 Thanks, Ashka. How do you follow an act like that? At least I had some jokes. I know it's these balloons here. It looks like a democratic national convention. This would be the Hillary Balloon here, the transparency. Anyway, we're going to talk about some serious data here from a form of rest that is probably the least frequently used and the least available. It's called dry flotation rest. We went back to take a look at some of the work that we started back in Antarctica, the first rest research in Antarctica back in the 1970s. We did the first DEG research. That led to some laboratory chamber research in my lab in New Zealand back then where we were able to enhance hypnotizability, which is pretty handy to do because there's a pretty normal distribution of hypnotizability. When you want to use it for things like surgery or something like that, you may need more of it. I had a chance to practice that myself for two and a half hours of surgery on my leg, almost exactly a year ago. Watch the whole thing. Dry flotation rest. We all know about this, but for those of you who are new to this thing, the term sensory deprivation goes behind all of the rest work that began. That really began back in the 1940s through 70s, and sensory deprivation was associated with North Koreans doing brainwashing and all sorts of things like that. It's basically a form of torture with severe psychological disturbances. There were studies done by people like Martin Orrn where when they had panic buttons in the chambers so people could be released if they couldn't take it anymore, we finally learned that that is not the case. Back in the 70s, my colleague Robin Gregson and I found a favorable response to Antarctic wintering over isolation. They were really scared about this. Even going back to Scott's exploration of the pole, they took a dozen pairs of handcuffs with them in case people went nuts because of the sensory restriction. Seriously. Then Peter Sudfeld argued that when the anxiety inherent in the early deprivation research was alleviated, chamber rest at least at that point becomes a powerful way to positively alter a variety of psychological and behavioral processes. That's really before tanks were really much used. By 1985, this is the big breakthrough for all of us here, we finally had recognition in the textbook of psychiatry, the Bible for psychiatrists and for the medical profession in terms of looking at this stuff as being beneficial rather than being a negative experience. That's a real breakthrough. As a result of that, all of these introductory psychology textbooks usually would have a page or sometimes more about the dangers of sensory deprivation because there's this neat little picture of the chamber with all sorts of electrodes and so on. The textbooks began to change about then. That's been terrific for all of us and for the public who gets to use this. As most of us here know, there are three types of rest. We have the chamber, we have wet flotation, and we have dry flotation. We're going to talk mostly about dry flotation. This is my chamber in New Zealand where we first enhanced hypnotizability. It took six hours of lighted rest to enhance hypnotizability and we're talking not just increasing it statistically significantly but more than doubling standardized hypnotizability scores, which doubling test scores means nothing unless it really means it adds up to something else. We used electrical stimulation pain, ferrotic shock actually, and gave people a suggestion for glove analgesia so we could see whether or not the increase in hypnotizability would be reflected in the actual response to the hypnotic suggestion. We had people that actually outperformed the machine. They're actually taking 900 volts, luckily the amperage is very well. We like to minimize tissue damage in our work. It also lasted. Once people developed the ability to increase hypnotizability by learning how to focus their attention, it worked out really, really well to do this. That's our chamber. We had all sorts of instrumentation back then. We did EEG. We did peripheral temperature. We did core temperature. We did skin conductance. We did a variety of physiological measures and we did see an increase in arousal potentially reflects anxiety in the first after around three hours and then this really began to taper off and the beneficial effects began to kick in around four or five hours to a large extent. That's chamber rest only. Then we tested wet rest. We used the standard 20% magnesium sulfate solution in a light free tank and we had about 60% to 80% submergence. By the way, I'll probably talk more about that in the Q&A. We eventually, in my lab at Washington State University, which I've had for the last 30 plus years now, in our wet flotation work, eventually came up with a specific gravity ideal one being about 1.26. I think that fits some of the data presented yesterday, which is 1.25, which is highly influenced by body fat. There's the other variable that comes in there as well. Obviously, you float better with more body fat. What we found out is that wet rest failed to enhance hypnotizability. It also failed to influence hypnotic suggestion for pain relief. It didn't have any influence on hypnotizability. Going back to our study that was published in 1982, which was from a New Zealand lab where we used six hours of lighted chamber rest with Gansveld goggles, these goggles that allow light transmission, but you don't really get the ability to focus on any kind of an image. It helps to keep you awake. We also did another study later, which was Becky Dyer, who's, I think she's a colonel in the Army as a psychologist now. We ployed 3, 6, 12, and 24 hours of unlighted chamber rest. We were studying the effects on overeating. This is kind of