INTO
the
Relax@
FLOATING
Right now you are reading this magazine. Chances are, out
drugs, claimed to be able to communicate with dolphins, and
of the corner of your eye you can see other people, buildings,
participated in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, so
furniture, trees, the seat in front of you on the plane, or maybe
“odd” is relative.
a relaxing view of the ocean. And you can hear music, people
talking, the wind, the waves, engines, phones ringing, a distant
It could have ended there, but Lilly found that not only could the
burglar alarm, dogs barking or perhaps even zebras snorting.
brain function without external stimulus, it functioned superbly.
You can smell the perfume of the person next to you, coffee
Time spent in the isolation tank resulted in increased creativity,
brewing, the smoke of someone’s cigarette wafting on the
greater concentration, less stress and generally improved well-
breeze, wet dog, rain on dry earth, baby powder, or your
being. So, over the next couple of decades, a number of
neighbours braaiing. You feel the smoothness of the paper in
people worked on improving his original design. It was a long
your hand, the edge of the seat on the back of your thighs, the
process, but the result is that the flotation tanks in use today are
sun or the wind on your face, and the pressure of your shoes
aesthetically, ergonomically and technically vastly superior to
on your toes.
Lilly’s rather crude prototype.
Bet you hadn’t even thought of any of those things. You’ve
REST
learned to cut them out because you have to. You’d go crazy
Also known as restricted environmental stimulation technique
if you didn’t. But what does it cost you to keep those sensory
(REST), floating is increasingly entering the mainstream as its
barriers up? What are the mechanisms we use to block off
th erapeutic benefits become better known. The main advantage
more than half of what’s happening outside? Well, no one can
of floating is that, by cutting out all external stimuli, it achieves
really answer that question, but there has been research into the
in an hour what it takes Eastern yogis a decade or two to
benefits of shutting off that sensory overload.
master – a quiet mind. A quiet mind is something we almost
Sensory deprivation
never experience in our busy lives, so most of us don’t really
know the benefits.
The first recorded research into sensory deprivation (which
sounds quite nasty but isn’t) was by US neuroscientist John Lilly.
There’s a whole lot of jargon we could go into, like theta
In the 1950s he built a pretty scary sensory deprivation tank in
waves, alpha waves, etc., but whatever Greek alphabet soup
which student guinea pigs (and Lilly himself) floated on warm
we throw at it, the basic principle is shutting out the constant
salt water, in the hope of finding out whether the human brain
chatter. Instead of buzzing about nothing or about everything,
could function without any external input. It was a bit of an odd
our minds are calm, turned in towards ourselves and, some say,
experiment, but then Lilly also experimented with hallucinogenic
effectively accessing our unconscious. This is where healing