Is the float tank experience a sort of return to the womb? A lot of people think so. The idea is so widespread that one commercial float center is called The Womb Room. The parallels are striking: floating in dense warm salt solution, in a dark, secure, enclosed space; theta brain waves (like those of babies) creating a sense of timelessness; a dim awareness that at some uncertain future time one will have to emerge from this safe haven into a different, less peaceful place ….
Preliminary studies by Fine and Turner of the Medical College of Ohio, suggesting that floating causes an increased secretion of the body’s natural narcotics, endorphins,252 take on an intriguing significance when considered in this light. Endorphins are released from the pituitary gland, and it’s known that pregnant women develop an extra lobe of the pituitary gland. Tests have also shown that pregnant women have up to eight times the normal amount of endorphins in their blood. These endorphins flow freely across the placenta during pregnancy, so the fetus is also experiencing an extraordinarily high level of endorphins. In fact, endorphins seem to be a literal mother substitute. When puppies, chicks, and young guinea pigs that had been separated from their mothers were given doses of endorphins, they stopped crying and ceased to experience stress. The neuroscientist conducting the experiment remarked, “Almost as if opiates are neurochemically equivalent to the presence of mother, the animals given endorphins were quickly comforted.”101
Endorphins not only relieve pain; like the other opiates, such as heroin and morphine, they create states of intense euphoria. Prenatal bliss, then, is a physiologically real experience; probably the prototypical high to which all our other joys and experiences are compared and found sadly wanting. So when we’re suspended in the warm dark tank, body pulsing rhythmically with an audible and reassuring heart beat, with our brains pumping out endorphins, it’s quite possible some subconscious memory is stirred and profoundly deep emotional associations called up.
Mommy and I Are One. These speculations become even more interesting when we consider recent research in subliminal perception done by Lloyd Silverman. Silverman was originally interested in using subliminal perception to desensitize people who had fear of cockroaches. Using the tachitoscope, a special machine that flashes a message faster than a viewer can consciously see it, he flashed the neutral message “People are walking” to one group. To the other group, he flashed the loaded message “Mommy and I are one.” After four sessions, the group which had subliminally seen “Mommy and I are one” had made far more improvement than the control group.
Silverman then used the same technique to improve academic performance. Law students, all evenly matched academically before the study, were randomly assigned to two groups and shown the two different subliminal messages four times a week over a six-week summer session. At the end the Mommy group received substantially higher grades than the other group. Silverman concluded that the power of the Mommy message was as a “magical fulfillment of … wishes emanating from the earliest developmental level, particularly wishes for oral gratification and maternal warmth.”217, 218
Psychologist and author Howard Halpern observes of these fascinating results that the Mommy message seemed to act as “insurance that Mother won’t leave and abandon them, and a reduction in the threat they experience in temporary separations because, after all, Mommy and I are one; and a fusion with Mother’s strength can magically remedy all shortcomings and impairments.”93 In their book about these experiments, The Search for Oneness, Silverman and his associates go on to discuss how this pursuit for fusion with Mommy, the search for oneness, can become the most powerful impulse in life, impelling people to such varied pursuits as meditation, religious experiences of all sorts, drugs and alcohol, religious cults, and jogging.218
If the need for oneness, for fusion with Mother’s strength, is so powerful, and the float tank is such a striking and convincing analogue of the womb, then we have compelling answers to why the tank is such a satisfying and confidence-building experience, and why people who float often feel that their lives take on wholeness. If an hour or two of floating in the tank can provide us with an intense experience of the oneness that is the essential pursuit of our lives, then we have an explanation for floaters’ frequent spontaneous reduction in fears, spontaneous reduction in smoking, drinking, and drug taking, and a noticeable influx of energy, creativity, and productivity into their lives.
The womb hypothesis is interesting, but maybe we’re not taking a long range view of the satisfying sense of “Ah, home at last” that so many feel on entering the tank. Returning to the womb is a return over only a few years of a single individual’s life. It is also possible that the return is one of several million years, to the earliest days of the evolution of our species, when, as anthropologists now believe, for a period of hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of years, early humans lived as aquatic or semiaquatic creatures, gathering shellfish and living in the shallows of great inland seas.
The aquatic theory was first advanced by the British biologist of aquatic life Sir Alistair Hardy, and has gained a considerable following in recent years. Among the most prominent proponents of the hypothesis is Elaine Morgan, who recently devoted an entire volume to exploring it (The Aquatic Ape: A Theory of Human Evolution). Morgan cites recent geological and anthropological evidence that a crucial gap in human fossil history (the yawning gap between the very ape-like and knuckle-walking Ramapithecus, whose fossils are dated around 9 million years ago, and Australopithecus, who walked upright on two legs and whose foot imprints are almost exactly like ours, whose fossil remains date from about 3.7 million years ago), coincided with a time when large areas of Africa were flooded and covered by vast seas, with the exception of some large upland areas that became islands. Morgan explains:
The aquatic theory envisages that during this period one group of apes embarked on a distinct path of evolution by adapting to an aquatic environment—just as other species had done earlier [e.g. dolphins, whales, porpoises, all warm-blooded mammals whose skeletons show the remnants of legs, indicating they once lived on land before returning to the sea]. Later, when the waters receded and new ecological opportunities opened up, they returned to their former terrestrial lifestyle. But they brought with them a package of in-built aquatic adaptations, which they still demonstrably retain…. The theory suggests that man did not lose his hair because he became an overheated hunter…. He lost it for the same reason as the whale and the dolphin and the manatee: because if any fairly large aquatic mammal needs to keep warm in water, it is better served by a layer of fat on the inside of its skin than by a layer of hair on the outside of it.168
In her ingenious and fascinating treatise, Morgan shows how satisfactorily the aquatic theory explains many otherwise inexplicable points of human nature and physiology. For example, to adapt to life in the water, early humans developed the ability to close the nasal passages and throat, and to hold their breath for deep diving (a skill other primates—who are afraid of the water—do not have). In developing the soft palate and unique throat structure and nasal cavity, humans also developed the ability to enunciate words (other primates are physiologically unable to do so), out of which came our speech and other verbal abilities. The theory also explains the recent discovery that babies are able to swim not merely before they’re able to walk but even before they can crawl. Not only do babies have a swimming reflex, but breath-holding and diving reflexes as well. The theory also explains why humans weep salt tears, copulate face to face, have no body hair, walk on two legs rather than knuckle-walking like our ape cousins, and have developed such a large neocortex.
Does this theory hold water? Throw it in the lake and see if it floats. If it has any validity (and both Morgan and Hardy produce persuasive arguments), then we are water babies in more ways than one and salt water is our natural element, the evolutionary matrix of our species for as many as 5 million years. We were made to float; it’s in our genes. Buoyant basking beasts. And each time we lie back on the supportive salt water, bobbing blissfully, our breath booming rhythmically in our ears like surf, we are connecting with our heritage, stirring our cellular memory, communing with some ancient self—that primordial Australopithecan cousin, floating pensively in the warm, shallow salt sea of northern Africa 5 million years back, humming and burbling soulfully with our delightful and unique vocal tract and resonant nasal passages, and preparing to crack open a succulent shellfish on our hairless belly with a rock. O brave new world, that has such people in it!