a cool study in the fact that people got to take their favorite foods like it might be Oreo cookies and ice cream. That's all they'd get for the period of time, the period of time they were done. We even got permission. One of the subjects was a wife of one of the faculty members, and her thing was wine and cheese or something. We got permission to give her as much wine as she wanted through that. Anyway, the end result is in the longer periods of 12 and 24 hours, they became averse to their problem foods. We also discovered that Becky became averse to all the different problem foods that people brought in, so she's very thin. That's the kind of thing you use that for, but there was a lot of sleeping involved in that. We concluded, we just guessed, I should say, it was not really a conclusion because we didn't systematically collect that data, that you're missing rest effects when people go to sleep. Whether you sleep in the tank, you sleep in the chamber, you're missing the rest effects in terms of having to develop imaginal activity. This blinding flash of the obvious got us to guess that S is exposed to lighted rest, or less likely to fall asleep than those exposed to unlighted rest. Curiously enough, nobody's actually ever checked this out. It's embarrassing. Do you think how many years some of us have been doing this research, having not checked that out? We were guessing that sleeping attenuates rest effects because what it does is shorten the time that people are engaged in trying to adapt to reduce stimulation. Adapting to reduce stimulation is where the benefit comes in. We wanted to test this directly, and the study we're going to talk about today, I promise I'll eventually get to it, was to determine the effects of lighted versus unlighted rest on hypnotizability. We also used experimental pain as our criterion measure. This is the way you have to conduct this research. You have to have control groups. You have to have one condition versus another condition. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of effort to do these things. We move ahead in little tiny, tiny steps. The breakthroughs are often things that we're not looking for at the time. We always talk about proposing research, planning research, writing grants. Really, research is generally rescued rather than planned. What you find out is often things you stumble on. Anyway, all we did here, we had university community volunteers. They weren't students at Washington State University. Some were. Some weren't. We just take people from that community. Washington State University is an eastern Washington, if you don't know about that. It's very rural. We have about 20,000 students and about 12,000 other people, as we call them, and about eight miles away with the University of Idaho, which is another similar place. It's very much a university, a couple of small towns. It's kind of an isolated area anyway. There's not a lot to do except study and party. Some students party more than anything else. I'm on the student conduct board. I continue to be amazed at some of the things they do. Truly amazed. I was going to tell you it's not. I won't tell you this one. Anyway, all these stuff that experiences with hypnosis beforehand. This is important when you do hypnosis research because when you get practice with hypnosis, you don't just generally get a perfect measure of hypnotizability by measuring it. If I take one of you up here and test your hypnotizability with one of the standardized scales, like a Stanford scale, we'll get a score. It's probably going to be stable over time, but if you get more experience with it, you're going to get better or worse. You'll get to a plateau point. It's good to have multiple experiences. We did that, and that takes a lot of time. That's about 12 to 18 hypnotic inductions before we could even start the experiment. Let's take a look at the dry flotation chamber. This one will be at float on, I think, in the not too distant future, maybe about a year on. The big thing here is we had some discussion about that yesterday from Dr. Feinstein. The anti-vibration part of it is just incredibly difficult to engineer, and that's what makes these things very, very expensive. The anti-vibration legs are kind of a NASA development. It takes a lot of time to do that, to reduce the sound transmission. The walls and this are filled with sand, and the wood is finally finished. You go through all kinds of trouble, for example, like when you oil the wood, you don't use a petroleum byproduct. You use lemon oil, so you don't have any of those kinds of things influencing the environment. Then it has to sit for a long period of time, even with the lemon oil, until that goes away. Air filtration, and negative ion generators, and all that sort of thing, very similar, if not identical to most of the ones you get with the wet float. That's what the box looks like. Let's take a look inside here. It's a bladder, which is a non-arabatic type of material, and on that is kind of a low tactile velour, which is tested in a lot of different environments to do it. You kind of sink into the bladder. It's not like sitting on it. It's not like laying on a water bed at all. You sink into it as you do in a regular flotation situation. This is a great way to get people into a wet float who don't want to try it, or have had a bad experience initially. In other words, they've splashed the salt waters we've all done, and our eyes the first time. We don't bother. We're not bothered by that, but new people are. You can get them into a partial flotation situation to start with. It's a nice introductory way of doing things. You don't have to take their clothes off or shower before and after, and so on. There's a lot less time involved in terms of running