 It'll be a talk in which what I try to do is pull together some threads about where we started, what we did, where stress research has gone since we were involved in it, and maybe where float research could go in the future. What I know is that we're very, very fortunate as a float community that at LIBR, Justin Feinstein is being funded to start a research center, because we started in 1978, and soon after we started, Peter Südfeld started doing work, Reid Berrabas started doing work, actually a little bit before we started, Jeff Bruno and the people at Lawrence University started doing work. And those were the people that carried on the work, along with a few others, from 78 till about 98 or 2000, when most of us sort of pulled out of doing research in floatation. Every reason that happened was the difficulty in us getting funding. And today, to do real research at any university, you need serious money. Most of that money is going to come from the federal government, and the reason you need serious money from the federal government is the federal government not only gives you money to do the research, but then they give anywhere from 40 to 50 percent of the amount that they just gave you to the university to pay for all the labs and all the costs associated with doing the research. So for Justin to be able to have this opportunity, for him to have a research center that's open to this, for them to build, to be able to get a column to build a really nice tank system, you know, I think that's just a wonderful opportunity. When we started out, we were interested in seeing what happens to the stress response. We felt, I mean, basically I was working with John Turner, who's a physiologist, and John got excited about the idea of floatation, not just because he wanted to crawl in the tank and explore consciousness spaces, but because he thought that the tank may be an ideal place to do physiological baselining, that a person's system will move towards a physiological baseline as they lie in that environment. Primarily because it's a totally supportive environment, there's no need for any response. In terms of the amount of external input, you're not only cutting down light and sound, but you're cutting down all the information to the skin. You're stopping the system from having to adjust its temperature, metabolism. All of a sudden, we're in a really, really quiet environment, which all of you know. So we started with the peripheral stress response. We sort of focused on the fight-flight part of that, and the fight-flight part of that is driven by the autonomic nervous system. And we're really looking at aspects of that on the left, the sympathetic nervous system, which is the alarm portion of the autonomic nervous system. And we wanted to measure various types of things that would tell us what happens to this when they're floating in the tank. We believe it's going to be a physiological baseline, prove us right, please. So one of the areas that we looked at was blood pressure, and one of the first studies that we ever published had to do with actually blood pressure changes in people with essential hypertension. The thing about blood pressure is driven by constriction of the blood vessels. That's called peripheral resistance, and it's also driven by the force coming out of the heart. It's driven by both the heart rate and what's called the stroke volume and the amount of force that the heart is pushing. Our theory was that's going to reduce in this environment. And we did before and after, well, here's a guy who floats. That's me floating in our first tank, and as you can see, that's not a crude tank. That's a well-built tank. That came from Samadhi Tank Company, but it doesn't look like these here. But it was fine, and we didn't have any, fortunately we didn't have any problem with IRRB. They were easy in terms of letting us do this research. And that's my arm, and that's John taking blood pressure. So that's the low technology we had at the time to monitor blood pressure before and after the float. We didn't have anything that we could basically have in the tank while they were floating. We were pretty satisfied that what we were getting out of the experience in terms of the physiology change of the floatation tank was a reduction in the fight-flight response. We monitored some other things, peripheral temperature, which is sort of interesting. We know what the temperature of the water is, 94.5 degrees. We kept it at 94.5 degrees. Most people's peripheral temperature would go to 95 or 95.5 degrees. So the blood flow to the skin was, all the breaks on the blood flow to the skin sort of go away, and you have, you know, actually a warmer temperature in your skin than the tank water itself. So we were sure the fight-flight system was quieting down, but there's another system that's key to the stress response, and it's called the HPA axis. That stands for the hypothalamic pituitary axis. The hypothalamus, which is part of the brain, secretes hormones, or if we want to call them, we could say they're neurotransmitters, into the pituitary, and the pituitary sends those out into the rest of the body. They hit the adrenal glands, and the adrenal glands would release cortisol. They also release a number of other hormones. Cortisol had been decided at that point in stress research as the gold standard of the stress response. Measure cortisol. If it's cortisol is going up, it's a