 Based on things that I've been thinking about as I've been listening to the other presenters One is that it seems to me that the whole rest and flotation field Can be divided into two major threads or major major approaches One is what you might call from the inside out That is people who have had various kinds of experiences while floating or With experiences analogous to floating And have gained various kinds of subjective reactions like, you know increased self-understanding Some new connection cognitive connection or emotional connection with the universe things like that Which they then extrapolate and and conclude that this is kind of a general Effect of the experience The other approach is from the outside in and that is people who may or may not have floated But have some ideas about what the effects of severely reduced external stimulation might be on the brain and on other parts of the human organism and then Do tests to find out? Whether they're right So in the first case the ideas come from the experience in the second case What you look at is what you think might be relevant might be affected Not on the basis of what you experienced while you were floating necessarily But on the basis of some other theoretical standpoint Secondly, I want to point out. I'm not going to talk about the entire history of reduced stimulation and Just to remind you briefly that history goes back far beyond any kind of research or even Systematized experience with rest that is we know it from ancient Greece The Oracle of Delphi for example people who consulted her went through a reduced stimulation experience and in many other times and cultures people did that for gaining self understanding or for Establishing contact with supernatural beings God Spirits guidance guiding animals angels and so on and for example the Major figures in the major religions of our time all experienced their Enlightenment or their contact with the being that gave them their new religious ideas under conditions of reduced stimulation whether in a cave Like Muhammad on a mountaintop like Moses and Jesus in a forest under a tree like the Buddha and so on This is a well-known stimulus for spiritual thought and connection The third thing I want to say is how ironic it is that some of our Going from the inside out and going from the outside in Experiences connect in interesting ways for example a couple of people have mentioned that In flotation and in other forms of rest as well the Right hemisphere of the brain Becomes more active and more dominant or at least less oppressed or suppressed by the left brain The left half of the brain then is usual. Well, how can we document that? Okay, but from the inside out we know that people in rest have creative ideas They have vivid dreams and daydreams They have free-flowing thoughts and so on All anecdotally, but if you want to support that with evidence You have to call on the left brain to design experiments to show that in flotation The rest brain does the left brain doesn't work that well It's an interesting bit of irony Okay, now I'm going to tell you what I was planning to tell you I'm going to go through the history of not only flotation rest but Chamber rest as well from the invention of both in the 1950s until the present time and In each case I'm going to give you if I'm going to go through a decade by decade And in each case I'm going to give you the decade and what was happening during that period in the methodology of rest and in what was being looked at by scientists who are using the technique I've got some illustrations of the facilities that were then used then I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the results and then I'm I've got a set of slides that are entitled In in terms of why wasn't the technique more acceptable in general and specifically to mainstream scientists and I think that's an important issue because if the if the Movement is to develop as well as it might It's important to get the scientists on your side and I know there are some people who don't believe that Who think that the inside-out technique is sufficient? But for example, we just heard that flotation providers are not qualified to treat But wouldn't it be nice if the people who are qualified to treat to treat would refer their patients to flotation providers and That could happen in a lot of cases because we know that flotation is helpful in a whole series of symptoms and disorders That it could be used to help the treatment, but it isn't because the scientists don't believe it so onward 1950s and 60s is when it all started as you probably know and It was invented at McGill University In Montreal, Canada yay And also more or less simultaneously the tank version was invented by John Lilly and Jay Shirley Interestingly Jay Shirley's name seems to have disappeared from the history Although John and he worked together right from the beginning at NIH and and Jay Shirley was fully involved in in the research at any rate the results were dramatic very dramatic As it says they're mostly negative including all kinds of hallucinations you may have run across in your introductory psych text The line of squirrels marching across the visual field and things like that the subjects in the McGill experiments reported Violent and major mood swings. They were very stressed. They were disoriented and most of them quit Before the scheduled end of the experiment, but those were multi-day experiments So we have to remember that it's quitting before the end of the experiment They might still many of them still stayed in for several days There were approximately 25 different terms for this technique everybody who jumped into the field made up their own term Heb and company called it perceptual isolation Somebody else called it sensory deprivation Perceptual diminution all kinds of names and you were could never quite be sure that they were talking about the same thing and They were interpreting it on the basis of a variety of different theories as it