 Good morning everybody. I can't see you but I assume there are people out there. The light is shining in my eyes. Thank you Ashkan. Previous flotation conferences had also invited me to give a talk and what I used to talk about is the history of rest, primarily research but also applications. And last year I talked about how interest in this approach grew, diminished, grew, diminished and now is growing again starting in the 1950s with the invention of the what was then called the Perceptual Isolation Chamber by Donald Hebb, a professor in Montreal. There was a burst of interest in the 1950s and 1960s and then it started to drop off but in the 1970s when John Lilly came in with the flotation tank it exploded again and was very hot in the 1970s and part of the 80s and then for various reasons interest diminished. Just at the time that it started to disappear again there were scientific reviewers of the literature on rest who said that the results were quite interesting but they were not very solid so that there were you know one or two studies on this and one or two studies on that but you didn't really have enough information to be sure about what the conclusions ought to be and I've been thinking about that and one of the things that I thought about is what areas are there in which that's not the case in which there is enough research that we can draw pretty reliable conclusions and that reminded me of a talk by Donald Rumsfeld whom you may remember secretary of defense under President Bush and he said what I've quoted up there about things we know we know things we know we don't know and things we don't know we don't know. He was greeted with laughter. People thought that was a pretty silly comment and I thought about it and I have concluded that he was right. There are things that we're sure we know some of which may actually be true some of which may not. There are things that we're aware that we don't know. There are some effects of flotation rest for example and effects of all kinds of other procedures where we're not we don't really know what what the outcome is and then there are things out there that we've never thought of and if those things are the things we don't know we don't know. So apply to flotation rest to the research literature. I came up with the following criteria for assigning particular bits of knowledge to one or the other of those categories. So what we know are the are the effects that have been researched by a number of studies that have controls that have a large enough sample to draw conclusions from and that have quantitative data not just impressions or anecdotes. You have to remember there's an old saying that the plural of anecdote is not data it's just more anecdotes. Then there are things that we may know that we think we know but we're not really sure. So there have been a few studies perhaps there are some data but not enough studies not enough data not enough good controls not enough measures and so on to be firm in claiming yes we know that. Then there are things we don't know and here's where the anecdotes and self reports come in and observations by researchers or by people who operate float tanks that is we have reports from people that this happens but we don't really have data about it and I think we can split the results of the flotation literature into two very large categories. One is things that we know we know and we may know but there's this whole other thing that we are somehow aware of but we're not really sure of how to measure it how to evaluate it and a lot of that is the kind of deep self self inside semi mystical experiences out of body contact with extraterrestrials and all kinds of other things like that. Now we know there are lots of people who report a variety of such altered states effects but the data on that are missing. So those are things that we have an inkling about but we don't really know it and then there is that vast possibly vast amount of stuff that we don't know we don't know. If you don't know that you don't know you can't even ask questions because you don't know what to ask them about right. So for the purposes of this talk I thought I would take a look at the phenomena that belong to these four different categories as regards flotation rest. Now I should tell you this is not a systematic exhaustive literature search I didn't do that for review but I indicated where such a review might be useful and where we might need more research before we even do the review and I think in the ones that I categorize as what we know we know somebody ought to do some meta-analyses which is a mathematical statistical technique for combining the results of lots of different studies and determining just how reliable those results are across studies to see whether to what extent the results are consistent across particular studies. Nobody's ever done that with flotation rest and I think now there are probably enough studies to be worth trying to do that. The reason why this is a good time to do that is that there is this sudden growth maybe gradual but fast growth of interest in flotation. Somebody said this morning that unlike before when they mention flotation or flotation rest to a random person more and more people say oh yes I've heard about that and I said and more and more when I say I mentioned that to somebody they're likely to say oh yeah I floated. So there is a growth of interest out there not only among the people who are professionally involved but among the general public. So it's a good time to do the review from that point of view. It may also spark a renewed interest among researchers. There are a bunch of new researchers in the field nowhere near as many as there were originally but it seems to be coming back in that regard as well and in the categories that I'm going to show you there are two subcategories one is research from previous years and one is more recent research. But the other thing is that I've also done a kind of random surfing of the web for claims that are being made for flotation and some of these are made by tank operators some of them are made by people who have floated many of them are made by media people magazine writers radio commentators and so on who read some of the literature and maybe have floated once and then their experts and they tell us what it's all about. Now I've mentioned previously that Neil Miller who is one of the towering figures in behavioral health and medical psychology once said that what that we should be bold in what we try but cautious in what we claim and I think we