Float or Die

Brian Balogh: In the midst of Cold War paranoia, neurophysiologist John C. Lilly sought to understand the nature of the mind, what kinds of threats it can endure, and how it can persevere through extreme adversity. Historian D. Graham Burnett explains how Lilly’s initial research included examining the minds of humans and animals in order to better understand the effects of isolation and close contact on the mind.

D. G. Burnett: We see work on what gets called chronic contact experiments, where you isolate a person, and later an animal, with a researcher whose job is to build an intimacy relationship, possibly even something like dependency, with a researcher with whom there’s cohabitation, for the purpose of accessing information or creating a new kind of bond, and then isolation. Isolation involves, as you know, being cut off.

Brian Balogh: Why isolation?

D. G. Burnett: People had noticed that under conditions of durational isolation, humans and animals undergo real psychic, and in some cases even physical change. One component of Lilly’s research involved developing sensory deprivation and isolation conditions, linked to the effort to figure what would happen to, for instance, U.S. submariners or astronauts or those who manned remote sensing stations in the military, how would those folks fare if they suddenly found themselves cut off and isolated for long periods of time. There was already a research tradition of sensory deprivation. We’re talking about putting sleeves on people’s hands, hoods over their heads and faces, goggles. These kinds of technology had been used for quite a while.
What would happen is you would set somebody up in one of these depauperate sensory environments, thinned out, reduced sensory environments for long periods of time, and you wanted to be able to test, to see what happened to your folks if you left them like that for hours or potentially even days, since that could be part of a battery of test for astronauts, pilots, submariners, etc.

Brian Balogh: Around the same time, Lilly is becoming increasingly interested in the minds of dolphins.

D. G. Burnett: Lilly was a self-mythologizer, and he himself spent a lot of time talking about his own breakthrough moment. It occurred as he tells the story again and again, when he was running a set of experiments on dolphin brains using direct electrodes and there was a panel switch that the dolphin could hit to turn off a charge that was being delivered to the brain. Lilly, who worked for a long time with monkeys, felt the dolphin learned much, much faster than he, Lilly, was expecting, how to turn off the charge. He also came to believe that some of the squeaky phonations that the dolphin in considerable distress was making began as he heard them to emulate human speech in certain ways. In a literal sense, Lilly felt he heard a voice while doing this experimental work, and that began to change everything. I wanna say again that that’s a story I’m telling you Lilly told.

Brian Balogh: Regardless of whether the story Lilly told was accurate, he does eventually move away from mapping the brain and using electrodes. Instead, he begins to try to understand consciousness by asking some pretty tricky questions.

D. G. Burnett: Lilly’s work with dolphins and what it’s like to be a dolphin, to be in this weightless environment, not to have hands, to be immersed in the ocean, that work was tangled up with his interest in the conditions of the human body in these darkened, immersive flotation environments. He was thinking his way toward the mind-brain of the dolphin, but he was fascinated by what happened to the human mind-brain when it was placed under comparable conditions.

Brian Balogh: I don’t know if our producer told you, but I floated for 90 minutes. It was a plastic tank, looked very modern to me. What did the original flotation tanks look like?

D. G. Burnett: The original flotation tanks did not look like the sexy California pod environment that you probably experienced in your float.

Brian Balogh: It looked sexy until I got into it.

D. G. Burnett: The original tanks, because they were produced in Cold War bioscience research facilities, were a little creepy, scary-looking, honestly. Imagine putting a hood on that was attached to a respirator and having your body fully suspended almost in a fetal position inside a cement tank of regulated temperature-controlled water, soundproofed box.

Brian Balogh: Wow. That does sound scary.

D. G. Burnett: We have to remind ourselves that while now we think of flotation tanks as again new age healing spaces, this technology comes out of a line of Cold War research that was tangled up with really creepy research enterprises like the kind of work of MKUltra, the experimental skunk works of a set of pretty vicious Cold War spooks that were willing to do some really icky things to each other. The kinds of icky things that they did was put people in little boxes for long periods of time until they went stark raving mad. Flotation tanks have their birth at the edges of that sort of research, not out of the work of Esalen Institute, feelgood meditation.