turns out They were not talking about the state the same thing. I'll show you in a minute. Why? Okay, here's some examples. This is the perceptual isolation chamber at McGill and As you see the subject is wearing a big cardboard cuffs. So his hands couldn't feel anything either Goggles which were translucent so you couldn't see any patterned perception, but there was constant light and Constant white noise was fed into the chamber and that's what it looked like from the subject if you looked at the subject closely Okay, now you think about this and took took us a while to realize that what you're having here is constant over-stimulation Right, there's constant light. There's constant noise How is that deprivation of stimulus input? It isn't here is John Lily and Jay Shirley's original tank What they call the hydro hypodynamic environment for some reason that never caught on as the term for it Now John didn't find that very stressful and I don't think Jay did either from when I talked to him about it But naive subjects did okay. Here you are in a tank completely submerged in water Something that through evolution we have learned to fear because you drown right and you had a mask on There it is nice, eh? They had a mask on and you were told that there's an air hose and that leads to an air pump and there was a monitor there Nice. There's a monitor there who would make sure the pump was working Well Suppose the monitor had to go to the bathroom Suppose the monitor went on a coffee break and suppose the pump stopped just then The first time you would realize it was when you drowned It's not a reassuring kind of thought so those subjects were also experienced high stress barriers to acceptance, okay McGill University laboratory Reported as I said Subjects were scared anxious. They had all these hallucinations The McGill people did some interesting studies which they thought and reported showed that people became more persuasible under these conditions It's a matter of opinion And cognitive decrements on various kinds of intellectual performance tests and the research themselves were afraid that might they might Psychologically damage the subjects so how did they deal with that? They dealt with that by putting a big panic button in the in the room and by having the subject sign a legal release form That if they experienced psychological damage, they wouldn't sue You can imagine how reassuring that must have been when you showed up for the experiment And I can tell you that my own experience my first experience with rest was then called sensory deprivation Was not it at McGill, but we also had panic button and Legal release forms and this was the first time it occurred to me that I might in fact Be in trouble as a result of this experiment I was told if you push the panic button a bell will sound that can be heard all through the building and people will run to Let you out. I thought my god What kind of emergency is this going to be and then I had to sign the legal reform release form right? You know I lasted three hours before I pushed the button On top of that this was at the time of the Korean War and Shortly thereafter and there were all kinds of rumors floating around that this was the technique that was used by The Chinese and Korean military on prisoners of war from the West to brainwash them and turn them into communists Okay There's only two things wrong with that one is It didn't happen at all or hardly at all and secondly they didn't use reduced stimulation In fact, they used excessive stimulation. Anyway from the other laboratories We got similar kinds of reports plus people couldn't speak clearly or couldn't speak at their normal rate They had very unpleasant fantasies Mood swings and so forth and they regressed to a more primitive state of thought This was called a model psychosis, which is a pretty scary label, too Okay so People did not really think that this was a technique that was very good to keep exploring and it was primarily used and primarily interpreted in terms of all of these dramatic and negative effects in The next decade 1960s to 70s a lot of the people who are doing the early research dropped out of the field They did kind of one-shot studies and then quit We're not really that interested in the field and they began some people those who stayed in the field The major one being John Zubek at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada Started doing parametric research such as vary a systematically varying the length of the Rest period from starting with a few hours up to several days looking at how the effects changed over time and then also Imposing restriction on one modality at a time. So they would have subject in one experiment with in darkness, but there was sound and Mobility was not in not restricted and so on there was another study in which they put people in a very restrictive Kind of box but with normal light and sound and so forth And so they were looking at how it affected these different sensory modalities if you varied it one at a time Dark and silent sensory deprivation chambers, which were introduced by Jack Vernon at Princeton. He was my mentor Became the more the most dominant form of chamber rest while John Lilly was Developing a more acceptable form of tank rest and there were now quite a few labs in a number of countries as the slide shows and Best of all from my point of view, I think was the elimination of experimental artifacts such as the panic button the legal release form and that kind of thing and It turned out that when you did away with those then the early heb and company results did not hold up They could not be replicated in other words if you take away the irrelevant Procedures that scared the subject before he or she even went into the chamber then you didn't get these negative outcomes Sensory deprivation itself as Shortly after we started calling it rest Sensory deprivation itself did not produce major hallucinations mood swings anxiety fear and all that stuff that