are bold in what we try I'm not so sure that all of us are cautious in what we claim so this is kind of a warning the warning is that people who are enamored with floating or people who do it for a living or people who just find it very interesting should be very cautious in what they say it it can do partly because you might mislead people who don't experience the things that you tell them they should partly because we don't really know the boundaries of what flotation can accomplish and what it can't on a regular basis on a consistent basis and partly because in some of the claims that I've seen there are assertions that are not really well-founded but that are verging on medical advice and if you give medical advice without a stable solid research foundation you're opening yourself up to legal problems okay false advertising is usually or frequently overlooked but when it comes to medical treatments all you have to do is find one or two people who say well we were led to believe that such and such is going to happen that will improve our health and it didn't and you're in big trouble so that's one of that's one of the reasons why I wanted to do this review so as to give the community some idea of what it is safe to claim and what is perhaps less safe or more risky so here's what we know about therapeutic applications of flotation okay I'm not going to read the slide to you you can read faster than I can talk anyway but you can see the major categories reduced pain and reduced pain from a variety of sources improved muscle tone and muscle control and reduced stress and tension and all of these as you can see from this is just a random sampling of the literature it's not an exhaustive review all of these have considerable backing from actual studies fair number of studies and there are many more than these both in the early days or early years of flotation research and more recently okay so I think we're we're fairly sure that we can claim these as consistent effects not universal not everybody gets these benefits but most people do here's what we know about the effects of flotation on behavioral health there are fewer studies on this but still enough to draw pretty good conclusions people who are burnt out stressed out at work after flotation there have been some studies showing that they can get back to work and they feel better about it and so on stress management and relaxation not just floating when you have a particular stressful experience or stress reaction but more generally over a long period of time reduced blood pressure and the reduced blood pressure is both among normal tensors people have normal blood pressure and people who are are hypertensive and there are studies showing that rest is an active treatment methodology not just a placebo that has an effect because people expect to have an effect so that's good that we know also we also know that rest has positive effects on various kinds of performance some of it cognitive creativity memory recall recognition improved athletic performance on a number of different sports and again this has both a lot of old research and some new research very consistent and enhanced learning and recall of what you've just learned so again this I think you can claim safely as being reliable effects of flotation now here's what we may know that is we have some data but perhaps not enough to be very firm about claiming these outcomes fibromyalgia study is going on now presumably in the near future we will have enough to move it from this category into the what we know category I pay personality pilot studies but not really enough data to draw firm conclusions one thing that we really need to do research on is what it is that flotation rest is good for and what it is that chamber rest is good for I was very pleased to see that there will be a talk about chamber rest tomorrow in the conference I think we have neglected that ignored it and I think that's a mistake because it is very useful in some applications and then the whole issue of altered state self-hypnosis deep in meditation I have a very good anecdote about meditation also but it's not a datum so that's what we may know here's what else we may know pleasant memories people report more pleasant memories in the tank than they do when they're just reminiscing normal environments they are happier and if they're uncomfortable physically they may benefit from floating and there have been a few studies about of pregnant women who report after floating that the discomforts of pregnancy have been eased by being there but these are anecdotal reports nobody's ever really tried to systematically look into these claims now here's what we don't know we don't know why it works now some of the physical effects may be because of the epsom salts that's kind of disappointing because then why bother with all the other stuff the darkness and the silence and so what interests let people soak in it epsom salts so we're most of us are hoping that there's more to it than that but just exactly what there is to it is a matter that theorists have been arguing about discussing for decades and there are many multiple competing theories mine is the best but others are pretty good too no I should have said that Ashkan said we're not competitive we're friendly and peaceful so they're all good okay we don't know as I said what is what are the best things for treatment by flotation and treatment by chamber rest and that would be good to to find out partly because it might encourage float tank operators to also think about adding a rest chamber to their facility if we find out that you can put people in rest chambers and treat things that flotation doesn't work on that could add a significant new tool to your treatment procedures and then there are questions about how long should one float to get the best results how many times should you float to get the best results how many times in a particular week or month or whatever you should do you should float to get the best result we don't know that there have been a few explorations of it but nothing really very convincing now what we don't know we don't know so I want to thank everybody who was involved in my research as it says I've been doing rest research for about 35 years actually some closer to 40 but it's been fun and a lot of people participated in it in one way or another helped me help themselves and so forth and I am grateful to all of them if you want any further information like specific references of all those references that I put on the screen get in touch with me