Since childhood, Donna Lucco of Houston, Texas, has been a competitive athlete: AAU swimming, high school, college, and AAU track, cycling, the marathon. Following a victory in the Galveston Marathon in 1980, she set her sights on the Boston Marathon. “I trained real real hard for Boston,” she says, “but I did pretty poorly. And then after that I lost interest for a while. I was kind of burned out.”
Donna turned to non-athletic pursuits, earning two B.S. degrees from the University of Houston (in anthropology and psychology), and working as a counselor at a psychiatric hospital. Then she decided to try floating, emerged from her first float “feeling fantastic,” and was soon floating two or three times a week. “When I really noticed the difference is on Mondays,” she says. “I work all night Sunday night, so on Mondays when I would float in the morning I’d be more capable of running in the afternoon. I’d come right from work and float for two hours instead of going to bed, and I wasn’t tired.”
Floating renewed Donna’s athletic ambitions. In the summer of 1982 she made a coast-to-coast bicycle trip, averaging about eighty miles a day. Back in Houston, she continued floating, cycling, swimming, and running, and set her sights on a new goal—the Olympic trials in May 1984.
As she stepped up the intensity of her training, she found the tank indispensable for overcoming fatigue and avoiding injury. But the tank’s greatest value for Donna, she says, has been its effects in her mind: “The tank is the perfect tool for programming and goal setting, just changing your attitudes about yourself, replacing negative thoughts with positive messages.” Aware that floating enormously increases suggestibility, Donna “reprograms” herself with tapes of positive messages and guided visualizations, played to her while she floats.
A recent Harris poll shows that more than 90 million Americans—59 percent of all adults—participate regularly in some physical activity, compared with only 24 percent of the population just twenty years ago. There is a parallel rise in public interest in ways of using the mind to improve on the quality of exercise. Once you begin to take physical exercise seriously there’s no way you can avoid the realization that athletics is not purely a matter of muscle, with victory to the physically gifted. It is intricately linked to mental states, including such variables as psychological barriers, mind-set, confidence, will, desire, belief, concentration, coolness, and self-image.
All 90 million of today’s sometime athletes have had at least some experience with this aspect of athletics, which—with the great popularity of Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Book of Tennis and subsequent similar books on skiing, golf, soccer, running, and more—has come to be known as “the inner game.” Those who have not experimented with the inner game themselves have certainly seen it in action, as professional baseball, basketball, and football teams and various Olympic teams hire psychologists to instruct the players in hypnosis, visualization, or meditation techniques.
It may have been noticed that when the longtime also-ran Philadelphia Eagles acquired a floatation tank in 1980, the team went on to win the NFC championship, and when they went to the Super Bowl game (their first), they took a floatation tank with them to New Orleans. The Philadelphia Phillies baseball team noticed the tank in the Eagles’ training room; many of its players began floating and the Phillies went on to win their first World Series for decades.
Another team equipped with a tank is the Dallas Cowboys, and star defensive back Charlie Waters said of his use of the tank in 1981: “The young players sometimes resist these techniques, but when they see those Super Bowl rings, they change their minds. In pro football, you have to make the assumption that everybody is in great shape, everybody is fast, everybody is strong. Then the difference becomes: Who can think on his feet.” And it is in the mental part of the game, according to Waters, that the tank has a telling effect.
Researchers have known for years of the enormous influence of mental events over the workings of the body. Physiologist Edmund Jacobson’s experiments with visualization of physical activity and corresponding muscular contractions were conducted more than fifty years ago. Later researchers became interested in just how this connection between mental image and physical response could be put to practical use, as in the now-classic experiment with the basketball-shooting school boys. (See pages 103 and 105.) One study of dart throwing matched two groups on the basis of vividness of imagery and their initial scores—that is, they were evenly matched at the beginning. One group was told to visualize themselves throwing nothing but bull’s eyes. The other group imagined themselves throwing at the center but missing. The positive group improved scores by 28 percent, while the scores of the others actually deteriorated by 3 percent.
Could it be, researchers wondered, that such tests were showing the results only of increased or decreased confidence”? By seeing themselves as successful and accurate dart-throwers, did the subjects gain confidence in their own abilities? A test was devised in which members of one group simply imagined their darts hitting the bull’s-eye, and members of the other group visualized themselves with all their senses, feeling themselves inside their imagined bodies. While both groups visualized success and should have had the same amount of increase in confidence, tests revealed that although the group that only visualized success had a very slight improvement, the group that visualized and mentally experienced the entire physical process improved dramatically. The conclusion had to be that somehow the process of vivid visualization actually improved physical coordination and performance.
