 It's an unusual experience, being on the first board of directors doing the float conference was a very exciting experience. One of the things that happened was there was a decision in terms of the program that we would do a tribute, it was sort of suggested by Peter Soodfeld who is not here, to one of the early scientists who worked in the field of sensory deprivation, his name was Marvin Zuckerman PhD, and his last name wasn't PhD, Marvin Zuckerman. And Marvin was a very interesting guy. He took from his work in sensory deprivation an awareness of the people that were coming to basically participate in the experiments and an awareness from his friends and other people around him and an awareness from himself and developed a theory of a personality trait called sensation seeking. So we're going to do a tribute to Marvin, hopefully give you a little idea about what this man was, give you an idea of what sensation seeking is, help you think about it maybe in terms of lucky strike, you'll see what I mean there, as we all recover from lucky strike. And get to hear Marvin in his own words about some certain areas. So Marvin was born in 1928 and he passed away in 2018. He had cardiac arrest actually on his way to vote at 90 years old. He was one of the first waiver researchers who studied sensory deprivation. Many of you may not be aware of the names of any of these researchers, some of you in psychology may be. There were men like Donald Hebb, John Zubek, Peter Sudfeld actually was a young graduate student when many of these scientists were working in this area. Marvin became internationally recognized expert in this concept of sensation seeking. And his interest in this area led him to study not only the personality trait itself but things in sports and vocations, social, sexual, marital relationships, tastes in art, the media, fantasy and humor, habits of smoking, drinking, drug use, he actually worked with drug users and eating and his research also extended into the areas of psychopathology and an area that we're all familiar with from floating stress. He completed his bachelor's degree at New York University's Washington Square College of Arts and Sciences and went on eventually to become a research associate and an assistant professor at Indiana University's Medical Center. He also worked at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia and his work there where he was working with sensory deprivation and hypnosis really began to get him interested in this concept of sensation seeking. Now after a brief ten years at Brooklyn College and Adelphi University he joined the faculty of the University of Delaware in 1969 and he stayed there until he became professor emeritus in the later 2000s. He's a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science and he was a member of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, an area that some of the current researchers are probably also members of and the American Psychomatic Society and the Eastern Psychological Association. He's offered several books as you can see up there as well as 170 articles and reviews in professional journals. The book I am most familiar with is sensation seeking beyond the optimal level of arousal and it was a book that I read fairly early on in my investigations with flotation and not something that I ended up utilizing in our work but it was something that really primed my thinking about what was going on and who's interested in coming in for the experiments and one way of thinking about this I think as you go on and I talk a little bit about this who are the people coming into our float centers. So what is sensation seeking? It's a personality trait. Person searches for experiences and feelings that are varied, novel, complex, and intense with a readiness to take physical, social, legal, and financial risks for the sake of such experiences which sounds more like people that open float centers may be the financial risk than necessarily the people coming in. Real and adventure seeking is one of the key sub traits which is a desire for outdoor activities involving unusual sensation and risks such as skydiving, scuba diving, high speed driving, and flying. Experience seeking is probably the one most closely related to flotation. Referring to new sensory or mental experiences through unconventional choices also including psychedelic experiences, social nonconformity, and the desire to associate with unconventional people like Lucky Strike, like Flux, like Oskar, like Graham, yes, like us. Disinhibition, preference of out of control activities such as wild parties, drinking, we'll leave off the illegal activities. Boredom susceptibility, intolerance of repetition or boring people, and restlessness in such conditions, often desiring and often having, often desiring new sensation to kind of move the mind. In 2004 he kind of produced his own autobiographical work and what he concluded was over the last several decades I formulated a psycho-biological model for personality because along the way what they began to discover is this sensation seeking trait was highly tied to genetic factors. Without going into all the genetics of it, it has to do with the long form of a certain dopamine gene. So dopamine is a very interesting substance in our system but it tends to drive novelty, the desire for novelty. So in terms of his observation of the people coming in for sensory deprivation experiences in the early areas of study, while working, this is from his book, while working at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia, I developed a hunch that sensation seekers might be overrepresented among volunteers for unusual experiments like sensory deprivation and hypnosis. Our procedure was to advertise for volunteers in student newspapers, offering a rate of pay that we had hoped would eliminate any selective volunteering. When our subjects arrived and passed the front desk, someone in the front would call us saying, one of your subjects is coming down the hall. How did they always know it was one of our subjects? The answer was that many of them looked odd to the secretaries. They had very long hair before it was fashionable among the young. They often came in carrying motorcycle helmets or dressed in some outrageous fashion by