John Lilly: A Mind in the Water

So who was Lilly? His early biography offers little hint of what would be his enduring obsession with the bottlenose. Taking a degree in physics from Caltech in 1938, Lilly headed off to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, joining the war effort as a researcher in avionics. An early photo shows him as a rakish young scientist, smoking a corncob pipe while tinkering with a device designed to monitor the blood pressure of American flyboys -- a number of whom, in those days, were actually using surfacing cetaceans for strafing practice.

After the war, motivated in large part by contact with the pioneering brain surgeon Wilder Penfield, Lilly turned his hand to neuroscience, applying the era's expanding array of solid-state electronic devices to the monitoring and mapping of the central nervous system. Eventually appointed to a research position at the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), Lilly spent the better part of a decade conducting invasive cortical vivisection on a variety of animals, particularly macaques. In the spy-versus-spy world of the high Cold War, this kind of work had undeniably creepy dimensions. Manchurian Candidate anxieties about "forced indoctrination" and pharmacological manipulation of political loyalties peaked in the 1950s, and security establishment spooks (as well as a few actual thugs) hung around the edges of the laboratories where scientists were hammering electrodes into primate brains. Lilly later claimed not to care for that sort of thing, but in his prime as a government employee he had high-level security clearance -- J. Edgar Hoover knew him by name -- and was actively involved in research into brainwashing (or "reprogramming" as it was then called among the cognoscenti), sleep deprivation, and "operant control" of animals with wires implanted in the "pain centers" of their gray matter. Lilly's papers from this period include a black-and-white photograph of two brain-wired monkeys at coitus, ostensibly being driven by remote electrical stimulation. It may have been some sort of inside joke around the lab, but maybe not.

The story covers Lilly's career, through dolphin research and beyond:

Lilly was no diver, however. His deep fascination with these feelings hails from a very different arena: his long-standing research into that menacing corner of the human sciences known as sensory deprivation. While still working for the government at NIMH, Lilly and several collaborators developed a new technique for testing the psychological stability of human beings under sustained isolation and reduced sensory input: the flotation tank. Warm water, circulating silently through a perfectly dark chamber, buoyed a naked experimental subject over whose whole head had been fitted a latex mask attached to life-support and monitoring devices. Money for this sort of research hailed, of course, from the military, which was mostly curious how pilots and submariners (and potentially astronauts) would fare during long spells of lonely tedium. When it turned out that many subjects rapidly came unhinged in this disorienting environment, unforeseen possibilities emerged: the technology could be used in personality assessment, and perhaps also in personality adjustment. Lilly himself -- fearless about self-experimentation, and already beginning to conceive of himself as a cosmonaut of consciousness -- spent many hours encased in his own tanks, exploring what happened when a mind in the water was left to its own devices. The results were trippy (this was, after all, the Lilly that would later inspire the sci-fi thriller Altered States), but he was convinced that the mentally sophisticated and strong -- those with what he would eventually call "wet courage" -- could thrive under these conditions. One had to transcend the terror, because a kind of enlightenment lay on the other side.

Much more at Orion Magazine.