stress response. If it's staying plateaued, it's not a stress response. And the regulation of cortisol is actually pretty complicated, because we have a rhythm that normally occurs with cortisol, where our cortisol peaks in the morning, and it begins to come down during the day, and then as we go to sleep, it hits sort of below and stays low, and then starts up again. So that's the daily rhythm of cortisol, and that's controlled by one part of the brain. The stress response sort of bounces along that. So you get little pulses every time you're dealing with a stressor of cortisol. So what we did with cortisol was begin to look, we tried first within sessions, but we thought the half-life of cortisol and the length of the sessions, we're not really going to see much change during the sessions. We're going to have to look across sessions. And we actually set up a series of studies and looked across sessions, and we compared it to control conditions, and we found cortisol went down in pupils that floated. In other words, they started out at one level, and across a number of floats, their cortisol started to come down, and it tended to stay below the original baseline, even during a brief follow-up period. So there was some sort of process going on in the floaters that actually they were having fewer stress responses. They were emitting less cortisol. And when we take a look at that brain system, we see the adrenocorticotropic hormone that triggers glucocorticoids and noradrenaline and adrenaline, which we all know are activators. And then we see all those arrows pointing over to actually immune cells. So one of the things that began to happen later in our research is a hot topic became the interaction between the stress response and the immune response. The immune response was sort of thought of as being an automatic system, not really connected to the nervous system. Now it's not thought of that way at all. As we realize, not only do direct factors coming from the nervous system actually trigger the immune system and do the hormones act to trigger the immune system, and usually cortisol inhibits the immune system. It doesn't really make it, it doesn't usually accelerate it. It mostly inhibits it. The immune system emits things, cytokines, that feed back to the brain and begin to affect the way the brain functions. And so today, if you're in the business of research, one really hot area is inflammation. And if you're in the business of alternative medicine, one really hot area is inflammation. So along the way, we started out playing with the stress response, and along came this theory of allostasis. And allostatic load is a concept that goes a little bit beyond the normal thinking of stress responding. Instead of thinking about one single system being in homeostasis, it thinks of multi-systems, all the systems in the body. And whether or not those systems are operating in a way that they can respond to a stressor in a normal way as on the top, and then come through recovery, or whether allostatic load gets triggered by a situation where you have too many stressors, constantly hit with too many stressors, and it pushes your system up, an inability to adapt to stressors and drives the system up, or you've got a faulty system it doesn't recover to begin with, or it doesn't respond to begin with. And so if you look at cortisol, that can be seen all the time, because cortisol in a way does that sort of thing. I would really like to see future research with flotation looking in a multi-system way at what happens to the stress response across time. We were looking at one endpoint, cortisol. When they do allostatic load research, they can look at five or seven different endpoints. Some of those including inflammation endpoints, some including other immune endpoints, some including cortisol, and possibly long-term views of epinephrine and norepinephrine. Every time we did studies, we tended to look at one endpoint. And that's what I would like to see different. And part of this talk is my own ramblings about what would be great to see in new stress research since we have the opportunities. What began to emerge out of our studies was, one, stress response reduced during flotation. And most of the people are aware of those studies that we've done. Stress levels reduced after repeated floating. And that cortisol was an example of it, blood pressures, an example of it. Then we got to the point where we were sort of guessing that what's going on here may be a re-regulation of the stress response. Now at the time we were doing the work, there was a psychologist from Yale, Gary Schwartz, who had come up with a theory called dysregulation. And it was a theory that was based on cybernetics, and it said, look, we're just a hierarchy of lots of negative feedback loops. And as long as those loops are connected, we're functioning well. If those loops get distorted, disconnected, et cetera, well, we start to have disorder in the system. And that disorder in the system is reflected by changes in the body, such as essential hypertension or other types of disease. We were very interested in Gary's ideas. John went and did a sabbatical with Gary. And so we started thinking, well, we've looked at cortisol, but we really haven't looked to see if there's some sort of internal regulation of cortisol going on. In other words, we look at mean levels, but we haven't really looked at changes in the variability