 Happy day, you know I really feel and I mean this fortunate to be here among you mostly because this really excellent positive energy is all over the place at this float conference and I guess I missed a lot of positive energy in previous float conferences but I'd really like to honor that whole business of this positive energy by taking you folks on a short or brief trip back in time and in a way it's kind of fitting because this year 2018 is the 40th anniversary of Tom Fine and I beginning to do research in flotation. Hey Tom, come here for a second, we're even dressed for the occasion. In 1970 I flew into Los Angeles, that's what it looked like in 1970 with a city in the distance there at the top and I was on my way to start a postdoctoral stint at UCLA medical school and I can tell you that at that time I was totally not paying attention to anything like human density or stress or things that were related to that kind of thing and it's so interesting to me that over the years that's kind of how my career got shaped looking at stress and the impacts of human density on other species as well as our own, excuse me. So how did Tom and I get going on this where we were beginning to work together? Well I left UCLA and went to Ohio to the medical college of Ohio, it was a young school, I really was impressed by the fact that it offered a big open doorway to make your own career and for the first few years I was doing some of the work that I had started doing which is the lab and field studies working with brain sex differentiation which I'd done at UCLA and then wildlife contraception and stress and wildlife which were things that I have actually continued to this day and Tom on the other hand was doing studies with relaxation, biofeedback and he was also reading John Lilly books and so he came to me and said you ought to read this book, I didn't really know him at that time and so those were the two books and the deep self was the one that I read most deeply and so we started some cross-discipline discussions about this whole business of relaxation and the possibility of using flotation which we called isolation tanks at the time to reduce sensory input and I was especially interested in the possibility that you could use this as a tool for baselining physiological functions so that you would be able to drop everything down and then look at it from that perspective and then add in various factors that would change that a great research tool and we also because of the conversations we were having over that time period we were getting to know each other we started talking a lot about consciousness and self-awareness and started floating once we got a tank but before we could get the tank I had to go and sell it to the chairman of my department so we were on the third floor of the health science building very formal looking you know medical school looking thing and this is the guy who was my chairman at the time Leonard Nelson and he's really the reason that we ever got this thing off the ground because without the chairman's permission to use space in that department it wouldn't go and he said to me when I asked him he said well you're already doing some weird research working with wild horses in a medical school and he said so sure why don't you just do that but remember you have to fund it and I said okay we can do that so we did and the next step was contact with Glen and Lee Perry I love Glen and Lee I've known them for all of the time all of the time that we've done this I met Glen and Lee in like 1978 I guess so 40 years and they've always been just like they are so our first tank was a Samadhi tank and part of how we learned to float was through discussions that we had with Glen and Lee and so they were very helpful in getting us oriented but the thing is that a medical school is a very conservative environment and in that really conservative environment it was coats and ties it was all about posturing institutional review boards which we've discussed in the last two days somewhat image territoriality and money even back in the 1970s money and so when we came up with the money and we got the tank it was time for us to get started and initially while we were putting things together people didn't say very much so we're wandering around in a lab and what was this lab this laboratory was actually provided to us because a fellow faculty member who was doing bird research with quail was leaving and that's how we managed to move into that lab space and converted into a tank facility and after we had the tank rolling and people were floating once in a while it became very great interest to the people who were in the building as to what's going on up there what is that thing and what are you doing in there and one day one of the staff members was peeking into the room and there was somebody in there so she went down to the office and said there's a naked man in the bird room so at that point we were pretty well convinced that we had to keep the door closed we were trying to be open minded about this you know but it didn't work that way so we had some fun while we were doing that's Tom basically taking a break on a thousand pounds of Epsom salts and the next thing that we had to do was to set up the lab so all this stuff that you see is the process of setting it up and this was late in 1978 and we didn't really start doing the any significant experiments until early 1979 so we needed a shower and I know that's not very fancy but that's what it was and we needed a place to take your clothes off and put them back on and again not fancy and we had to have data collection system for electronics and that is really an Apple II computer up there and a deck writer the keyboard down in the left front was originally connected to a PDP12 computer do you know what a PDP12 looked like it was a big tower and it had real to real tapes that were this big around and that's how computers were working back then so you can see we had a lot of stuff to deal with in order to get this thing rolling it was by these standards today incredibly primitive that's Tom floating that's me taking blood pressure of subject immediately after the float and we had him put their arm out of the side of the tank and we had so we had cut a hole in the side of the tank and then we put a plug in there so that while they're floating there was no light and then we pull the plug out and the arm would come out it was very remote looking so we also we had three tanks during the time we were working we had the Samadhi tank then we had a float to relax tank and then we had a float area and this picture