Cool Obscure Stories from Early Float History – DSP 215

If you’ve ever met one at the Float Conference, you’ll know they have some of the best and most bizarre stories in the float industry.

Graham and Ashkahn share a couple of their favorites from the old researchers that they’ve heard.

Graham: Alright!

Ashkahn: Word. What’s going on there?

Graham: Hello.

Ashkahn: Hello.

Graham: I am Graham.

Ashkahn: And I am Ashkahn.

Graham: And the question today is “What’s a cool story from early float history I probably don’t know about?”

Ashkahn: Nice.

Graham: Well if you could send us a full list of early float history stories that you do know about, that would make it easier.

Ashkahn: Yeah man, we weren’t around/alive.

Graham: Travel back in time. Teamed up with Golden Age John Lilly.

Ashkahn: We’re not supposed to talk about that, we signed that contract.

Yeah. But yeah, we’ve heard some cool stories so we can repeat some cool stories to you.

Graham: Yup, get a bunch of the facts wrong, mingle them all up.

Ashkahn: One of these would be entirely made up so it would be up to you to figure out which one.

Graham: It was the time travel one.

Ashkahn: I guess they’re mostly cool research stories that I’m thinking of in my head.

Graham: Yeah totally.

Ashkahn: Just researchers did some crazy stuff back in the day.

Graham: Kick it off.

Ashkahn: Kick it off, alright. One thing that I think will garner a lot of sympathy from anyone who has a float center out there is that whenever we talk to researchers that had float tanks set up in the research facilities, they all have some sort of disastrous salt story as well. Like, even in their more controlled, easy going setting of having a float tank as part of a research project, they still had these horrible, horrible salt catastrophes.

There’s an amazing one from Tom Fine and John Turner. They did like the first kind of float tank research out there. And they had a float tank set up, it was on you know not the first floor of the building so it was like higher up. Second or third floor or something. And they went home over the weekend and they had a like leak in their pump. Something about their pump was slowly leaking.

Graham: Yeah. As long as it was running it leaked a little bit of water and they had like a jug under the little area that had the drip leak.

Ashkahn: Which that is a bad sign.

Graham: Yeah. But they, so what happened is, they left the pump on over the weekend when they were gone. Which normally wouldn’t be a problem really because you’re just filtering a bunch of water. But then the terrifying thing happened, where the leak just kind of kept building and then eventually-

Ashkahn: Going and going and going.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: And so they came in on Monday-

Graham: The full volume of the float tank had been emptied out.

Ashkahn: Yep. So no more water in the float tank. And directly below the room that they had their float tanks was-

Graham: That’s so painful.

Ashkahn: The room that their university kept these huge old school mainframe computers. You know, this is back in the early 80’s. So like, state of the art at the time.

Graham: It’s like the equivalent of your phone but much larger.

Ashkahn: Yeah. For those of you who don’t know.

Graham: Much less water proof.

Ashkahn: Just imagine a huge phone sitting in a room. So they have all this like sophisticated computer hardware in the room below this float tank and all the salt had dripped down there. To the point where they went in and there was like they described it as stalactites of salt on the ceiling. Going down and just like all over the equipment. And their initial reaction was just like, “we gotta clean this up before anybody sees this. We’re about to be in huge trouble.” And so they did. They just like cleaned up as much as they possibly could as fast as they could. Until, like, their supervisor came and was very upset. When we saw like the post clean up version of it. And thought that was like the entire, the entire thing that had happened. And miraculously the computers kept working. That was the crazy part.

Graham: Yeah. Which is why we have more float research after that point. I think they would’ve just been fired otherwise.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Shut down.  

And there was still salt. When we were visiting their place we went into like some lady’s office now but it used to be where they had the float tank and there was still just like bubbling and salt damage around the base of the wall.

Graham: Yeah. If you’ve had a float tank center where you didn’t waterproof more than, I don’t know, like 20 feet beyond the edges of the shower. You’ll see little like, just salt damage just creeping into the wall underneath. Yeah. That was really funny to see that.

Ashkahn: Oh man. Same thing with Arreed. We were visiting Arreed Barabasz in his research facility. Where he did like a bunch of dry REST research for years. Short story. We bought this dry tank from him because he talked us into it I think.