of cortisol across the sessions. What if we do? So in the next study we did, we did our usual type of study with cortisol, but we not only looked at mean levels, we took a look at actually the variation within individuals across the entire treatment time. And what we found was the variability went down. And we interpreted that to mean that a re-regulation was occurring in the stress response. And the cortisol process was actually becoming tighter so that the person's response and then recovery was happening quicker. Now that's a bit of a speculation. It's a heck of a jump, actually. But we got it published in the Journal of Applied Physiology. So, you know, and for, in my own thinking, more work of that kind, looking at what type of re-regulation of stress responding would be great in the future. So we then, we're dealing with a lot of other things and we started to get into clinical stuff. We wrote this funny little theoretical paper in this wonderful journal called Floating, which was published by the Flotation Tank Association, Lee Glenn, I'm doing the bit for it. And in that paper we really got wildly sort of off on our speculative ideas to say, okay, we know floating decreases physiological rousal. And we also know that floating is manipulating attention inward. Now we, the way we justified that in the article is both a study that we ran in which we looked at changes in heart rate and based on whether people are getting biofeedback or not getting biofeedback and whether they were in the tank or outside the tank and people in the tank getting biofeedback had better control of their heart rates than people outside the tank. There was also a study that was done many, many years ago by Jay Shirley, who was one of the originators of water-based sensory isolation in which they didn't do it in a water-based tank, but they did it in a chamber and what they looked at was single motor unit control and that people in a chamber had better single motor unit control than people who were outside in a normal environment if they were getting biofeedback for a single muscle motor unit. So those are both indications that there is better interoceptive perception and that can lead to better control in the tank. So that manipulates attention inward and then we took the giant leap to say that repeated floating facilitates the manipulation of appraisal to acceptance. Actually we didn't exactly say that in the paper, but I said it now. So mindfulness, okay, so appraisal process just very quickly, this is sort of a stress, a model of stress that's been used by the cognitive folks in psychology, Richard Lazarus. A key portion of it has to do with whether or not we experience something as stressful is how we end up appraising it. Half of that appraisal is unconscious. We're not even, it's not a conscious thing. We call it appraisal, but our system is programmed to say threat. The other half of the appraisal is conscious. That's the part where you think about something and you think about how dangerous it is and that sort of thing and you go, can I respond to it or not and if I can, it's not going to cause a stress response. We began to pause, I mean basically we were thinking, look, when you get in the flotation tank, what happens? Your tension goes inward. Is that comfortable? Has anybody ever been in a flotation tank where their tension went inward and they weren't comfortable? At least one person too. Well I know a lot of people and including myself at times. However, repeated floating will tend to shift that experience. We really, one of the ways we found this out also was that when we were starting to do experiments and we were measuring people's physiology in the first and second session, it was a lot different than in the fourth or fifth session. They need, we traditionally did not start measuring people now until four sessions into the experiment because they were still sort of responding to the environment and not necessarily sure about it and maybe responding to internal dialogue and other things while they were floating. So I think one of the things that we really need to explore is the degree to which my thoughts may be true and that it actually does manipulate that appraisal process. Another thing I think most float center operators may notice, that a lot of people will come, get in the tank, have come out, tell you they've had the most fantastic experience in the world and they're not come back ever. Okay, and I think that's the same sort of thing. My thinking about it is they probably never really gotten the tank. So one of the things that's going on now is that basically in stress research there's a lot of work in paying attention to how the prefrontal cortex and the cortex of the brain controls the lower centers of the brain, the amygdala. I think Loretta Young talked about this in her talk and other people have talked about it and I really think with fMRI and other things we're going to be able to look at more of that. One of the things that I've learned a lot about is PTSD in the research that I've been conducting. I'm part of a very large research project looking at combat related mental illness in the Ohio National Guard and being part of it I started reading many of the different articles written about it and started getting interested in the brain changes that they're seeing in PTSD. And essentially what they're seeing is that areas of the cortex are not effectively