was due to the way in which the subjects were put into the situation and The the rate at which people left the experiment early went down to someplace around 5% very low As a reference there's to John Zubeck's excellent review book on the subject of Up to the up to time it was published 1969 So we got the modern flotation tank from Glenn and Lee and John Which was certainly much better than being totally immersed in the water? And that's the way it looked to the subject in the sense of deprivation. So you have to imagine You know in reality, of course, it was all black So I tried to bring a picture of that, but I thought it would not be terribly informative. I Came close though. This is a picture of my sensory deprivation chamber at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver Canada, right So this the subject lies on the bed over here in the foreground is a Cooler in which we had liquid diet food, which was essentially bland in taste We didn't want to stimulate them Through the taste buds either at the foot of the bed is a chemical toilet So they did not have to leave the chamber in order to urinate and we asked them to defecate before they went in and There was a desk for after after the experiment We sometimes had to put the lights on and had them take tests which were on the table there And there was also an intercom and they were told that The door was not locked which was true of course and if they wanted to leave before the experiment was over They could do two things one was the intercom was on all the time and there was a monitor outside all the time All they had to do is say I want to quit let me out or if they didn't want to do that All they had to do was get up and walk out of the door. Okay, so that reduced anxiety quite considerably Here are some results and I have to tell you this is not a systematic lit review just a couple of Data graphs from from our own research But we started using it and I originally started to try to replicate the head results on persuasability We did some attitude change studies in which we played tapes persuasive tapes Into the chamber and then I decided it would be nice to do it on something that had some real life relevance and some behavioral Data and so we tried to get people to quit smoking And what did we find? Well, what we found was that 24 hours of sensory deprivation Led to two years later people smoking Approximately half as much as they had before they went into the chamber That was pretty impressive Smoking is very recalcitrant to treatment. You probably know within a year. Usually the Relapse rate is 80 to 90 percent and people are smoking essentially as much as they had before the treatment But this is with real psychotherapeutic treatments. I was quite surprised. I didn't believe the data We did a number of replications other people did some replications and they hold up very well if you combine them if you combine rest or sensory deprivation with a more standard behavioral cognitive behavioral Or similar technique The data are even better apparently the results of the two techniques some eight so the success of one technique is Added to the success of the sensory deprivation procedure and the relapse rate is even lower So that was quite encouraging Well, why didn't it catch on more? Unfortunately the brainwashing accusation Became revived Because in the 1970s There was a considerable amount of propaganda about sensory deprivation being used to torture Suspected terrorists in a number of places around the world Including in Northern Ireland and West Germany Again What the facts were were that these suspects were interrogated By having hoods put over their heads so they couldn't identify The people who were interrogating them or the witnesses against them It had nothing to do with wanting to reduce the amount of stimulation they were getting and also they were beaten They were you've probably seen on TV where the cops surround some suspect and shout at him incessantly They did that they made them stand against the wall in painful positions for long periods of time So it was all over stimulation not under stimulation, but the facts Take a long time to catch up with the accusations and a lot of the researchers did not want to subject themselves to what happened to some Jan Gross who was a Czech Psychologist who became a refugee to Germany was was attacked by leftist German students John Zubeck was accused of having Done research on brainwashing and he was he was doing research on perceptual and Motor effects had nothing to do with the brainwashing at all I had done the research on smoking and persuasability And I said if you want to send those people over to UBC from the University of Manitoba I will welcome them, but they didn't come But they but John was was very severely attacked his daughter was threatened in school and so on so you could imagine that deterred a lot of people from accepting these data and and Doing the research further 1970s and 80s was a good time You may not be familiar with the term salutogenesis there are two terms that were introduced by an Israeli sociologist named Aaron Antonofsky pathogenesis that is Disease producing and salutogenesis which is health producing so we moved in the 70s and 80s from looking at the negative effects of rest and how we were calling it rest thanks to Rod and Who will be speaking tomorrow Rod Bore? and Looking more at the positive effects When we introduced the term rest Restricted environmental stimulation technique or restricted environmental stimulation therapy depending on what use you are putting it to John Lilly suggested that we that the acronym should stand for restore energy simply traveling The kind of traveling he was doing was not the kind of traveling we were doing so I didn't accept that But we found and other people found and you know what I say we It wasn't only we there were other people doing this research Memory improved After a period of sensory deprivation or rest you put people in that in the tank or