Evidence of mental image’s direct-programming capability began to pour in as more and more athletes learned to apply the lessons of these experiments to their own sports. Golf has always been an intensely mental sport, but Jack Nicklaus revealed the importance of visualization in his book Golf My Way: “I never hit a shot, even in practice, without having a very sharp, infocus picture of it in my head. It’s like a color movie. First I ‘see’ the ball where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting up high on the bright green grass. Then the scene quickly changes and I ‘see’ the ball going there: its path, trajectory, and shape, even its behavior on landing. Then there’s a sort of fade-out, and the next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality.172
Richard Suinn, head of the psychology department at the University of Colorado, has done extensive work with mental imagery. Over a decade ago he attempted a controlled experiment with the University of Colorado ski team: One half of the team went into a state of relaxation, and used mental imagery, visualizing themselves skiing over the run yard by yard, taking each turn. If they made an error they were instructed to go back and correct it mentally. The other group practiced as they normally would, without visualization. But Suinn didn’t get a chance to complete the experiment; since the performance of the visualization group was so far superior to the other group, the coach selected only visualizers to ski in competition, so no comparison with the control group was possible. The team went on to enormous success. Says Suinn: “What visualization does is program the muscles. Every time you do it, you’re setting up a kind of computer program. When you get to the competition, all you have to do is press the start button and your body takes over—you’re along for the ride.” 241 Using this “visuomotor behavior rehearsal” technique (VMBR), Suinn subsequently trained several successful Winter Olympic teams.
Clearly, visualization can improve performance dramatically. But what’s particularly interesting and apposite is that in all cases where athletes have used visualization techniques, or psychologists and coaches have instructed athletes in such techniques, they have emphasized the importance of controlling the desired athletic performance so that it is experienced as fully as possible: by visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory imagery, by the emotional brain and the muscles and nerves.
George Leonard, author of The Ultimate Athlete and himself a student of aikido, writes of visualization: “It’s not simply a question of ‘giving it the old college try.’ ‘Trying’ in the ordinary sense can even be detrimental. The practice, rather, entails creating a sense of the event that is vivid and fully realized, an occasion in itself…. Whatever visual or feeling language we use, the key lies in making the occasion as real and present in the realm of intentionality and structure as in the realm of energy, matter, space, and time.”136
Herbie the marathoner understood this instinctively as he floated in the tank, watching himself cross the finish line in Central Park, hearing the crowd, feeling the nippy breeze, smelling the hot dogs—convincing himself the scene was real. And as the test of the two groups of dart throwers indicates, the difference between simply visualizing success and intensely experiencing the entire scene and process can be the difference between defeat and victory.
However, as Suinn and other experts stress, while control and richness of mental imagery is the goal, the true key to effective imagery is deep relaxation. Suinn’s visuomotor behavior rehearsal, he points out, “can be divided simply into relaxation … and the use of imagery for strengthening psychological or motor skills.” However, Suinn has found that it is often more difficult, and takes more time, to teach the athlete to relax systematically, so that the imagery will be effective, than it does to teach the rest of the technique. The problem is that athletes, like everyone else, have little experience of true deep relaxation.
Mental imagery experts have found a direct relationship between relaxation and imagery: The more deeply relaxed one becomes, the clearer, more controllable, and more frequent is one’s mental imagery. And as the hard evidence cited in Chapter 12 attests, the float tank sharply increases the production, intensity, clarity, and controllability of mental imagery. Also, floating promotes the generation of large amounts of slow theta waves, which are directly linked with the production of mental images of uncanny power and reality.
Visualization Techniques
Each athlete will want to begin by picturing in the mind’s eye the skills called for in competition or training, or the specific skills most in need of improvement. Often, appropriate mental images will naturally suggest themselves—perhaps an image of a swift and graceful gazelle, of winged sandals, fists of lead, or muscles like massive ropes. Each athlete must discover for himself what imagery works best: fantasy and exaggeration for some, romantic Chariots of Fire slow-motion for others, gritty grunting cinema verité realism for others. Brief descriptions follow of several visualization techniques that athletes have found particularly useful in the float tank. Try the ones that interest you, discover which work best, and be willing to change or improvise whenever you feel the impulse. Mental images can be made even more effective by combining them with repeated positive suggestions, such as: “I am running easily, effortlessly, powerfully” or ‘’I am always able to see the ball clearly” or “Each time I come to bat I am calm, confident, relaxed, and centered.”
