The isolation tank, built first by the neurophysiologist John C. Lilly at the National Institute of Mental Health in 1954 to answer a specific question: whether the brain’s activity is driven by external stimulation or is intrinsic. A subject floats in body-temperature salt water in darkness and silence, and the answer turned out to be that the activity does not stop.
The two histories
The scientific one runs from Lilly’s NIMH work through his later, less controlled experiments combining the tank with LSD and ketamine, to the tank’s afterlife as a relaxation technology. The other runs through the CIA: sensory deprivation was one of the lines of research MKUltra funded, including the work at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, where it was combined with drugs and electroshock on patients who had not consented, and where the object was not neuroscience but the disruption of personality.
Why it is in this vault
It is the physical apparatus at the centre of the Stranger Things premise, and the show’s use of it is closer to the second history than the first. It also sits underneath the Remote Viewing programmes, whose protocols assume that reducing sensory input improves signal, an assumption that came out of this line of work and was never independently validated.
Connections
MKUltra · Stranger Things · Remote Viewing · Sidney Gottlieb · Church Committee · Stargate Program · Ingo Swann