that while we're doing the chamber at that Time put people in the chamber after having listened to a passage from a book Tested them 24 hours later, and they remembered much more than people who had done their usual activities in between for 24 hours And we used it also for for checking Athletic skills of various sorts perceptual motor coordination and for a number of Clinical uses so go back again to you know flotation providers are not qualified to to to treat people but It's not something that you can't solve So we were looking at things like Henry Adams at the St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, D.C. Was looking at putting schizophrenics Into a reduced stimulation environment for a while. They showed symptomatic improvement. It didn't cure schizophrenia But their symptoms became less severe We did the same with autistic children and we got the same results because their symptoms became much less severe and they found this they found the The environment quite pleasant and they wanted to go back afterwards one theory is that schizophrenia and autism are Dysfunctions of the gating system that usually filters out stimulation from the environment so that the patients are Chronically overstimulated if you put them in some place where there isn't so much stimulation It's then they behave with it with fewer symptoms And we did we did a whole lot of studies and other people did as well I'm blood pressure and some of them have been mentioned before blood pressure muscle tension headaches pain various sorts chronic pain and so forth What we basically found and I think I still believe this was that chamber rest was optimal if we wanted to change behaviors such as smoking for example overeating Over-eating on on special favorite foods you this I did a study in Australia which showed that after Being in the rest chamber for 24 hours and nothing to eat But your favorite food which you had identified ahead of time made you not like that food so much anymore As the favorite problem food we told them, you know what people who wanted to lose weight, but they couldn't resist you know Whipped cream or something we put them in there with nothing to eat But their favorite problem food and they stopped eating it at least for a while So we did I think that for behavior that's governed primarily by the Yeah, they're left hemisphere That is voluntary behaviors or behaviors that were voluntary but became automatic as you got addicted The chamber is optimal for changes in the autonomic nervous system Stress muscle that sort of thing the tank is better and this was also the decade at which commercial tank facilities began and The an iris the International Rest Investigator Society and the first incarnation of FTA Were established and started holding meetings by the way This was still in the early part was still during the Vietnam War and FTA had another meaning as well I Some of you remember I guess it had to do with Some verb the army, but I won't say what it was anyway John Lilly's seminal book the Deep Self came out during this decade and I published a book With help from Rod Borey and a couple of other people But that reviewed the entire body of research until then Despite the way is another Chamber study That Rod Borey and I ran Rod primarily was responsible for it and as you can see that curve that top curve is The one where people got 24 hours of sensory deprivation and some messages about Systematic behavior to lose weight and as you can see it was pretty successful So four months later they had lost on the average of around 11 and a half pounds. It's not bad And we're still going up. We also did a study on scientific creativity during this period Late late in the period the next period was 1980s to 90s where The work went almost entirely in the direction of applied research commercial flotation Facilities spread around the world and became much more visible There are lots of magazine articles and newspaper articles and so on about them interviews with people who had floated interviews with With the facility managers or owners and so forth. The problem was that the research Essentially fell apart. It kept going. There was a lot of research, but most of it was Very small samples one five maybe not much more than that. Most of them had no control groups or control treatments They were Scatter gun in the sense that there was a study here on this thing and the study there on some other thing and so forth Nothing really fit together very well So there were studies of in the topics that I listed there stress management chronic pain chronic insomnia phobias and so on and Most of them came up with positive results Okay, and there were new theories including the one about the left brain and the right brain Which was I think a step forward from the psychoanalytic theories that dominated the field in the early days We also found research on cognitive and performance enhancement Skiing tennis basketball dart throwing archery rifle shooting etc etc and again almost all of them reported positive results and Also pilot training which was interesting people who were Trained on a simulator after Sensory deprivation or rest did better As a consequence of that and a number of studies on various kinds of creativity scientific creativity And and at least one on music creativity by the way, which was recently published. It took a long time and the chamber rest effectiveness on the habit modification was confirmed by a by a fair number of replications and also its use in Autism schizophrenia and also children acting out children's acting out behavior now acting out behavior was customarily Handled by isolating the child and this was explained and they found that when the after a period of isolation the child was allowed back into the classroom or whatever it was and Behaved better and this was interpreted as a result of punishment timeout was a punishment and In order not to be put back in there the kid behaved himself or herself after they came out mostly