To say that the floatation tank works because it so completely blanks out what we ordinarily think of as external reality may seem like straining after the obvious. But it’s important to remember that many of floatation’s most powerful effects are achieved less through what happens while we are floating than through what doesn’t happen: noise, light, normal gravity, other people, a sense of time, and so on.
Though floaters look on the physical and mental effects of sensory restriction as positive, most scientists—not to mention large numbers of people in the mainstream of society—see such isolation as boring if not dangerous. Dr. Lilly writes: “Most people have been programmed to avoid solitude, isolation, and confinement. Television sets in homes are anti-isolation and anti-solitude devices…. Thus, there is a negative attitude toward solitude, isolation, and confinement in most persons.”
Some of the negative attitudes have already been mentioned in Chapter Two. A few readers may also recall a widely reprinted article by Woodburn Heron, “The Pathology of Boredom,” which first appeared in 1957 in Scientific American, “A changing sensory environment seems essential for human beings,” Heron wrote. “Without it, the brain ceases to function in an adequate way.”99 (Pathology, of course, means the science of diseases, their nature and causes, so even in his title Heron links boredom with disease.) Millions more will remember the episode of Hawaii Five-O in which sinister Red Chinese Wo Fat turned trained intelligence agents into quivering jelly by plopping them into isolation tanks: “No man,” sneered Wo Fat, “can survive six hours without breaking.”
Aside from Lilly, whose explorations of inner space took him on such odd journeys that academic scientists wrote him off as lost, one of the first scientists to challenge these conclusions, and to do so with rigorous work in the laboratory, was Peter Suedfeld, of the University of British Columbia. His influential reconsideration of the “pathology” of sensory isolation was published under the title “The Benefits of Boredom” in the American Scientist in 1975. After examining the results of previous experiments in the field, Suedfeld concluded that the reported negative reactions and emotional stress were largely the result of “anxiety-arousing instructions,” and were “due more to these frightening peripheral features than to sensory deprivation itself.” Suedfeld also pointed out that tests of subjects in sensory deprivation experiments showed significant beneficial results from periods of sensory restriction, including “increased visual acuity,” “improvements in tactile perception,” improvement in auditory sensitivity, increased sensitivity to certain tastes (sweet and bitter). Some improvements in sensory abilities in tests lasted as long as two weeks.
Suedfeld also noted that “significant aspects of perceptual functioning seem to be enhanced by sensory deprivation.” Among the beneficial effects he noted were improvements in learning, recall, I.Q. scores, perceptual-motor tasks, enhanced visual concentration, increased short term visual storage, and improved discriminatory learning. All this from an environment Heron claimed would engender a pathological state in the brain and would cause the brain to cease functioning in an “adequate way.”
After citing many other cases in which sensory deprivation apparently had beneficial effects, such as helping some of the subjects quit smoking, Suedfeld concluded that sensory isolation influences “in one or another, processes as various as the electrical activity of the brain, biochemical secretions, galvanic skin response, basic sensory and perceptual processes, cognition, motivation, development, group interaction, the relationship between environment and personality characteristics, learning, conformity, attitude change, introspection, and creativity. This is probably as wide a range of effects as have been investigated in any substantive area by any technique known to psychologists” (italics mine).234
It should be noted that in this article Suedfeld was at times referring to tests done using sensory deprivation chambers, not floatation tanks, yet recent tests indicate that the effects of floatation tanks are as powerful as, or more powerful than, those of the uncomfortable isolation chambers used in these early experiments, Suedfeld himself has in recent years begun working with floatation tanks.
Having remarked that subjects in some of the early sensory deprivation tests seemed open to attitude change, Suedfeld decided to see if these benefits of boredom couldn’t he put to productive use in changing harmful behavioral patterns, and settled on cigarette smoking. During his first test utilizing sensory deprivation with smokers, he says he had absolutely no faith that the technique would have any effect on ingrained behavior. However he did a follow-up study after three months, and “lo and behold, we found that those groups in sensory deprivation were smoking almost 40 percent less than the others. This was very encouraging and surprising, Buoyed by this unexpected success, Suedfeld went on to do a whole series of studies of the effects of sensory deprivation on smoking cessation, overcoming phobias, weight reduction, and alcoholism, among others, with extraordinary results. (We will look at Suedfeld’s remarkable findings in Chapters Twenty-one, Twenty-two, and Twenty-three.)
In 1983, Suedfeld delivered the keynote address at the First International Conference on REST and Self-Regulation at Denver, and most of the other floatation and sensory deprivation researchers who delivered papers stressed that their work was deeply indebted to Suedfeld’s research and ideas. If anyone is an authority on how floating works, it is Suedfeld, so I asked him if he could explain in a general way his understanding of just why it is so successful in changing behavior and attitude. Suedfeld explained what he called the “two factor theory.”
Stimulus Hunger. The first factor to be taken into account, according to Suedfeld, is stimulus hunger. Returning to his idea of the benefits of boredom, he pointed out that in a very real way the brain does become bored in an environment where there is very little stimulation. And becoming bored, it begins to cast about for something to pay attention to. Like a habitual reader, deprived of a book, who finds himself desperately reading the back of a cereal box, the person in the isolation chamber or float tank becomes very interested in, and very receptive to, any information or stimulation.