The Mind Movie. Since you’re the director of your own internal picture show, make full use of all the potentials of film making: Take the picture from many angles; zoom in and out on the ball, the goal, your feet; in moments of particular intensity or effort go into slow motion; reward great efforts with an instant replay; if you happen to make an error, go back and erase it, run through the scene again, and do it right. Give yourself motivation: Station your true love at the finish line to embrace you; read your name in the headlines of the sports pages; visualize opening a record book and seeing that the holder of the world’s record is you; watch yourself deliver a victory speech over nationwide TV as Howard Cosell makes circumlocutory inquiries about your feelings.
Role Swapping. It’s helpful to free yourself now and then from habitual ways by assuming a completely different style of play. Dogged defensive players should visualize themselves as offensive hotshots; laidback players can see themselves as superaggressive. This doesn’t mean that you will adopt the new style in actual competition. You are just allowing yourself to experience in your mind what it is like to play in other styles.
Mental Workout. If you are floating before a workout, visualize yourself going through each step of the training: See yourself lifting each weight, strongly, flawlessly; see yourself doing your circuit training with extraordinary speed and endurance; see yourself working up to and beyond your normal capacity, without fatigue. This can have remarkable effects. I’ve been told by weightlifters that since there’s no necessity of waiting or resting between sets, they can run through an entire hour’s workout in a few minutes of visualizing, and that the muscle-building effect of the visualized workout seems to be just as strong as the actual workout. Since tests show that imagined actions result in genuine muscular contractions, this is quite credible, and research by sports physiologists suggests that visualized workouts can in fact increase strength.
Grace Under Pressure
All right (I hear someone say), I’m sure the tank must be a wonderful place for someone who needs to relax, but I can’t afford to get too relaxed. I’ve got to get psyched up so I can eat my opponents alive! I’ve got to have that old adrenaline surging through me! I need my killer instinct!
This idea of working yourself up into a frenzy, the better to unleash your aggressive and competitive energies and mobilize all your physical powers, has a long history. The problem is it doesn’t work. A flood of recent studies shows there are clear physiological reasons why athletic frenzy is counterproductive. What’s entailed in getting psyched is triggering the fight-or-flight reaction, an evolutionary strategy devised by the body to mobilize us instantly in the face of a threat to our security. With the release of certain hormones, we make available extraordinary strength: very good for lifting a truck off a trapped body, tearing out someone’s liver, or running like hell in mindless terror, but not so hot for the kind of clearheaded strategy, pinpoint accuracy, total concentration, and perfectly coordinated finesse required in most sports.
The fight-or-flight response is not helpful in any sport in which we want a clear head and access to the peak of our powers. There is such overwhelming evidence of this that psychologists have made it a law: the Yerkes-Dodson Law, which states that a highly aroused state is good for performing very simple tasks but not more complex ones, which are accomplished better in a state of very low arousal—i.e., while calm. Easier said than done. How do we get calm, and stay calm, in a highly charged situation such as athletic competition—or performance of any sort? Or, how do we acquire what Ernest Hemingway called “grace under pressure”?
I’ve cited numerous studies indicating that floatation, by triggering the relaxation response, causes lower heart and pulse rate and blood pressure, decreased muscle tension, increased blood flow to hands, feet, and stomach, decreased oxygen consumption, deeper and slower respiration, increased visual acuity, decreased levels of lactic acid in the blood and muscles, increase in various perceptual-motor abilities, increased intellectual functions such as learning, recall, and problem solving, among other effects, and that these beneficial responses to floating are quite long-lasting (in some tests certain salutary effects lingered for two to three weeks). All of these effects are directly counter to the maladaptive fight-or-flight reactions.
Turner and Fine, of the Medical College of Ohio, carefully measured all these decreases in fight-or-flight or sympathetic nervous system reactions, compared them with nervous system changes in a “relaxed” control group that did not use the float tank, and concluded that floating “alters the set points in the endocrine homeostatic mechanism so that the individual experiences a lower adrenal activation rate.”252 Other tests show that while floating reduces arousal of the sympathetic-adrenal axis, or the fight-or-flight reaction, it also leads to increased visual, tactile, and auditory sensitivity, quicker reactions, and enhanced performance of both simple and complex learning tasks. Floating, then, is conducive to the calm, unshakable, steady, centered, alert, totally concentrated state of mind that characterizes top athletes working at peak efficiency.