himself My interpretation was quite different Which is that in the normal environment these kids were being overstimulated too much was going on you took them out of that Aversive state overstimulation is not pleasant You take them out of that it allowed them to calm down get back to a normal state self-control and so on and then they were Okay, when you put them back there was no one Really big authoritative book at this time, but for Iris proceedings were held and their book and the books published the papers that were given at those meetings The 1900s to 2000s nothing much happened Was kind of shit kind of a shame the commercial facilities were closing down. They were not getting enough customers The laboratories were closing down Funding was disappearing People who are interested in the research were disappearing a lot of people felt that all the important stuff had been done There wasn't anything much else to do and Again the irony was that this was the time at which the general scientific public at least the psychological and Psychological medical public began to take notice of the street of this technique Okay, which they had pretty much ignored most of the time and they we had several really authoritative reviews by leading people all of whom said the data are very interesting the findings are very positive and Promising but because most of the studies, especially the tank studies Were not controlled and I did not have good controls had very small samples and so forth It was important to do more research to establish them on a firmer footing One of these studies by the way was a three-year study by the US Army On whether they could use whether sensory deprivation or rest could be used to help train soldiers So just at the time that the outside world was taking notice and wanting more The field was disappearing from under us both iris and FTA one dissolved and Most of the people who have been doing the research went on to other topics What happened well as I said funding was reduced and The interesting ideas many people thought had been already explored and I'll show you a slide in a minute about the reduced drama clinical applications again funds space and equipment and The turf wars were sad and I think it was partly my fault I was really naive, you know, and I Tried to explain to clinicians that one of the advantages of rest was that they could spend less time with patients Because you put the person in rest and you all you needed was you know an intern or some other kind of slave and they could monitor They could monitor the the tank or chamber and the Therapist could go on and do other things and I forgot the fact that they get paid by the hour And the idea of my telling them that they didn't have to spend so many hours did not really appeal That was a bad strategy Plus a lot of people thought that This was treading on their ground that here were people who are not psychiatrists and making recommendations about treatment for Psychopatians and so forth and Another problem was that there were so many claims of positive results Okay, people do not believe in panaceas people do not believe that some particular methodology Can be effective in dozens and dozens of different problems and yet that's what we were publishing Okay, and they wanted to see more evidence that that was the case and until they saw that evidence They were not willing to adopt the or even test the method Commercial facilities had a problem which I would like to warn you against or about and that is that when you start a commercial facility In a particular community depending on how large it is There is a pool of people who think yeah, I want to try this but many of them once they've tried it don't want to try it again and so as Glenn and Lee said It's important to foster repeat visitors Because if you just depend on one on the first-time visitors It goes pretty well until that pool is finished and they've done it and then you've got problems The other thing was that some communities many communities made really unreasonable demands on the tank operators in because they didn't the you know the municipal or state Health departments and such didn't understand what this was all about and so they tried to find an analog Okay, and in at least one case The analog they came up with with a swimming pool So they required that the operator Have a trained and Red Cross certified lifeguard on duty whenever there was somebody floating In case they started to drown Very ridiculous Another barrier to acceptance was mysticism and drugs and I remember I'm talking about acceptance by the scientific community Not about the public at large I think I'm sorry to say that John Slater writings contributed to this There's a lot of mysticism of you know contact with benevolent spiritual beings and malevolent ones as well and his use of drugs along with floating Didn't go over too well with with the scientific community And his close friendship with Timothy Leary and other people from that coterie were pointed to as Impuning somehow the scientific relevance or purity of the work Which I think was truly misguided But I can understand how it happens as sort of guilt by association and then out came Altered states. How many of you have seen altered states? Quite a few I'm surprised. It's an old movie anyway In in altered states. There is a researcher loosely modeled on John very loosely I must say who takes some mystical South American indigenous drug and Goes into floating and eventually turns into a pre-human Ape and he goes into the zoo and starts killing antelopes and eating them raw and that kind of stuff and There's the there's the poster The most terrifying experiment in the history of science is out of control Okay, would you really want to go into a tank after you see that? I don't know I'm a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan and When I watched the movie I was waiting as he was regressing further and further back for him to Come to the point of Puba in the operetta