by opening the doors and kicking people out North Dakota got a gold award they were the cream of the crud that this was the best bad system that you could imagine they actually did set up systems to receive people in the local communities so as this was happening they hired lots of people from the local universities in North Dakota that were teaching at that time the relatively newer approach of humanistic psychology and we had some of the professors actually go to work at the state hospital and recruited students to come through for internships and as employees and because of that it was kind of an interesting environment this was before they had IRBs and when they hired us they basically gave us free access to any patient in the state hospital to do whatever pretty much we wanted to with the applied psychophysiology techniques that we were using so we wrote a grant and had a state hospital laboratory built for us in 1972 and that laboratory was a wing it was a hydrotherapy wing so it had lots of hot and cold running water and lots of space because it wasn't being used anymore and this was a T at the end of a building eight rooms on either side of the T and we basically made a big door to close the whole area off and that became our lab and one wing as you walked into the right the last room was custom built 8 foot by 8 foot in an 8 by 12 room a tank and it didn't look anything like these wonderful tanks you have here this was very crude and quite ugly but it worked essentially we had this 8 by 8 tank with a little bit of filtration and sanitation hardware in the entry area but we had built it because my lab partner was had heard of it and we thought it might be interesting to record physiological signals inside of it and this obviously poses the problem of recording electrical signals inside of a saline environment which is next to impossible the difficulty of recording the EEG inside the tank was one of the big difficulties now at the time we would do by feedback training by feedback therapy was good for muscle relaxation it was good for temperature training for migraine brainwave alpha training was pretty much the only kind of brainwave training that was being done in the early 1970s and at that point we actually applied the EEG alpha training to alcoholics and had a grant for alpha training and alcoholics which was turned down by NIH in 1974 but they had quit funding any neurofeedback research in the US at that point so it was no real big surprise that we didn't get funded we also were playing around with restricted sensory input gonds fell glasses and headphones in a reclining chair kind of like you've seen in the hallway out here and for that we basically were using that for people that had high levels of anxiety and tension that could tolerate it because not everybody that was anxious could tolerate the lack of input some people didn't tolerate it really quite badly now we happen to be working at the time with a group of humanistic psychology folks and one of them had gone out to the east coast and learned a new technique called transactional analysis or TA and TA was the I'm okay you're okay psychology and I'm not a therapist I'm a brain geek so I didn't do any of the therapy end of this I just set up the tanks and techniques and all of this so I'm not into transactional analysis in fact my lab partner and I found that the therapist was actually extremely narcissistic and we had to do a little bit of a setup and try it on one of us first and the audio recording we did a tape loop to try and program in the taped message to replace a bad message someone would have in their head from early in their life and my lab partner and I decided we had to give this a try and we tried it on me unfortunately we used his voice on the tape which we didn't know if you get a tape played to you in the sensory deprivation environment you're going to hear that voice and so I had my lab partners voice were rattling around my head for a little over a week after a one-hour session and so we realized well it has to be the patient's voice and not only that you have to adjust the frequencies because you don't hear yourself like we do you hear yourself through bone conduction so you have a lot more base so we had to change the equalization to make it sound like you so the therapist would work with the people for months and come up with the script that was bad and they would come up with a re-script that they wanted to replace it with and at that point we did one session with Gonsfeld glasses to see whether they would tolerate the lack of input because some people didn't tolerate that the ones who could we ended up with five patients within the one year and in that was the last year we operated the lab and during that time these patients experienced only five sessions during one week and essentially when you get into the sensory deprivation environment your lack of input allows your brain to slow and what we observed is essentially that the general dominant what you would normally see as eyes closed EEG but in a tank you don't have input so you end up with the eyes closed EEG pattern even with your eyes open and it takes a little bit of time for that to happen but essentially you have an eyes open alpha state now as you're in the tank for a bit of time the EEG slows and you become theta dominant which is the state that you're in in the hypnagogic state as you're falling asleep or as you're waking up the colorful dreams that you might have and essentially that theta state was what we were shooting for if you think about it if you have a bad message that was put into you when you were very young it was put into you during a state that you're not in now as an adult state dependent learning you were in a slow theta state at the time until you achieve that same state you're not going to be able to overwrite the message so we were putting people in the tank recording their EEG now the EEG was recorded at the back of the head we glued the electrode on with