 Thank you Ashkan. You've probably all heard that after you eat you shouldn't go swimming for an hour or indulge in any kind of strenuous exercise. That's because after you eat your blood tends to be redirected towards the digestive system rather than your cardiovascular system and you may have a heart attack. Well the same thing goes because the blood goes to the digestive system. It doesn't go into the brain. So if you'd like to close your eyes lean back comfortably and try not to snore we can go ahead. This is how all academics start their slideshow. Made up title. Made up institution. There's no such place really. And misspelled flotation because it's not spelled F-L-O-A-T. It's F-L-O-T-A-T-I-O-N. Okay I'm leaving. I don't have to put up with booing. Okay anyway. So I'm going to be talking about what we know about the effects of rest flotation and otherwise on creativity. So what do we know about the effects of rest in general? As you know I don't read my slides you can read faster than I can talk anyway. But those are effects that have been replicated by more than one study with reasonable size samples, with reasonable controls, and with reasonable measures. So they're not just anecdotal. They're not just the impressions that people get from speaking with people who have floated and so on. These are hard data. Okay. What you'll notice there is that doesn't say anything about creativity. Now if we go to what I called anecdotal results, that is what do people tell us when they come out of the tank. Then you get lots of stuff about creative or pseudo creative experiences. Like vivid dreams and imagery. Well they're not really creative in the sense that people consciously or deliberately create them but they are different. And so you know that's what I mean by pseudo creative. There's deep introspection. Contrary to what you have heard earlier about the effects of rest on memory and on the quality of what you remember, we have found that people remember pleasant occasions, pleasant experiences more often than unpleasant ones. So that's kind of nice. And then there's some changes in values. Like universalism, which is one of 11 values measured by Shalom Schwartz's universal value scale. And it tends to go up at least temporarily after floating. And some people actually achieve a meditative or self hypnotic state. We once floated a Zen master who wanted to see what it was like. And he came out after about 45 minutes when it ended. And he said that all his adult life he had meditated four or five hours a day. And during the course of a year of doing that he reached a state of meditation that was about as deep as he had achieved in 45 minutes in the tank. I always wanted to follow that up and get some measures and get some more practitioners of meditative techniques, but we never got around to it. So if anybody would like to try that, I'd be really interested in the results. Now there have been studies purporting to measure the effects of rest on creativity. But there is a definitional problem. If you try to measure creativity in a way that is quantitative, measurable and so on, you can do statistical analysis on it, et cetera, you have a problem in identifying assessment techniques. And so what people usually do if they try to measure the effects of rest on creativity is to use a variety of psychological tests, psychometric instruments that are designed to do that. The Guilford test, for example, is a test for unusual uses. So you'd give the person who's being tested a stimulus, for example, a hammer. Think up as many unusual uses for a hammer as you can in a given period of time. And then the more unusual uses you come up with, the more creative your score is. There are other things like making up a new way of solving a problem, or telling a story based on a stimulus that the experimenter gives you, either orally, verbally, or a picture, and then somebody rates how original that is and so on. But I have a problem with that because I think that originality and creativity are not the same thing. Original just means it's, as in the unusual test, unusual uses test, that it's unusual, okay? If you tell somebody make up uses for a hammer, they can say, you know, you hit a nail, you break open a jar that you can't open any other way, and so on. Those are not original, but you can say you can use it as a pendulum on a clock. That's unusual. It's not very creative because it's not very useful. And creativity, I think, has to involve something that is both original, that is not your standard response, but that also has some kind of value to it. That is, a new way of actually solving a problem that's important or at least meaningful. As I said on the slide there, that represents new and improved ways of looking at a topic, and it can be improved in many different ways. It can be prettier, more beautiful. It can be more fitting. It can be morally superior to the normal solutions. It can be more useful in the real world, and so on. And so for something to be actually creative, you need more than for it just to be unusual. So, you know, a beautiful painting, a musical composition, a new scientific theory, a new political system, and so on would qualify in my definition as creative if they are also original. If they are only original, then that doesn't meet the standards. So what do we know about rest? Well, there have been, I think, a couple of studies of so-called creativity, actually originality, in flotation. And one is quite old. Fourgaze and Fourgaze was over 50 years ago, and there's also a newer one that's about 10 years old, and they both found some improvement in performance on these tests of originality. That looked like a beneficial effect of floating. I did a couple myself of these experiments. I'm not citing myself, but we found pretty much the same thing. We use a storytelling task. Storytelling, I'll give you an example. There is a person standing in a phone booth. Do you remember phone booths? Probably not. I do. Anyway, there's a person standing in a phone booth with the phone in his hand, and there's somebody standing outside hammering on the door. Make up a story. Now, people can make up lots of stories. Some of them are pretty obvious. Some of them are not so obvious. But the question is, how do you score that? And what we did was develop the scoring system. For example, to what extent did the story include why the people who were doing this, what they were trying to accomplish, and how would it turn out? And we had rating scales, and we had people who used the rating scales to judge the stories. And in fact, it turned out that people in rest did more creative stories than a control group. But then when I thought back on it, is this creative? Well, it's kind of between depending on how good the story is, how interesting it is. It might be creative, but if it's just a story that's off the norm, that may or may not meet my more stringent criteria for creativity. So, basically, as you've heard me talk before, what I have to say is, what are the effects of flotation on creativity? We