the micado who traced his his heritage to a primordial Protoplasmic globule and I was waiting for this guy to turn into one, but they never got to that point Eventually you'll be relieved to know that he was saved by the love of his wife Nothing like the love of a good woman If you look at the coverage of sensory deprivation or rest in introductory psych texts, which I end up friend and colleague published in 1989 you will see that from 1956 to 1986 when we stopped the study the negative references tended to decrease for the most part negative emotion didn't it was not significantly different but fewer fewer textbook said it was intolerable or That there were cognitive decrements none of them said psychosis About half many half as many referred to solitary confinement and so on on the other hand the more positive comments increased so Balanced meaning there was both positive and negative and the others went up quite a bit But you notice that even 30 years after the McGill experiments a third of the references were still to those experiments Now think about any other topic in psychology or any of the other sciences Where 30 years later they were still primarily quoting studies that had been done back then I don't think you can find very many and we also found as time went on that the number of Textbooks that referred to it at all went down and my interpretation was that the reason they went down was because it wasn't so dramatic Anymore okay, you know you float somebody and their blood pressure goes down. That's not nearly as exciting as squirrels marching across the visual field Not worth mentioning Okay, in the last decade what happened. Well, both commercial facilities and research spread around the world more lots of facilities in Australia and Europe and so on FDA model 2 was organized international conferences like this one and The two branches of the commercial and the scientific scientific slash Therapeutic have seemed to be connecting much better than they had back when the first FTA and iris Worked which was almost in isolation. So the fibromyalgia study that many of the Commercial facilities are engaged in providing data for scientific analysis is a I think a marvelous Development and I hope there will be many more of those Also, especially in Sweden is that least as far as I know There have been a number of studies which basically replicated the research from the 80s or so But with better controls more subjects and so on So the things that the reviewers were calling for Back in the 80s seemed to be getting moving Although I'm not sure that the Swedish scientists who are doing that research are aware of the fact that they're replicating earlier work and then the new the developments in Things like scanning devices and so forth. I think are very promising in terms of Actually pinning down Why we're getting the effects we're getting I have some suggestions for the future Continuing the systematic replications and extensions with good controls and good measures and Proper statistical analyses and all the rest and I think we need to test the boundaries try to see What things there are that rest doesn't work for? And that would allay the fear of some people that what we're dealing with is a placebo Placebos work on everything. Okay, if rest works on everything, maybe that's what it is now We did many studies showing that it was not a placebo But if people are convinced that it is it's very hard to convince them otherwise even if you have data meta-analyses would help and Good reviews of the literature would help and then of course you can expand the things you try things you tested on and the as I said that the Collaboration between commercial tank facilities and researchers and I've always liked Neil Miller's motto Neil Miller was a very eminent in fact Sort of the father of health psychology and behavioral medicine Professor at Yale who said we should be courageous in what we try and cautious in what we claim I've always liked that one and I think we should adopt that So here's some more stuff about where somebody asked, you know, where we go forward from here Well, this is one place we can go forward. I've loved this one the man-eating clam shell Would you get into that? Not so sure, you know, I'm a scuba diver and I've seen clams like that and I sure a shell wouldn't go near them but Here's another one the isophone and this this is being described as a Mechanism whereby the person can communicate with somebody else and totally concentrate on the communication Because there's nothing else in the environment interesting idea and last but not least Rest in interstellar space flight Wouldn't that be fun? If you'd like to volunteer, I'll have a sign-up sheet later on and That as the slide says is the end. Thank you. Thank you Yeah, thanks Peter. We actually have a couple minutes for some questions if anyone wants to ask a couple questions Yeah So the question was what do you think rest might not work on? I have to admit that so far everything. I've tried it on it worked I Think I'll leave that to the next generation of researchers. I really don't know Yeah, I think I think that the The fact that that the rest operators have totally ignored chamber rest is a mistake In many of the facilities you could add a chamber And the chambers are not terribly expensive. You can get prefab one so you can make your own You need a room with some soundproofing and a bed some food container water container Chemical toilet and an intercom and that's it. That's not very expensive. It's it's cheaper than a tank and you can Reload you can you can cite control Systematic large sample research that it works on habit modification for people who want to change And there are people who'd like to quit smoking and for whom, you know the gum and the patch and all that aren't working There are people who'd like to lose weight There are people who'd like to stop overeating and so on also the the research that Henry Adams did on People who were just short of being