is just simply showing you how crude the EEG work we were doing was you remember what was going on yesterday with a discussion of yeah so it was basically that was what we were doing with the electrodes that were connected to the person and while they're floating oh I got a better one in a minute you'll see so everything was going along pretty well and then we started running into a couple of issues like one was that the tank was in a lab on the third floor and one day when we were changing the fluid the hose got left running in the tank and everybody went home and then the campus police contacted me and said there's a flood on the third floor and so that's the way we found out that we needed a floor drain and as it turned out this floor drain thing that flood went from the third floor down into the second floor and below our lab was a computer center even though it was ancient computers it still didn't like magnesium sulfate so we had stalactites of magnesium sulfate hanging from the ceiling in this computer lab and Tom and I were looking at each other so what should we do close the door you know that was a solution right but then we started thinking about it and eventually we knew that they were going to go in there so we went in and we tried to clean it up we tried to but it was impossible you know we knocked the stalactites off the ceiling and we were able to get a lot of the salt that was all over the surface of the computers wiped off but it still looked terrible and so the next day I'm in front of the tank room and down the hall comes the chairman of the Department of Pharmacology Dr. Escarri and he's not in a good mood he said as he approached me he looks at me and he goes he's Egyptian they cannot have this happening so he went back and tried to get the tank thrown out of the building but my chairman Leonard Nelson came to the rescue and he said look we can just cover the cost of getting this fixed up and we'll put a drain in the floor so that's how we got a floor drain now the next thing on this list is that we were beginning to move into a whole realm of possibilities what we could actually do in terms of where should we start what should we do and we knew about the old stress style approach to being in water and sensory deprivation actually on the left there but we were interested in lowering stress and also in exploring the inner self using something to look more like what was in the upper right and so at the beginning we said we should start out simple so we started out by taking blood pressure and heart rate because that you can do those things before and after a float and it's pretty quick it's pretty easy it's not messy and at the time when we were beginning this in 1980 we were calling the we were just calling this a tank that was it was an isolation tank but in 1980 Peter Soodfeld in Canada and Rod Borey in New York had been discussing a name for this whole thing that what we were going to be doing and they decided that it restricted environmental stimulation therapy might be good so even from the beginning they were thinking therapy and we were thinking therapy from the beginning because we're in a medical school repeated floating was really the key we learned over time that it took a while for people to accommodate the subjects to accommodate to it and so we eventually reached the point even though early on we were floating people only two or three times before we would collect data as a baseline we ended up at the point where we figured a minimum of four floats to get people to the point where you could begin to study them and honestly retrospectively and now I would say you the more floats the better to get people started and to the point where they're having an experience that when they get in there it's going to happen quickly so the basic methods we use for data collection were the common ones we measured blood pressure and heart rate we took blood samples for measuring hormones we also measured hormones in saliva and urine we did EEGs these really crude ones we use self-report scales and subjective comments and we worked and tailored each one for whatever study we were doing and the end points we were measuring were pretty straightforward also blood pressure and heart rate as far as the hormones went we focused on hormones of the adrenal stress axis which have been already discussed so I don't know go into those details right now cortisol and aldosterone mostly cortisol and then epinephrine and norepinephrine and ACTH which is the pituitary hormone that stimulates the adrenal cortex to make the cortisol we also looked at a non stress axis hormone luteinizing hormone which is in the reproductive system coming from the pituitary and we also looked at endorphins we look a little bit at immune function but it was in the crudest fashion not like MC flux presented yesterday this was very crude we were measuring salivary IgA which is a very crude measure of immune function but it can give you some information and we also looked in the arthritis studies that we did we looked at two other measures of immune function which which I can talk about briefly but finally interoceptive information which is what's the individual experiencing and their sense of well-being but also what input is coming into them you know that they are aware of so we did pain rating scales and self reports regarding self-awareness in the clinical area which we moved into eventually much later as we had been doing these early studies it took us about 10 years to get through them we looked at arthritis and several measures there in the two ESR which is erythrocyte sedimentation rate and CRP which is C reactive protein those are both again crude measures of immune function and we also looked at pain that was unrelated to arthritis headache back and shoulder pain and we use pain logs rating scales there and rating scales for the relaxation response as well so that was the core of the stuff we did I'll show you a couple of details in a moment but that was basically the core of the stuff we were doing and we had a fortune of having medical students graduate students nursing students that were at the medical school who were interested in what we were doing and that we're willing to be helpers and also in some cases subjects and it's funny once you get one person that is in a group of people that is willing to become a subject for a research project then the others start coming forward and they will they will join so before I proceed into any details about the work we did with cortisol I just wanted to mention that we have this neuroendocrine substrate for