The value of that state of mind is not limited to sports, but produces the kind of joyous, life-enhancing energy that makes it a self-validating or autotelic experience. It is, in fact, what we have earlier called flow, the common ingredient of all pleasurable activity, from religion to love, sports to sex, music to philosophy. Floating, it seems, is the ideal preparation and practice for all athletes, including those at play in the fields of the Lord.
Whole Brain Play
Another way of analyzing the beneficial effects of floating on athletic performance is in terms of the specialization of the brain’s hemispheres. We know that when we’re playing at our best, in those wonderful moments of flow, there’s a wordless but perfect synchronism between body and mind. We don’t have to give orders to the body; it acts perfectly, instantaneously, as in a third baseman’s reflex dive for a backhanded spear of a line shot, or a flurry of volleys between two tennis players at the net, action moving too fast for the eye or the rational mind to follow.
It’s apparent that the brain’s left hemisphere (verbal, sequential, analytical, relatively slow, processing details) has little to do with such moments of flow, while the right hemisphere (fast, visual, spatial, holistic, synthetic) is operating freely. Athletic excellence depends so much on the nonverbal, large-scale processing of the right hemisphere that all athletes instinctively know that the intrusion of the verbal hemisphere can bring the flow experience to a dead halt. One of the oldest tricks in sports is to cause your opponent to activate the logical/verbal left brain, as when the baseball player, watching his hot-hitting opponent in batting practice, shouts, “Hey, Willie, you’re hitting good! What did you do to change your stance—bend your knees more?” Willie begins to wonder what he is doing, the left hemisphere swings into action, and the great slump begins.
There are so many simultaneous spatial variables involved in every moment of athletic action that, if the linear, detail-oriented left hemisphere tries to interfere, it can only end up disrupting our play. And in the liberation of the right hemisphere, the float tank can be a valuable tool for athletes. As we have seen in earlier chapters, there is extensive evidence that floatation causes the dominant verbal left hemisphere to let go its usual tight hand on the controls, allowing the often neglected or undeveloped right hemisphere to come into play. Or, as Budzynski puts it: “The right brain comes out in that float tank and says ‘Whoopee’.”38
This effect, lasting as it does for many hours or days after a float, can be maintained and carried by the athlete into the arena.
The point, of course, is not to eliminate the left brain. Logical and verbal intelligence are essential to clear thinking, to effective strategy. The third baseman would not have been in position to make his reflex diving stab if he hadn’t used his logical brain to consider the game situation, the batter’s ability to pull the ball, and so on. Our need is not to replace left-brain dominance with right-brain dominance, but to wrest total control from the left brain, to keep the left brain from trying to usurp the right brain’s role, to establish a cooperation and open communication between the two, so that each hemisphere is allowed to serve its proper function. And this is exactly what the float tank does: Studies of brain waves indicate that floating has the effect of bringing the electrical rhythms of both hemispheres into a state of balance and “hypersynchrony.”
Crocodile Sports and Horseplay
While the visual-spatial, large-scale, rapid processing abilities of the right hemisphere are essential to all athletic activity, the true source of athletic activity and ability lies in those deeper parts of the brain that evolved earlier—the paleomammalian or “horse brain,” and the “reptile brain.” These ancient parts of the brain control almost all our automatic and unconscious physical activity, have immense (though nonverbal) knowledge, handle extremely subtle mechanisms like balance, coordinate movement, and direct and focus our awareness and arousal. While the neocortex is important when we are consciously trying to learn new skills—such physical activities as riding a bike or skiing, where at first we have to think about what we’re doing—we quickly learn to do them “without thinking,” which means that the physical knowledge has been handed over to our old brain. Clearly, in most sports, where we depend on the ability to perform all sorts of complicated and difficult actions automatically, we rely on the constant and unhindered working of these deep levels of the mind (what MacLean calls the visceral mind), and when they work freely we speak of the result approvingly as body/mind unity.
These primal systems of the brain are the seat of strong and irrational drives and emotions: aggression, pleasure, ritualistic behavior, territoriality, competitiveness, social hierarchies, group or team spirit, and so on, including most of those deep impulses that are the essence of sport. Our ability and desire to play games, our enjoyment of sport, and our athletic capabilities depend on communicating effectively with these older and deeper levels of the brain.
But it is our highly developed cerebral cortex that differentiates us from the “lower” animals. Our culture emphasizes and rewards effective use of the cerebral cortex. Too often, however, the result is a devaluation or even denial of those atavistic, reptilian levels of mind. We have come up out of the muck and do not like to be reminded of it. Physically as well as mentally we suffer the curse of what MacLean calls schizophysiology: a split between the new brain, which thinks, and the older brains, which act. Even when we are trying to open ourselves to the older levels of the mind, communication is difficult, since while the neocortex tends to express itself in words, the deeper brains evolved before language and operate through primal impulses, emotions, drives, images, senses, and symbols instead of verbal concepts.