subjects through it that way. We gave them a Stanford hypnotic susceptibility scale form C. That's been normed since in all sorts of different languages. We've done them in Taiwanese. We've done them in Japanese. We've done them in Mexico with Mexican subject, which is different than the norming we did in Spain. It's the most widely used scale, extremely reliable. Then for the pain test, we used ischemic pain. What we do here is, it's an experimental form of pain. What you do is you wrap a blood pressure cuff around the subject and you inflate the blood pressure cuff to what is it, 250 millimeters of mercury. Then you want to, of course, get the pain going so we have them squeeze a hand dynamometer and run between 10 and 20 pounds. The idea was to try to do 10 kilograms. Some people couldn't do that. That really hurts. It actually approximates the post-operative pain that was developed by Hill guard at Stanford many, many years ago. It's also a similar work at Harvard. The same thing we use when I was teaching at Harvard. We have this nice pain measure. Then we tell people, we take out our little timer and we ask them every five seconds to report on a scale of one to 10 where one, they're not feeling any pain. This is the point. They very much like to remove the cuff because it really, really hurts. So they're going two, four, six, seven. Then they finally get to 10 and we say, please keep reporting. So we take it off because if we just give them a one to 10, what will happen is we get heroes. People who give you nine, nine and a quarter, nine and a half, they're going to show you. But if we open the scale up, we get linear data, which is really important for statistics. So we get people that report. People in hypnosis give you zero across the board. It's absolutely incredible. People without it will, by a minute and a half, they're in real agony with this kind of pain. So we have a nice experimental way of doing it and we haven't hit any gangrene at all. We do get it off in time. Minimal tissue damage is our goal. So the first group, these are randomly assigned to the lighted condition. They did six hours in dry flotation. The Gansfill goggles, just like the standard chamber, but we have the dry flotation environment. We also use the same thing we did with the early hypnosis experiments to replicate them. You know, the ones that were done 30 years ago that we did. We used sound attenuating earplugs. They're about 30 decibels and we used very, very low-level white noise. Not invasive white noise, but very, very low-level. And I don't have the exact sound transmission levels on that. But that's as an additional masking sound. Probably not necessary. Probably not a good idea. But that's what we did before and wanted to replicate exactly what we did with the straight chamber studies. So we're not, you know, not introducing some variable that wasn't used before. Then we had the same in the same in the light-free condition. In other words, we turned the lights out. And in the group three, it was basically a control condition. It was a casual classroom. One where we maintained social contact. They had access to interactive media and that sort of thing. Now we've monitored them by the intercommunication system. Same thing we use in the wet float. And same thing most people use in the chambers. We had to use the criteria developed by Sanders and Ryder way back in the 60s to identify, quote, sensory deprivation phenomena. So people were experiencing these things. We would take them out of the environment. This is a leftover. Once a human subjects committee at a university gets on to a protection for those subjects, even if it's irrelevant by all sorts of data, it continues. It takes a life on its own. So, you know, so you look at this, nobody met the criteria. Fine. So we can report again, nobody met the criteria, but nonetheless, the next experiment, they still want that applied. So that's how you that's how we get this ancient stuff in there. And basically, what happened is this quite simply six hours of lighted dry flotation rest significantly increased Stanford hypnotic susceptibility form C scores and significantly reduced ischemic pain score. So they increased in hypnotizability. And, importantly, they're able to take a lot more pain for a long period of time. And I'm talking about a lot more. I mean, you know, they're reporting zero after a minute and a half, whereas the subjects are in the control group, we're way over 13, 14, 15 within within 3040 seconds. Try this ischemic pain, be careful, no, no tissue damage. And the lighted condition was statistically significantly better and hypnotizability and pain relief scores, although both did work the unlike it did work as well. So we did in the six hours is long enough to get an effect. So essentially, this went back to the old theory that I had on this. And the idea is that you have to have the person being awake in the rest environment for them to develop the focused attention that we need in hypnosis. What's hypnosis? Yes, it's all sorts of physiological data for it. We have it, we can talk about the interior single and so on. It's simply this over over simplified attention, you got to be able to pay attention, concentration, if that means attention for a while, that leads to control the imagination, who is a controlled by the sinister hypnotist, hopefully not no, it's controlled by you. Okay. And so you have a choice hypnosis gives you the choice, you can, for example, you can choose to experience the pain or you can choose not to do the new definition of noses that we just developed at APA last year. When I was president of the hypnosis division, you can Google it. It's right there. So there we are. And that would be a very cold rest environment. Thanks everybody.