physiological self-regulation and it includes the brain the base of the brain where the hypothalamus is and the pituitary gland is connected to it and which is directed by the hypothalamus and then the limbic system which really facilitates the communication between all of those areas and the cortex if you look at it diagrammatically in the crudest form the green area there is essentially the limbic areas and structures the limbic pathways and structures and so that what I'm trying to make a point of is that there is communication between cortical function and the hypothalamus and the pituitary because of the hypothalamus and so you have feedback regulation that is influenced both by the endocrine system and by mental and emotional state and this is a two-way street so psychological state can influence endocrine function and endocrine hormones can influence psychological state so we took this picture and we started looking at how linking that there were a number of links of cognition and other cortical functions to neuroendocrine and hypothalamic controls through the limbic system so these are examples of functions in the body that are assisted by this pathway of these linkages between cortex limbic system and hypothalamus so within this larger picture we started looking specifically at the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis and basically as was mentioned yesterday the simple picture is that in pink you have if stress occurs you have an increase in cortisol increase aldosterone and increase in catecholamines epinephrine and norepinephrine okay and if you have a relaxation response it goes the other way and that was the tenant that we worked with when we did the first set of studies and this is the graph that I think puts all of the subject of relaxation and flotation in terms of the endocrine system into perspective so this was a study we did published study peer-reviewed journal of plasma cortisol levels in subjects that had experienced a baseline several sessions then a treatment period of several sessions and then a follow-up period without sessions and what was really clear here if you compare the non-rest condition which is just reclining on a recliner in a dimly lit room to the rest environment which was floating in the tank you can see that not only do the absolute numbers change and remain lower with the tank but you see that those dotted those dots there represent the variation around the mean and so it means that this was the beginning of our awareness that there may be an effect in the regulatory process of decreasing the variation around the mean associated with flotation with repeated flotation and the fact that it was sustained so another thing we looked at was comparing biofeedback as a tool for relaxation with rest and in all cases we're measuring hormones we found that rest was more effective at reducing hormone levels than biofeedback another thing that we found that was critical for us was that repeated flotation led to a decrease in the variability of cortisol around the mean and not only since you're decreasing the amount of the hormone that's present on average you have to take into account that that could decrease the variability around the mean so we calculated the coefficient of variation the bottom line there and it was still very significant in rest but not in a non-rest condition so that was for us a pretty powerful measurement we began then looking at the idea of the possibility that there was some process in in regulation or feedback regulation of hormonal systems at least the cortisol feedback loop that was affected by flotation and we got pretty curious about this I went and spent about a month at Yale University with an investigator named Gary Schwartz who was a person who had done a lot of the original work on a subject called dysregulation which is where feedback loops go into a state of disarray and that one of the goals of relaxation training is to help those feedback loops come back to normal and as part of that time I spent with Gary Schwartz we began to develop Tom and I began to develop a basic theory about this process or a hypothesis about how this could be related so in order to ex before I go into that in a little bit I want to talk about how we got blood samples from subjects that were in the tank while they were floating so one of the things that is if you look at the upper diagram we tried having the subject put their arm out and and we had an indwelling line in the back of their hand okay it was just too clumsy I mean part of their body sticking out of the tank it's not a really normal float you know and so we went to the bottom diagram which was putting their hand on a floating pad in the tank and then putting the line in on the back of their hand interestingly once they got this into this and we were taking repeated floats and samples they adapted pretty readily I mean they said they were having normal floats they really got into outer space etc so it was it was effective the reason we had to do it this way is because those two hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine in the stress system stress response system have a very short half-life about 90 seconds to two minutes and so by the time you could put a person in the tank float them and then take them out after the float you wouldn't be able to tell what had happened so this was why we went that direction next thing was what we felt that these studies showed over the period of years that we were doing it so we found positive effects on the physiology you know there's no there was physiology down decreased blood pressure and heart rate decreased stress related hormones decreased variability and cortisol regulation and improved immunity we also found improved sense of well-being improved task performance decreased pain levels in patients that was universal decreased pain and improved function in arthritis patients and greater efficacy than other stress reduction techniques so that's basically what we found during that time we were working but another thing that came out of this was we felt there was something going on in this flotation thing that didn't go on and other relaxation modalities some kind of restructuring refunctioning of the brain so we began looking at a subject called systems regulation and that was basically feedback loops and we we we basically studied feedback loops and the idea was that in a state of chronic stress the feedback loops were disrupted to the extent that the individual couldn't function properly so we also on the basis of knowing that psychological state can influence endocrine state