the standards of the secretaries. Here's something I had to say about high sensation seekers. Although high sensation seekers become restless in short-term sensory deprivation, they do not seem to experience much stress. In longer-term isolation, high sensation seekers are not only capable of enduring sensory deprivation, but seem willing to repeat the experience. Apparently, they found something of interest in the experience that did not depend on external stimulation. The correlations with the primary process measures suggest that there was an internal experience, a primary process thinking that was positive in nature. Sensory deprivation may have represented a trip akin to self-exploration through the use of psychedelic drugs. So in his own words, variation stimulation almost as much as we need food and water and so forth. The basic need and deprivation of this kind of stimulation led to some very uncomfortable states. So we ask, is there a personality trait that some people need more stimulation or more variety or intensity of stimulation than others? That's when we developed our first sensation-seeking scale. And subsequently, that expanded, became the main focus of my research, is the, we were surprised by how many things were affected by this trait, sensation-seeking. And then we got interested in the biological basis, the genetic and biological basis. And here again, we had some very interesting findings pointed to the fact that this is a very fundamental trait with biological roots. There is, particularly for one type of sensation-seeking, we call it experience-seeking, seeking sensation through the mind and the senses, one type of experience-seeking. And sensation-seekers, high sensation-seekers are more prone to engage in divergent thinking. These are, they don't think in the conventional ways. They tend to think along unconventional lines. So they, and this is a part of creativity. Creativity is the ability to think and do things in a way that haven't been done before, part of novelty-seeking, you might say. So in a sense, they tend to be more creative if they have ability to be creative. And we think of creativity, we think of abilities. Many of the people who, on the streets who are drug dealers, they're very creative. They're creative criminally. They think of new ways of doing the things, you know. But we don't call that creativity, even though it is creativity. So it depends on what, if you have the ability to pursue your divergent thinking along lines that result in the production of something, whether it's in business or art or science, you know, you have the ability, plus the sensation-seeking, that makes you more creative in what you're doing. Well, as I say, it came out of a natural course out of my research in sensory deprivation, which is the opposite of sensation-seeking. But I must admit, perhaps I was at the time in my life, you know. I looked at people, friends who are high sensation-seekers, and I looked at them with some kind of, I used them as kind of a prototype when I was designing this straight. But what would they, what are the things they do, what do they like, you know, as kind of prototype for writing items from my scale? Now it didn't, of course, it went, you know, we had other ways than once we had these items. We have to have the idea, it was a new idea for a trait. It was a new, which no one was really measuring at that time, okay. So to get my idea, I looked around there, you know, and what people were doing. And I said, in my first form of this test, we depended on, I like to do, we say, would you like to do this? Like, would you like to do skydiving, you know? Because we assume most people aren't doing it. But the mere wanting to think, thought they would like to do it, is something that characterizes a higher sensation-seeker. Okay, whereas a lower sensation says, no, that's crazy. Why would I want to do that? You know, that's dangerous. So in what people might like to do, well, it's our first items for our thrill and adventure-seeking sub-scale, okay. Then we asked, well, what about, we don't know, one of the other aspects. You know, we looked at sex, drugs, and we asked questions about, would you like to do this? Would you like to do that? Or in the case of sex, what do you like to do? Or what are your attitudes toward it? Are they permissive attitudes? Those are the sort of things that we looked at. So that's how I got the initial items. We have different kinds of items now that don't include content, just the need for excitement. I would say to be a publishing professor teaching, you can't be too high. Because if you're too high, you know, you're out doing other things. You're not doing research and writing. So, but I would say I was higher than the average professor, okay. Now recently that became a moot point when they discovered this gene, the dopamine-4 receptor gene. Now I was in England, by this time I was, you know, getting on an age. It was my last sabbatical. But I had the chance, I was in the genetics lab there, and I had the chance to have my own DNA examined for the presence of this particular gene, the form of the gene. So I did, and I found I had the long form of the gene, which is the type associated with sensation seeking. But as I explained to my colleagues there, my sensation seeking, that by the time you were 60, my sensation seeking was confined to writing the top of the double-decker bus in London, you know. Because age, you know, you may have a gene for something, but this expression is affected by other biological factors related to age. Normal, like the rise in MAO with age, which reduces sensation seeking. So the rise of MAO for, just for your information, MAO happens to be a substance that's flowing around in all of us, that actually affects all our dopamine, it breaks it down. And so as that rises with age, we have to leave Lucky Strike, the older ones of us, earlier than the younger ones who can stay till two in the morning and close the place down. So Marvin Zuckerman is part of our history. Somebody that we really owe a lot to in terms of understanding both the effects of sensory deprivation and some of the personality aspects of people who are attracted to our flotation tanks. So Marvin, we thank you and thank you very much for this.