Most people who engage in sports come up against this separation, which is in effect a split between mind and body. The problem is a seeming inability or unwillingness to allow those deeper levels of the mind to operate freely. This can be seen in players who are stiff, who can “learn” a sport only by consciously and painstakingly assimilating information or lessons, who can never lose themselves totally in the game, who can never open themselves up to the full range of experience and emotion that sport can provide. Rather than trusting the body which means trusting the wordless wisdom of the deep, unconscious mind—the “cerebral” athlete tries to boss the body around: “Keep your eye on the ball, you idiot!”
But as we saw earlier, one of the primary effects of floating is to establish an integration of the old and new layers of the brain, to improve communication between the levels, open up our consciousness to an influx of energy from the suppressed and repressed lower levels of the mind. Among the ways the float tank does this are:
By increasing our sensitivity to body states, i.e., allowing the neocortex to become more aware of what the deeper levels of the brain are doing. Increased body-awareness is directly linked to increased athletic capability, and all great athletes are distinguished by extraordinary body-awareness.
By increasing relaxation. (Muscular tension hinders the operation of the deep levels of the mind by making it more difficult to move the body freely.)
By decreasing stress-related biochemicals in the body. (The fight-or-flight reaction places the old brain in a state of imbalance, limiting its ability to coordinate and control the body.)
By making the neocortex more receptive to wordless information flowing to it from the old brain in the form of images, emotions, compulsions, and the like.
By making the lower brain more receptive to directives flowing to it from the upper brain in the form of suggestions and images.
These and other indications of improved communication between the upper and lower levels of the brain have been documented by numerous scientific studies of subjects in float tanks.
Recalling Socrates’ charioteering metaphor for the brain, we could say the difference between athletes with or without access to the deeper levels of mind is the difference between a chariot racer with two swift horses hitched to his vehicle and one whose horses are out to pasture somewhere: Both racers may have equal desire to win, equal skills, equally good chariots, equally powerful horses, but the one with his team in harness will win the race.
Floating on the Lifetide. While we have been dealing here with actual levels of the physiological system known as the brain, a parallel can also be made with levels of the mind or psyche, for as we gain access through floating to the levels of the brain that are older in evolutionary terms, we also gain access to the more ancient contents and modes of consciousness, peeling away layer by layer millions of years of psychic development. Floating gives us entree to what Jung has described as the Collective Unconscious: deep “memories” which are not memories of actual events but rather the memories of our species—and more, of all the millions of years of evolution. This collective wisdom comprises that bedrock of emotions, instincts, and desires that cannot be remembered consciously, but is necessarily filtered and distorted through the mechanisms of dream, consciousness, and language and emerges transformed into certain patterns: ways in which we tend to view life, which Jung called the “archetypes.”123, 124
Throughout the first seventy years of the century, Jung’s idea of an ongoing natural process to which all living things are connected, and which consists of inherited knowledge, seemed hard for many to believe. How could memory be inherited? But with recent advancements in unraveling the mysteries of our genetic material, it is now clear that it’s quite possible to inherit wisdom through the unbelievably intricate codes of the DNA molecules inside every cell. The new breakthroughs in genetics are exciting, since they offer the possibility of systematic and planned access to the contents of the collective unconscious. Biologist Lyall Watson touches on this in his treatise on the biology of the unconscious, Lifetide: “If Jung is right about an ongoing natural process which our personal unconscious samples four or five times each night in dreams, then there might well be other ways we can experience this flow. It may be possible for us to tap into it consciously.”257
With this in mind, it’s interesting to consider the work of Jungian psychiatrist Dr. Thaddeus Kostrubala, who noticed that strenuous exercise, extended over long periods, seemed to open people up to ordinarily unconscious or inaccessible areas of their minds. He started running and noticed that he was undergoing very rapidly the kind of changes usually associated with long periods of psychotherapy. He began conducting therapy while he and his patients were running together, and made the chastening discovery that in many cases his patients were healed more by running than by his own abilities as a psychotherapist. In his subsequent book The Joy of Running, Kostrubala systematized his experiences, arguing that running stimulated and revealed to the runner different layers of the psyche in a fairly consistent progression and time sequence:
In the first twenty minutes the runner deals with ego concerns or self-consciousness.