and endocrine state can influence psychological state we used this as part of this relaxation training paradigm and finally based on the the subject of psychoneuro immunology as an example it's the study of the interaction between physiological state and immune function MC flux talked about it yesterday but we looked at the fact that chronic stress facilitates cancer asthma and allergies and that de-stressing put could facilitate a return to normal so we basically developed this loop and the main thing I would mention in the loop is if you look at where it says begin with high life stress negative attitude and poor psycho social support and you insert this is a loop that's used in in the theory of relaxation training you insert floatation in there and one of the things that comes out of that is the individual aside from improving the physiological state they have an improved sense of well-being their attitudes get better because they're feeling better their self-esteem goes up they cope better and so they can move into a realm of maximum self-care for taking better care of themselves so the last thing I want to address really is the subject of consciousness and self-awareness because that's really how it started when John Lilly developed this system and that's me and John and Tom around 1980 what year was that Tom 1990 and this was a visit I made several visits to John in his house in Malibu and that's Glenn Perry on the left John on the right and his wife and John's wife Tony Lilly in the center and one of the things that on those visits occasionally John and I would get into a discussion and Tony would listen to it and in that discussion we would come to a place where we would disagree and John in the subject of whether you need experiments to do rest work or whether you just need experience that can get you to that place and he was talking about consciousness essentially we were thinking more of a clinical application but he said well you don't really need experience is much more efficient faster to get you to the goal etc so Tony was in the kitchen and she heard that and she said John sometimes you have to lower sometimes you have to lower a rope or a line from that helicopter you're in so that the average person can sort this out and John just sat there and he's kind of had a smile but he didn't say anything else so the last thing I want to address is that this subject of attention I think attention is a very important subject and that's a lot of what the tank is about so Albert Einstein said the whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking well that's talking about attention to detail Bob Dylan wrote some people feel the rain others just get wet another aspect of how close attention are you paying to something look at this image what do you see well there's somebody hanging from an opening that's actually an island out there in the ocean and there's water on the floor of this concrete structure but you have to actually look at it for a minute before you can pull anything useful out of it and then a question becomes is that person going up or down so the subject of attention is a very important subject so the last thing I would say about that is that during the course of the work we were doing Tom and I came up with basically look looking at the role of attention a hypothetically the role of attention being physiology down and the attention turned inward as part of this mechanism by how flotation works and so the question was why would attention lead a tighter lead to a tighter regulation in feedback and our perspective was that when you have repeated regular floating it gradually manipulates the attention from the direction of from the space of appraisal of the situation to actual acceptance of that and therefore the allostatic set points will gradually move toward a more basal homeostasis with less reactivity of symbolic stressors and this will be accompanied by a lower variation around the mean so that's where we left that subject we didn't do any more studies on it so I want to move back to the future now and to sew this up looking at these six international rest conferences that were occurred between 1983 and 1997 these conferences and the proceedings that were published from these conferences have certainly served as a as some core material for the science the theory and the applications related to rest so I prepared several float tune quotes Albert Einstein he's basically saying if you're going to do research pick a subject that you know really you can get into don't pick some simple thing you know like gravity so we think that flotation is complex so it's not the thinnest part of the board where we're drilling but it is complex that doesn't mean it doesn't deserve a lot of attention regarding the theory part well John Lilly said regarding consciousness in the realm of consciousness you can program yourself to move into any space you know exists if you use discipline and concentration and I think that subject of discipline and concentration are important in that regard and then finally regarding application Lee Perry said and this was back in 1983 the pre and post session float center procedures are important she said we can present the floater with the idea that how they use the floating experiences up to them and she basically said that this morning and we can help them integrate it after so in terms of float centers and people coming in and floating I think that that message is really important you know that the experience that the person has before they go in there and after they come out is probably about as important as the experience they have inside the last thing I wanted to say and this is a this is a drawing that was done by my daughter when she was 10 years old and one of the things I really liked about it was that it was unfettered it didn't have anything saying what it needed to look like it was a it was a face and that was her goal but all of the other stuff was just came out of her out of her mind and so what that means to me is that I think one of the things that floating can really provide is that kind of unfettered reality for us and and therefore I mean I feel very strongly that the subject of consciousness and awareness of self and the getting tuned into your own self is is so critical and and part of that is the process of becoming free inside there and I think child mind has that freedom and as we grow and become older and more mature and go through the things that life offers or doesn't that's when we get restricted so I think flotation offers that possibility and to be unfettered thanks very much