Jeffrey Mathias, Ph.D.

John C. Lilly was a brilliant neuroscientist, a trailblazing marine biologist who attempted to bridge the gap between dolphins and humans via interspecies communication, and a California countercultural guru with a heroic appetite for LSD and ketamine. This talk examines Lilly’s earlier work in “experimental isolation,” part of a brief scientific fad for the laboratory study of solitude. At the National Institute of Mental Health, outside Washington, DC, Lilly pursued this line of thinking through a unique scientific apparatus: a water tank, borrowed from a Navy funded project on the respiratory metabolism of scuba diving soldiers. Drawing on neurophysiological studies of the encéphale isolé— the nonhuman brain surgically isolated from both body and world via the severing of the brainstem— Lilly cast this tank as a similar means of “sensory deprivation,” submerging experimental subjects for prolonged periods, their faces covered by an aviation breathing mask smeared with tar. Alone and immersed in this monotonous sensory environment, what would the human subject become?

While a growing body of literature has examined Lilly’s career from any number of vantage points, this talk centers the water tank itself, an experimental environment cobbled together from military detritus. To do so, I approach Lilly’s apparatus genealogically, re-situating both it and Lilly in relation to three projects that informed it: the early Cold War imaginary of “underwater warfare”; the uptake of water immersion by the Air Force space program as a means of terrestrially simulating extraterrestrial weightlessness; and the backyard swimming pool in Lilly’s home suburb of Silver Springs, MD.