Stimulus hunger is an appetite of which the floater is generally, unaware. Far from feeling bored or in desperate need of stimulation, the floater is usually in a state of deep and serene relaxation. Meanwhile, the blissful floater’s reticular activating system is deciding that since there is not much sensory stimulation passing through for it to filter and direct to the higher brain, the floater’s attention level must he too low. So the RAS turns up the volume or, certain cognitive channels — that is, it heightens arousal and intensifies sensitivity and receptivity to incoming stimuli. But there are no incoming stimuli! So it turns up the volume a bit more … and so on: stimulus hunger.
Suedfeld, and others who use float tanks to effect behavior and attitude change, do so by allowing enough time to pass for the floater’s brain to have developed sufficient stimulus hunger, and then play prerecorded messages to the floater through underwater speakers. When the taped messages arrive in the midst of sensory restriction, the subject’s brain pays very close attention and is exceedingly receptive.
Unfreezing Attitudes. The second factor in the two factor theory has to do with the “frozenness” of attitudes. All habitual, stable attitudes, beliefs, and behavioral patterns are difficult to change, according to Suedfeld, because they are subject to the law of inertia: They tend to continue as they are until some force of greater power is exerted to change them; the attitudes and beliefs are frozen. To change them, you must first unfreeze them. One extremely powerful way to unfreeze attitudes is to enter a float tank.
In part, this is because the floater’s deep relaxation makes it seem simply too much of an effort to respond to or offer counterarguments to messages that contradict the frozen attitudes. Another consideration, based on Suedfeld’s statistical analysis of changes in belief structures of sensory deprivation subjects, is that subjects undergo a certain amount of cognitive confusion. In the float tank and isolation chamber, says Suedfeld, “well-learned, habitual, stable attitudes and well-learned, habitual, stable behavioral patterns lose their stability and habitualness, so that the system is unfrozen, destabilized, becomes confused, and new information then has a much better chance of changing them, because it doesn’t have to overcome all that resistance; resistance is weakened.”
After attitudes and behavior patterns are unfrozen, new attitudes and behaviors can be substituted for them: “When you’re being unfrozen, new information can change the attitude structure into a new pattern by giving you new facts you believe about an issue, or new ideas about how those facts should be evaluated or reacted to. And for new attitudes to become permanent, the new structure has to be refrozen. The three stages are unfreezing, changing, and refreezing. This is the theoretical underpinning of the effects of floatation tanks and sensory deprivation on attitude and behavior change.” Sensory restriction, says Suedfeld, whether in float tanks or isolation chambers, “is in itself an unfreezer.”
Deautomatization. This idea of unfreezing belief structures is paralleled on a neuropsychological level by the concept of deautomatization. Psychologists point out that motor behavior tends to become “automatic,” and as the physical actions become more automatized, so do the mental acts involved in those actions. An example is the way we come to drive a car automatically, paying virtually no attention to the mental processes or the highly coordinated motor skills involved. Obviously, automatization has great advantages, allowing us to perform an enormous range of mundane tasks without paying attention to them, and enabling us to save our valuable attention for important or novel situations. There are drawbacks, however. Many people have had the experience of getting up, going to work, coming home again, eating dinner, watching TV, getting ready for bed, and at some point coming fully awake and realizing they have gone through the entire day like a robot, on automatic pilot, with no real awareness of their actions or thoughts.
This is not a pleasant realization, and the obvious answer is to break away from automatic actions. Just as belief structures must first be unfrozen, so must automatic actions be deautomatized, a process psychologist Arthur Deikman defines as “the undoing of automatization, presumably by reinvesting actions and percepts with attention,” and “an undoing of the usual ways of perceiving and thinking due to the special way that attention is being used.”56 When people are able to deautomatize themselves, Deikman points out, they are filled with a powerful feeling of intensified sensory perceptions. William Blake spoke of “cleansing the doors of perception,” and Deikman cites other mystics who have experienced a “new vision,” a clarification of everything seen.
How is this deautomatization achieved? Deikman examines several techniques, including contemplative meditation, but focuses on the idea of “renunciation,” including “isolation and silence.” Isolation and silence sounds something like the float tank, but Deikman continues: “To the extent that perceptual and cognitive structures require the ‘nutriment’ of their accustomed stimuli for adequate functioning, renunciation would be expected to weaken and even disrupt these structures, thus tending to produce an unusual experience. Such an isolation from nutritive stimuli probably occurs internally as well.” This, of course, is reminiscent of unfreezing and of stimulus hunger. It may be, says Deikman, that meditation “creates temporary stimulus barriers producing a functional state of sensory isolation. On the basis of sensory isolation experiments it would be expected that long-term deprivation … of a particular class of stimulus ‘nutriment’ would cause an alteration in those functions previously established to deal with that class of stimuli. These alterations seem to be a type of deautomatization…. Thus, renunciation alone can be viewed as producing deautomatization” (italics mine). That is, the isolation tank experience (“renunciation”) produces deautomatization. On a sensory level, this explains why the world seems so fresh, colors so bright, our senses so keen, when we emerge from the tank. Our habitual or automatic ways of perceiving the world have been disrupted; we perceive things with a new intensity of attention. The world has become new.