alcoholics With the drinking way too much people might want to stop that so you could try a vast number of things drugs as well and it would add certainly to scientific credibility of the situation and Also do a lot of good for the patients and also establish the the commercial and end of the of the rest Enterprise in a new area of application. So I think it's It would be good for for some people to try that The what? Well, why would it not be? I'm just gonna repeat the questions for everyone That's okay. The question was in in what way do you find behavioral modification to be appropriate in a commercial setting? Well, my answer would be if somebody comes to you and says I'm very tense and I have chronic pain Is there anything wrong with floating them by the same token if somebody comes to use and says I would like to stop smoking But I haven't been able to what would be wrong with putting them in the chamber for 24 hours Yeah, do you see any need for a specialist to be a part of that? I don't know any more than you'd need a specialist for the person with Tension tension pain in the muscle I mean, you're not giving them medical treatment, right? What you are doing is giving them 24 hours in a relaxing environment I don't think you need any specialists for that Yes, I think that's true. And I but I don't think it's any more true than how you promote other medical or quasi medical Applications, and I've seen advertisements from tank facilities talking about insomnia headache and so on and so forth so same Same thing basically if one is wrong, then the other is wrong if one is right, then the other's right. I don't see any difference So the question was how would you recommend we facilitate more quality research? Well, I think that the fibromyalgia study is a very nice model it's a way of building up fairly large sample sizes and Sample sizes that are not restricted to any one particular vicinity or any particular type of subject and And also doesn't need very much government money, which is nice because governments are pretty tight these days for research money Even on mainstream kinds of studies much less something like the rest so I think the the collaboration between Researchers and the commercial facilities is is an excellent model Now I think also that once once the model is in place the participants can be expanded That is I'm sure there are people who are not rest researchers to begin with I Know there are because I've spoken to many who are not rest researchers themselves, but they're medical researchers or clinical psychology researchers Who would be happy to get involved in something like that? Yeah Yes, the the idea of chamber rest is to minimize Sensory input just like in the just like in the tank. So you lie in a bed You don't get up off the bed unless you'd have to use the chemical toilet The food is right there by your bedside and so is the water and you stay there until the end of the Rest period Why 24 hours for the rest period was the question? Yeah We've done some we've done a parametric study with smoking cessation and We found that 24 hours gets the maximum effect. So if you get let if you use yet less than 24 There's not as much smoking reduction. And if you use more than 24 I think we only end up to 40 or 48 or 72 The results are the same as with 24 So 24 seems to be a good point at which to to set the time You don't want to use you don't want to put them in for longer than necessary if it doesn't it doesn't improve the results and Obviously, you don't want to put them in for shorter if you don't get the results Now, I don't know whether 24 hours is optimal for everything but It's it's convenient, you know Subjects and schedule themselves to spend 24 hours away from Whatever else is they're doing in their life if you do it longer. It gets more difficult for them That's what our data show. Why do I why do I think that chamber rest is more effective for behavior mod than flotation? We've done flotation. I've tried flotation studies on smoking. It didn't work at all So and and we know that it does work with the chamber so I assume Yeah, one could one could try flotation for some of these other things and other other the behavior modification issues Maybe they work for the others, but they certainly don't work for smoking Just a follow-up on that. Yeah, what was the time periods for the flotation in comparison to the chamber rest? Time periods for flotation was the usual about an hour We the temperature in the chamber is a kind of comfortable room temperature Okay, and we probably have time for just one more question I'm sorry. I mean the rest chambers was there just pure silence or was there some sort of other audio program playing for them? Oh it varied in the The weight reduction study that I showed the slide off Putting weight reduction type messages in with into the chamber helped with smoking. It doesn't make any difference We've tried we've tried that and we tried message by themselves Messages in the chamber chamber by itself and the chamber by itself and the messages with in the chamber were about the same at the same effect So the messages didn't make much difference didn't make any difference Since we are getting a lot of questions about the chamber rest specifically do you have like a particular resource or Some area where people can learn just more about chamber rest in particular and the logistics of it. I guess you can buy my book Actually somebody showed me a copy earlier today and said that you can get them from Amazon But they only have a few copies and they're 150 bucks each They were about 30 when I wrote them and I've got royalties on the 30. I never got royalties on the 150 Don't know what to tell you library it may have it that that was basically the Most solid review of the literature up to that time which is 1980 and there hasn't been that much chamber research since And it's all in you know scattered journals so I don't know that's all I can say I guess sorry perfect. Thank you so much Peter. Yeah