Sense and Sensibility

Regarding Jack Butler’s experience in the water tank (“In the Tank,” January 25): To invoke the concept and experience of sensory deprivation is far from accurate — as those of us who pioneered in that genre of psychological research know. (See L. Goldberger, review, 1970, of J. P. Zubek, ed., Sensory Deprivation: Fifteen Years of Research, in Science; P. Solomon et al., Sensory Deprivation, 1961.) The novelty of spending just some 60 minutes in a strange and quite novel situation, be it in a water tank or whatever, is far from a replication of the experimental setup — usually lasting from eight to 24 hours — that produced some of the findings attributed to sensory deprivation, whether it be intense boredom, hallucinatory-like phenomena, or escape into the more familiar sleep state. Most frequently, the volunteer subjects expressed an intense desire to terminate the experience — never to be repeated! Some of the findings were that prolonged sensory deprivation might have less of a noxious effect on introverted persons more comfortable with exploring their inner selves and less dependent on the constancy of sensory input.

As with almost everything in our culture, the pioneer experiments by John Lilly — based on rather few exploratory dips into the water tank he created — became a potential source of commercialism inspired by Eastern philosophical traditions and meditation approaches over more traditional Western talk or drug therapies. But the idea of a 60-minute “bath” in a strange place isn’t the way to promote mental health, in my humble if not also overly frank opinion.

Leo Goldberger Lenox, Mass.

Jack Butler responds: I am flattered that my mere 60-minute session in a float tank has elicited comment from someone so qualified to make it. Undoubtedly, my experience diverged in certain respects from John Lilly’s original experiments. It benefited from the decades of improvement — some might say dilution — of the sensory-deprivation experience that has come from the activity’s commercialization. Yet I do think that my session, however brief and different from those original floats, provided at least some measure of their effects. I certainly felt sufficiently isolated during it, and unusually refreshed after it. (To say nothing of the hallucinations I am pretty sure I had.) The float-tank experience is not for everyone, however. Claustrophobes and extroverts — of which I am neither — are perhaps predisposed to dislike it. And though the float-tank literature claims otherwise, the tank is certainly not a panacea obviating the need for other ways to tend to one’s physical and mental health. I believe that my account was thorough, yet honest: I did not oversell the benefits of sensory deprivation. But having undergone it, even for that meager hour, I still believe that those sufficiently curious ought to give it a try. And perhaps I myself will have a go at one of those longer sessions, provided I can find anywhere willing to keep me in a tank for such an extended duration. My only experience with sensory deprivation has not gifted me with the clairvoyance necessary to say whether I’ll be successful. But we shall see.

Correction

The Week (February 22) said that Officer Brian Sicknick died after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. In fact, a medical examiner concluded that Sicknick showed no evidence of having suffered blunt-force trauma, and the cause of Sicknick’s death is unclear.