Graham: Sort pitch. If you want a dry tank contact us.

Ashkahn: Please get in touch with us if you want to buy a dry float tank. We have one and we don’t know what to do with it. But we were there dissembling this whole thing from his like research lab where it had been sitting for probably like 30 years or something.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: And as we pull it apart there’s just this back corner of the room that has all this like salt damage on it. And like his supervisor comes in after we’ve deconstructed this whole thing to check out the room and he’s like “What’s going on in that corner?” And Arreed was just like “I don’t know it’s just been like that. I think the construction crew probably didn’t screw something up or something.” And to us it was so obviously salt damage from this float tank. But I think he pulled it off. I think he convinced his supervisor that it was not in fact his fault.

Graham: So yeah. I mean even float laboratories are not immune to the crazy effects of salt damage. I’m sure pretty much every other lab out there that did the early float research had the exact same crazy construction problems too.

Ashkahn: Yeah. I mean it’s just nuts.

Graham: I was thinking of one from early Chamber REST. Which is kind of a two-parter. So, one Peter Suedfeld talks about really well in one of his conference talks where he’s talking about some of his early research. So I’ll leave it for you to go listen to that for details. But basically he started up Chamber REST research in following up what had been done previously in the university he was in. But with much less successful results. And he basically thought that people were making the previous chamber restrooms before they were even called Chamber REST chambers. And they were making them too threatening, you know. They would, kind of, lead them in there blindfolded so people didn’t know what the room looked like ahead of time. They had panic buttons. And one cool thing that Peter did was he just took out the panic buttons and let people see the room. Let them know that, you know, a facilitator was there to help if they needed anything. They could just hit an intercom button.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Give them like a tour of the room before the experiment started.

Graham: Yeah rather than leading them in blindfolded. Which feels really nerve wracking. And immediately the dropout rates went down and the amount of completions went way up. Which in itself is a really cool early story. Like it’s a good lesson for looking for simple solutions for what seem like very universal problems. In this case, people just don’t like being deprived of senses. And it’s like no they don’t like not knowing their surroundings and thinking they’re going to panic and stuff like that. But, it became so successful at kind of making people feel comfortable. You know, a lot of people were actually willing to sit there for 24 hours at time and they had a huge completion rate for doing these studies with Chamber REST then. To the point where they had someone who came in multiple times and kept trying to use different fake names in order to get back into the study. But it’s just like Peter running these studies all the time. So like, he knew that it was the same guy. But I think he kept hoping to like catch a different researcher or something. But yeah. He kept trying to sneak back in. So, that’s my early Chamber REST anecdote.

Ashkahn: I mean I guess like John Lilly as a person. So like, if you haven’t looked into John Lilly you should spend a couple hours doing that. Cause like the guy did some crazy stuff.

Graham: Yeah. I recommend reading Center of the Cyclone and The Scientist which are kind of his most autobiographical books and Deep Self I guess also has a lot of float stuff. But man, I mean we could just pretty much read verbatim excerpts from John Lilly books. Every single one-

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Is a crazy story.

Ashkahn: Especially he’s built this whole like dolphin house in the Virgin Islands. Like look into that if you’ve never heard that story. He built a house where a woman and the dolphin could like cohabitate a single space. So it was like waist high with water. And even had like a dolphin elevator to get the dolphin like up and down multiple stories. So crazy, I mean, crazy like feat of engineering and science project and all sorts of stuff.

Graham: Yeah. Yeah. The John Lilly stories are ridiculous. So, well I think that’s good for keeping our episode bite sized. They asked for one story, and they got two.

Ashkahn: Nice.

Graham: So yeah. Double whammy.

Ashkahn: Always over delivery. That’s what we do here.

Graham: Yeah. If you have other questions about anything just do us a favor and keep them to yourselves alright?

Ashkahn: Yeah. We don’t want to hear them.

Graham: And if you really need to shoot them over to us.

Ashkahn: Cause we do kind of want to hear them.

Graham: Go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast and that’s where you can do that.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Thank you very much.

Graham: Yep. Thank you.

Ashkahn: Good night.

Graham: Good morning. Maybe.

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