don't really know. So, we've got clues. We've got some kind of related data, but we don't really have the data to answer that question. After that, I did a couple of studies, one of which was kind of surprised my department at the University of British Columbia. I asked some of my colleagues in the psychology department to float and talk into a microphone about ideas about their research when they came out, or sit in their office for an hour and record ideas about their research. And then we came back six months later, by which time they'd forgotten what was what, and we had their ideas all mixed up, so they couldn't tell which was in the tank and which was in the office, and we had them rate how creative those ideas were. And now, we used the definition of creativity that was both original and important, or in some way really contributed either to your research program or to your theoretical ideas. And it turned out that they rated the ideas that they'd come up with after floating as more creative than the ideas that they'd come up after being in the office. So, that was a clue. What was the problem with it? Well, one of the problems with it is that it was self-rating. And you can always think, well, maybe they did remember which one was which, where they generated the idea and so on. So, we should have given it to outside observers and asked them to rate it, but we didn't do that. The second study, which came out about five years ago, was on music students who were given a task of performing an improvised piece for their professor, their jazz professor, so somebody who's an expert in the field. And we asked the professor to rate various aspects of the performance. And this was either after floating or not. And what we found was that that rating music is more complicated than perhaps we had realized because the professors rated some things as more creative, some aspects of the music as more creative, but other aspects as not. So, we had mixed results. That's why I said before, we still don't know the answer to the original question. Now, there's another question that intrigues me. And that is, to what extent, if there is an effect, a result that supports the hypothesis that floating improves creative performance of some sort, to what extent is that really due to floating? To what extent is it due to stimulus reduction? Floating is a multidimensional experience. Stimulus reduction is part of that. It's one of the dimensions of the multidimensional experience. Obviously, it's not the only dimension. So, can we say the reduction of feeling of gravity increases your ability to create new ideas? Is it lying supine in an epsom salt solution? Is it the silence? What is it? And so, I looked at, as I like to do, at historical analogs. Other environments in which stimulus reduction occurred, but not in the context of a flotation tank. And there is a list of some of the environments that I looked at and found all kinds of creative events, I guess, in many of those. For example, if you look at the originators of the major world religions, every one of them, of the major world religions, obviously a lot of minor ones, in terms of the number of people who adhere to them, and in terms of their influence on the world, every one of them generated his basic ideas in solitude, in an environment in which they were not only alone, but they were in a situation of reduced stimulation in a desert, on a mountain, in a forest, under a tree, in a cave, and so on. So those ideas were creative. They were both original and they were very influential. They changed the lives of millions of people in some cases, almost all of those cases. So in that conclusion would be that it's a stimulus reduction that can have a creative effect. And if you look at some of these other examples, there are many similar findings. And the third person phenomenon, I don't know if you're familiar with it, it's a finding of people who are in, again, reduced environmental stimulation situations, but usually in trouble of some sort, mountain climbers, shipwrecked sailors, people like that. And they imagine a third person being there who helps them survive. Now you could say it's a hallucination, but it helps them survive. It tells them, for example, if they're lost, it tells them in which direction to go. The most famous example is that of Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail around the world single handed. He was in his little boat off the Azores. He got sick, probably from food poisoning. And there was a big storm coming. And if he couldn't steer the boat into the wind, it would capsize. And he would drown. And he woke up and there was a man steering the boat. And he was steering it properly into the wind. And Slocum was very scared. And the man said, don't be scared. I'll steer your boat so you'll be safe. And I'm the pilot of one of Columbus's ships. Okay. Now, I mean, we can take that at face value. Maybe it was, right? But maybe it wasn't. And so what was it, if it wasn't true, if it wasn't the real thing? Nobody knows, of course. And many, many examples of that. There is a book called the Third Man Phenomenon that you might want to look at if this interests you. Okay. Now, the autobiographies and biographies of people who are accepted by the world as being highly creative. I have a long, long list here. I'll give you some examples. These are from some of my historical work and some from a book by a British psychiatrist named Anthony Stores. So here are some examples. Mozart, Picasso, Kafka, Sandberg, Einstein, Tesla, Descartes, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and there are many others. And there's also Raymond Cattel. I didn't want to leave out the psychologists. But all of these in their autobiographies testified that they did their best creative work. And in some cases, they could only do creative work if they were alone in a quiet environment, low stimulation, some of them in darkness or semi darkness, and so on. So to what extent does flotation or rest in general facilitate creative activity, creative accomplishments, and so on? What can I tell you? I said, I told you before, we don't know. But it looks like stimulus reduction can in fact contribute to that kind of behavior. And presumably then flotation can as well. And because flotation gives you more profound stimulus reduction than most other environments, maybe it can help more than other environments. There's a book here, I don't know if you've and if you've seen it's called Artwork from the Void, okay, from float on, of which you've probably heard, edited by Ashkan of whom you've also probably heard, which has a whole lot of examples of artwork, and some essays and poetry, and so on, that people produced when they came out of the tank. And it's some of it is fairly standard, not terribly unusual, but some of it is really creative, I think, in artistic terms. So again, it's anecdotal. And as we know, anecdotes are not data. But they can point the way to things about which data could be collected. So go out there and collect it. Thank you.