Brian Balogh: How do we get from point A to point B?

D. G. Burnett: That’s a great question. In fact, I would argue that John Lilly’s a big part of that story, because across the watershed of the 1960s, Lilly himself walks across from being a slightly scarifying Cold War biomedical mind-brain researcher with ties to the intelligence apparatus, to being a tuned in, turned on, dropped out guy wearing jumpsuits and headed West to Esalen to conduct mindfulness-oriented, consciousness-rising type experiences. By the time he’s headed West in the mid-’60s, he’s increasingly focused on the idea that whales and dolphins are possibly peace-loving, hyper-musical, master intelligences that have evolved without hands so they’re incapable of manipulating their environment, so they’re into just being men.

Brian Balogh: That’s far out.

D. G. Burnett: Correct. The tanks go with him too. That is the same tanks that were once upon a time part of slightly creepy tests of the psychic robustness of potential military recruits, go with Lilly when he opens up his dolphin research lab in the Caribbean, because he increasingly thinks maybe floating in such tanks can help him think his way into the life form of an aquatic mammal.

Brian Balogh: What you’re describing, Graham, is quite different than a traditional objective scientific approach of being outside of one’s subject and gazing at it, quote, objectively. Was Lilly aware of that? Did he invert that whole process of looking inside himself in many ways, consciously?

D. G. Burnett: Brian, here you put your finger on what I literally take to be one of the very most interesting questions that can be asked of intellectual history, and in a sense of epistemology, of a theory of knowledge. In essence you’re asking me did something change from Lilly standing outside of his scientific object and trying to understand it from the outside, objectively, to Lilly trying to understand his object by converging with it, casting his soul in its direction, inhabiting it in a, what one might almost say an anthropological sense, ethnographic knowledge. I think that question of the difference between knowledge at a distance and knowledge that closes the gap is just about the most interesting question we’ve got.
Where Lilly’s concerned, my short answer is Yes with a capital Y. At the same time I think that development in his own thought has to be linked to a wider transformation in how we think about knowledge across the ’50s and into the ’70s, where distance begins to fail in new ways, and there is a hunger for closing of the gap.

Brian Balogh: While admittedly, Lilly never figures out how to totally close the gap, Burnett says Lilly’s efforts are still remarkable.

D. G. Burnett: Lilly and the researchers like him were extraordinarily courageous and slightly frightening spelunkers, cave-divers into consciousness. They were genuinely brave and a little masochistic/sadistic in their fascination with deep-diving into the brain, their own and the brains of others. I feel Lilly’s work with the dolphins, his work in flotation tanks, this work all came out of his deep, deep, driving fearlessness to get inside his brain and other brains.

Brian Balogh: It seems counter-intuitive, but Lilly thought that only through intense solitude could we fully connect with others. For Graham Burnett, that is an essential realization for us to ponder even today.

D. G. Burnett: I believe very strongly that the kind of integrity of the conditions for interiority in a human subject have come under new pressure over the last 10 to 15 years as a result of changes in our mediated universe. A sense of what it is simply to be inside one’s own mind, I would argue, is a really infungible condition of possibility for political subjectivity, for a sense of agency, responsibility, identity, self-sameness. The reason the theme of solitude is so crucial now is that those conditions for the simple being inside oneself and with oneself are changing very rapidly, and it is more difficult than ever to build that habit and to preserve that habit to us.

Brian Balogh: D. Graham Burnett is a Professor of History at Princeton University and author of The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the 20th Century.

Joanne Freeman: That’s gonna do it for us today. Do get in touch. You’ll find us at BackstoryRadio.org or send us an email to Backstory@Virginia.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter at Backstory Radio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Ed Ayers: Backstory’s produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and Johns Hopkins University. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Brian Balogh: A special thank you to Jordan and Ted at AquaFloat in Charlottesville for introducing me to floating for this episode. It’s time to come out now.

Speaker 1: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.

Speaker 13: Panoply.