In the next twenty minutes or so the runner descends through the personal unconscious, resurrecting and reexamining in a new light memories and emotions from the past. With the relaxation of inhibitions, physical and mental tensions and aggression bubble to the surface, bringing with them a euphoric “runner’s high.”
Then the runner sinks into the collective unconscious, with dreamlike archetypal images emerging spontaneously; life is often seen in mythic or symbolic terms, and perceptions are intensified.
And finally (after about sixty minutes of running), the runner descends into the deepest levels of the collective unconscious, experiencing oceanic feelings, full of wordless knowledge, including behavior patterns shared with animal and pre-human ancestors.132
This descent-through-the-layers model of Kostrubala describes very accurately what happens in the float tank, a fact demonstrated in an intriguing experiment. Boston educator R.A. (Terry) Hunt conducted a study in which about forty volunteers floated repeatedly (for a total of nearly two hundred floats) and described their experiences immediately after each one. The descriptions were then categorized into three different “orientations”:
The “Physiological Orientation,” in which floaters showed a concern with their bodies and physical experiences, and a “present space and time” orientation—much like the early part of the prototypical run Kostrubala describes, and much like the athlete’s period of warm-up and the early parts of the game.
The “Ego-Centered/Cognitive Mastery Orientation,” in which floaters learned to let go and become relaxed, dealt with day-to-day events and concerns, experienced imagery and memories, had “cathartic moments” in which they released their inhibitions and poured out tensions and aggression—very much like Kostrubala’s middle period of the run, the experience of the personal unconscious; and equivalent to that period in sports when the athlete is playing competently but is still uninspired, still trying to direct his play with his conscious mind. In Hunt’s terms, “the ego is attempting to master the experience in a variety of ways, each of which was chosen”; that is, the athlete is “trying to do,” to rely on discipline, effort, training.
The “Transpersonal Orientation”: Here, the floater has inwardly directed experiences in which, says Hunt, “there appears to be no ‘I’ (the witnessing ego) involved … in which the experience and the experiencer are mutually causal: each is happening to the other … [there is] a level of concentration that can only be described as ‘doing itself.’” Hunt says common experiences are merging or communicating with some spiritual entity, or a higher level of self. This parallels that period of the run when, Kostrubala says, the runner sinks into the collective unconscious; and is the equivalent of the athlete’s moments of inspired play, when he is playing “over his head,” merged with the game itself, not “trying to do” but simply doing. In the float tank, as on the playing field, the person who is in this Transpersonal Orientation is deeply relaxed, even while mentally extraordinarily alert, and is both “in the present space and time” and simultaneously outside of them, or, in Hunt’s words, on “the interface between the infinite and the present space and time.”
Hunt concluded that floaters showed a “demonstrable trend” toward what he called the “Explorative Progression,” with the subjects moving from the Physiological to the Ego-Centered/Cognitive Mastery to the Transpersonal Orientation. That is, floating does facilitate (and in many ways cause) entry to deeper (or higher) levels of the mind.106 Other experimental studies, work by psychologists and psychiatrists who use the tank for therapy, and a wealth of anecdotal evidence as well, confirm Hunt’s conclusions.
For athletes, this is important news. The tank takes us rapidly, consistently, and dependably into that mental-physical state which is most conducive to peak play, to transcending ourselves. By doing so it allows us to familiarize ourselves with the physical and mental characteristics of that state, so we can reproduce them with more skill and confidence when we are actually engaged in sport. Through use of the tank we can “practice” the experience of peak play; strengthen and develop our powers of relaxed concentration, calm alertness, and effortless doing; and increase our openness to the integrative powers of the collective unconscious. And, since physiological research shows that the effects of the tank carry over for many hours and even days, we can use the tank as a preparation for athletic play, as a sort of warm-up tool to put us into a state of mind/body unity, with increased abilities of sensory discrimination, enhanced communication between the levels of the physical brain, increased access to our own too often dormant power, strength, coordination, skill, wisdom, stamina, speed.
Whether we’re dealing with the lateralization of the functions of the cerebral cortex, the evolutionary layers of the brain, or the levels of the mind, floating does—in some ways we understand and in some ways still mysterious—bring about and increase a synchronous, balanced, unified, harmonious, and potentiating relationship between all parts of the brain. Through floating we are enabled to peel away millions of years of mental and physical evolution and descend to a level of cellular awareness, the collective unconscious, the Lifetide, that sets free our most explosive, serene, and inspired athletic powers.