inhibiting lower centers, especially the amygdala in people with PTSD. And these alterations actually show structural changes in people with PTSD. Now nobody's certain yet whether these structural changes are caused by the trauma or whether those structural changes were there before. But people are trying to figure that stuff out. This sort of made me think about the overall stress response which if we go back we're talking about the same thing and this is not talking about PTSD. This is just talking about what happens normally in stress. And this is sort of a picture also of then the types of changes, the areas in the brain that actually change functioning when a person has PTSD. And I would like to see some important work looking at whether or not the float tank offers something in a treatment regimen for PTSD. What we know is that treatment for PTSD today that is most effective is something called exposure. And what that really means is we expose people to the traumatic event. Most of the time the exposure is done in a narrative way in a therapeutic relationship. It's also done in virtual reality. You may have seen a video or YouTube or a news story where they used virtual reality exposure but the tank in many ways I think of it as an exposure vehicle. We expose ourselves to ourselves when we go in there. There's no way to get away from it. And it's that the repeated floating, well it's repeated exposure. And as we repeatedly expose, we begin to reappraise it, reappraise the experience as safe. Reappraise ourselves as safe. That's a big thing. I think we call that acceptance. So not only do they use exposure for PTSD but they use exposure for phobias and OCD. And many people would argue that all forms of psychotherapy are a kind of exposure. You're sitting there talking about something, you usually go somewhere when you're talking about something painful and you're working through it and you do it two or three times and then you sort of let it go, you accept it. There was a little bit of talk about something called the default mode network. I think a couple people mentioned that yesterday. So the default mode network are portions of the brain that when they go into operation internal tasks such as daydreaming, envisioning the future, retrieving memories, ah, you ever have that experience of the float tank? Essentially a floatation tank or a sensory reduced environment is going to trigger the default mode network. It's going to begin to drive that. Or if you just sit and close your eyes, it's going to begin to drive it. The tank's going to drive it more powerfully. However, the default mode network doesn't operate all on its own. There's something called the task positive network and the task positive network is what we utilize to pay attention to something, to work on something. And what's very interesting is that generally the default mode network and the task positive network inhibit each other. So when we go task positive, we don't default, and when we go to fault, we don't task positive. However, there's some ideas now, and actually I think I have a little picture here that sort of illustrates the difference on an FMRI. There's mind wandering without meta awareness, meaning I'm just letting my mind wander. And then here's mind wandering with meta awareness. Now what that means is I'm letting my mind sort of wander, but I'm attending to it. I'm attending to my own mind wandering. What does that sound like? That sound like meditation? I think it does. And I think it also sounds a little bit like what can happen in the floatation tank. So in going forward, what I would really like to see is more investigation and more investigation looking beyond the notion of relaxation, maybe to the notion of exposure. And I know that Justin Feinstein is planning to do some experiments that are going to use some provoking techniques to see how much it probes the internal inter-receptive perception and also use exposure in the tank and amplify exposure in the tank. But also I think we should look at whether just repeating, repeated floating for certain types of people proves to be an exposure technique. I'd love to find out what the fMRI changes that are associated with before and after a float, both in a novel floater, the first time floater, and somebody who's floated repeatedly for 20 sessions or 15 sessions, really learned to float. What are the fMRI changes that are associated with repeated floating when you're not floating, but when you're doing a task, when you're being asked to do something in an fMRI unit that's going to challenge your frontal lobes, that's going to challenge the ability to inhibit your amygdala? And then what are the effects of repeated floating on task-positive inhibition of default mode during self-focus? In other words, is there something about repeated floating that exercises these two guys? Not just one, but both of them. And does the balance and the way they operate begin to change over time? I think we have great opportunities today. I've never been more excited to see not only the technologies of the float tanks, but the fact that a brain institute, a brain institute that's really going to look at things with the best technology available, is going to begin to provide us more information about what really happens in floating. And I really hope they find that floating does promote acceptance, because I think that would be good for all of us. Thank you.