collodion those of you don't know what collodion is it's essentially a protein dissolved in ether and you squirt it on and it glues on really solidly if you grab the wire and pull really hard you'd have some tissue on the end it wouldn't come off now if you move the wire it changes the recording so we not only glued on the electrode we would glue the wire on next to it so that if you reach the end of this of the wire it wouldn't tug and wiggle the electrode it would simply tug on the wire where it was attached to your scalp so once the electrode was glued on by the way two electrodes for any one electrode that you expected to record from because electrodes go bad and you don't want to take somebody out of the tank to fix an electrode to put them back in so two electrodes go on for any one that you want to record if it goes bad you simply switch the input to the amp and as the person sits there and relaxes their initial experience is that there's an underwater speaker playing pink noise and white noise is harsh you know pink noise is kind of a softer sound and essentially that noise kind of fades away if you hear that staticky noise long enough you just don't pay attention to it anymore and as your brain waves change to a slower pattern the EEG being picked up essentially at that point switched the these were analog filters and Schmidt triggers but the old analog technology everything's nice and digital now but essentially the tape would kick in the pink noise had fade out the your voice would fade in and the I'm okay message would come on now that I'm okay message was tailored to the individual and again I'm not the therapist and after 40 years I don't remember specifically what any one of those messages was but the messages would essentially play in the background if you focused on it if you paid attention to it your brain waves would speed up the message would turn off and you if you focused on it all you got was pink noise as soon as you quit focusing on it in went the tape message again so this was an involuntary reprogramming which is why back then when we finished with the five patients during that one year we didn't present any of this data be most of your from I've been around for the last day at most you're too young to remember the early 70s but the politics then was not that friendly and we didn't think that this brainwashing technique was good to hand out to the US government at the time so we didn't present any of our outcomes now they do stuff that makes this look like child's play and honestly it was we were kids you know just playing but essentially the big trick was to seal off the electrode from any of the water and that was done with petroleum jelly which now we can take out a lot better back then we didn't have the dawn dishwashing detergent which they use on geese and ducks that get in the grease and stuff well it works really well to take grease off we didn't have it back then so at the time I had a long ponytail I could sit on and it was pretty slick back at a ponytail because the grease was in it was hard to get out and I had spent hundreds of hours in the tank back then it was it was a really fun time my my my first experience before any of this hookup for the experiment happened my first time sitting in the tank you know my my partner was the one who knew about tanks at all and he had told me that this was going to be a fabulous trippy experience and you know the 1970s altered consciousness was a thing people aspired towards and I thought well you know why not let's give it a try and I got in the tank and I'm sitting there laying and well it's supposed to be some trippy thing oh this is a dark place that's wet and I'm an old swimmer so the wet wasn't anything new and I'm starting to get bored and I thought well gee this isn't anything like it was cracked up to be and then I started to see little bits of light and then I felt like there's a pressure underneath me and I start to spin around and around flying towards the light now we're talking this is more like what they were talking about so I you know it was a really fun initial experience and the ones after that were equally interesting not just sensorily but with respect to internal journeys knowing yourself I mean there's nobody else there in the tank who else are you gonna know so we basically enjoyed playing around in the tank for the few years we were there the lab ran from 72 to 75 and the last year was when we were doing this experiment but we had the tank constructed after our first six months of operation and we didn't really know what we were doing there weren't a lot of people around like you all and there weren't instruction books on how to do this and so by trial and error we ended up throwing all this together and at this point it could be done so much better than we did it I mean goodness you can see the quality of them the tanks is phenomenal the quality of the chemistry of the tanks is phenomenal as we heard a little earlier and believe me this tank you could smell the chlorine like a bad swimming pool when you walked into the into the lab so it's nice to have modern technology and and if this were to be done again the updated version of this would be a total rewrite of what we had been doing again the technology that we used was ancient by comparison the amplifiers were all made by us because you couldn't purchase good EEG amplifiers at the time so that this was essentially a homemade tank with a homemade amplifiers the analysis that we were doing was on mainframe computers all of the data ended up going to the mainframe computer but the triggering and filtering and everything was done right there we tracked the EEG spectrum using the IBM mainframe in Fargo North Dakota a hundred miles away from the state hospital by the way is anybody here from North Dakota and I don't see anybody here from North that's the way it goes very few folks there you know if this were to be redone the the big trick again was simply to get the dry contact for the