In the Tank
In 1952, three decades before IBM PCs became just another household appliance, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly brought the computer to national attention. The UNIVAC they had built accurately predicted that Dwight Eisenhower would defeat front-runner Adlai Stevenson in the presidential election. Two years on, when Dr. John C. Lilly, the inventor of the sensory deprivation tank, began his research at the National Institute of Mental Health, the development of information technology barely seemed to trouble him. Later, it inspired his thinking as he dropped LSD, slipped into his tank and carefully considered his consciousness. In the first major publication of Lilly’s findings, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer (1968), the doctor imagines the brain as a piece of computer technology. “All human beings, all persons who reach adulthood in the world today are programmed biocomputers,” Lilly wrote.
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To make it as easy as possible to reprogram himself and thereby observe the workings of his mind, Lilly considered every measure that might help solve the mechanical problem of isolating the brain. One section of his book The Deep Self (1977) painstakingly examines the ways to avoid types of sensory disturbance. While attempting to bring the temperature of the water and air in his tank in perfect accord with his skin, Lilly fell into a coma. “Various emergency mechanisms in the body took over,” he calmly noted, “including activation of the mesencephalic vocalization center [midbrain], which produces ‘moans.’” Elsewhere in the book, he laments that the only way to prevent the force of gravity from affecting the inner ear would be to relocate oneself to “a field free of gravity in far-out spaces beyond the solar system, or go into orbit around the planet.” He also takes account of bodily functions. During a float, “one can learn to control orgasm,” he writes, “so that one does not have an ejaculation.” In the book’s foreword, a colleague recalls Lilly’s five-tank floating facility in Malibu, California. “For obvious reasons we soon began referring to the ranch as the Lilly Pond,” he writes, “although the official mailing name is Human Software Inc.”
In the silence of the tank, I heard my eyelashes brush against each other with a gravelly crunch. Others are deafened by the sound of their heartbeat. Lilly admitted he could not eliminate all sensory stimulation from the float and noted that a “pure” mental state, especially the kind that reveals the reality of consciousness, requires more than sensory isolation. He has quoted the polymath thinker G. Spencer Brown, who wrote: “To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know.” This demand to assume a Bartleby-like refusal to engage with the trifles of a busy world, what Lilly called “the consensus reality,” resonates not only with the second generation of floaters—who would, thirty-five years later, look to sensory deprivation as a shield against the “forever” of technological contact—but also with those original civil skeptics of the nineteenth century, the Transcendentalists.
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In the early decades of the nineteenth century, during the Second Great Awakening, American Christian sects fractured even as Christianity swelled its ranks. The fervor to reveal the true word, like Lilly’s zeal to discover the true mind, burned to the point of self-destruction. As the theologian Charles Lippy points out in his book Pluralism Comes of Age, “the intoxicating freedom of endless space and the lack of a national religious establishment encouraged others to have a hand at starting their own religions.” Many Protestants sought out a purer form of their faith, he writes, and “unwittingly” created new denominations. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Unitarian minister, decided to cast off the yoke of his congregation and look inward for his particular purity. Standing before six graduating seniors at the Harvard Divinity School in 1838, he gave an address that would have him barred from the campus for some thirty years. “The doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man,” he said, “and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand.” Emerson went on, deriding the typical Puritan church service: “We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us. We are fain to wrap our cloaks about us, and secure, as best we can, a solitude that hears not.”
Henry David Thoreau read Emerson’s essays, heard his addresses and wanted to live by his philosophy. In the spring of 1845, in order to better investigate his own truth, Thoreau enlisted a few friends to help build a small cabin near Walden Pond on a tract of land that Emerson owned, a mile and a half from his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. Once alone, he removed stumps from the surrounding terrain and cultivated beans. When Thoreau penned his own thoughts about self-understanding and solitary living, he spoke less of the befuddling ceremonies of the church and more about the technological distractions of his day: the locomotive, the letter, the newspaper, the telegraph. He complained that the devices and the glut of information they delivered made people petty and banal. “We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor,” he told a crowd in Providence, Rhode Island. “In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.” Thoreau was wary of what all this technology and urbanization had done to obscure the true workings of his mind. He hoped everyone could find a Walden Pond to settle by.
Unsurprisingly, many recent Internet-anxiety books invoke Thoreau. Turkle and Powers both discuss how the young iconoclast’s cranky wisdom might apply to cultural afflictions presumed to weaken twenty-first-century brains, especially texting or e-mailing too much, and Maushart predicates an experiment—to go for six months without screens of any type—on the experiences Thoreau details in Walden. Just as Thoreau had retreated to Walden Pond for a sabbatical from newspapers and letters, so too do many floaters descend into their sensory deprivation tanks to find relief from cellphones and the Internet. The desire to float alone in a dark and silent box may not, on the surface, resemble the impulse that sent a small-town intellectual to his bucolic home by the water, but Thoreau had not, in his experiment, sought the sensuality of nature; he had gone in search of minimalism. Sounding like a nineteenth-century Romantic version of Lilly, Thoreau intended to “live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