electrode to keep it from shorting through the saltwater and from what I hear there's a 10 channel wireless system that may be dry now which it sounds like the good old times weren't the good old times they were the bad old times by comparison so especially if you flip back to those therapies that were done previously I mean we were a little leery of what we were doing with the patients but when you compare that to what had been done to patients for so long you know you can see why there was really no IRB at that moment now since then obviously people have seen the wisdom of regulating crazy researchers and what we did then probably couldn't have been done under an IRB now very easily you're talking about reprogramming somebody's pre-conscious subconscious material with a technique and you know you might not get a whole bunch of people lining up to approve that so I if somebody wishes to try to move this forward in current times I'd be happy to offer our experience as a pilot but good luck IRBs are there to protect the patient and they need lots of protection from the old days luckily the typical experience of a transactional analysis therapist is that you can talk to your client about the change and you they can get a they know what the message should be but it's really hard to get back down into those deep states to change it in the five sessions these people reported a total change in their life and there was a slide earlier as floating to change somebody's life and you know these people had a dramatic life changes the messages that they had before were totally supplanted they had their own message in there now not some bad message that had been put there and it took five sessions within one week to do it the transactional analysis therapists were working six months to a year to get anything even close to that and it never really took with some of the people these five people had a total change in their unconscious view of themselves by having the programming put in and let me share a brief anecdote about the my pilot experience the therapist who was a transactional analysis therapist who was referring the people to us my lab partner and I knew him really well and this is a very narcissistic person he's so full of himself and when my lab partner put me into the tank to do the experiment to see whether the the filters and trigger Schmidt triggers would change and whether this would be too much of a change I would orient to it or any of that we put in a tape in my lab partner's voice and as more of a joke we were just testing to see if that the sound worked and and all of that so it was like somebody saying check check check but we wanted to be a bit of a message my lab partner thought well I'm okay you're okay is the whole transactional analysis thing and given his opinion of the therapist he put the message I'm okay I'm okay it's all about me and that's what I heard for over a week you know in his voice so it literally puts it in in a way that you can't stop it you can't stop it if you you'd have to sit up and and stay focused so you didn't have any slow brain activity for it to have as a target that's the only way to have avoided it so it's totally an involuntary change now they you know they were voluntarily entering into the tank their therapist had worked with them for a long period of time to come up with a message that they needed and everything so this wasn't just grabbing somebody off the street and doing some brainwashing to put a message in but again we figured that that could be what somebody did with the technique so we just when we shut the lab down we shut it down and we didn't present this data anywhere to anybody and actually when I was called to talk about this here I was a bit surprised you know it's never been published it's hardly ever been talked about but Bryant is here somewhere I can't really see very well and he had heard stories from years and years of hanging out in the lab and he had kind of heard about this so last year he shared the anecdote and that's why I got invited no I'm fine with sharing it now in the 1970s we didn't publish it we didn't present it we didn't talk about it outside of the immediate people we're working with because we thought that this was a dangerous technique and I'd be happy again if somebody wants to do this kind of a thing and they need to talk about this with a regulatory body or something this is the pilot study so I'd be happy to talk about it or write it up if somebody needs it for something but other than that it's just an old story from the early 70s and it's an old story at this point the the tank is gone the lab is gone when in 1975 I moved to California to start manufacturing biofeedback devices and I got out of that business fairly quickly you know how to make a small fortune in biofeedback start with a big one yeah so you know luckily the float business works very very well manufacturing for a niche market as soon as you sell into the niche and you saturate the market your sales are gone so you know I quickly went into the service industry instead of the sales and that worked very nicely I've been doing EEG services for ever I was the first tech in the world to be certified in computer analysis of the brain's electrical patterns so if anybody wants to get a hold of me for purposes of sharing this for a regulatory hurdle reason or something feel free to get a hold of me other than that this probably unless it's to help somebody out I probably am not going to spend the time to write this up most of the time at this point I'm doing high-level brain analysis to predict medication success and failure in psychiatry and I have quite a bit of writing about the genetic basis of the EEG that endophenotypes identified in the EEG so I'm tied up with a lot of other stuff but if it would it would benefit somebody that's trying to get this kind of a thing done again I'd be happy to help out but I don't have any particular need to write this up myself unless it would help somebody