A sensory deprivation tank is a temperature regulated, salt-water filled, soundproof, lightproof tank that can isolate its occupant from numerous forms of sensory input all at once, causing people to experience hallucinations, out of body experiences, and witness-what they claimed were-parallel universes. It sounds like the stuff of the future or of fantasy, but it has been around for a while.
John C. Lilly was the neuroscientist who spearheaded the creation of this tank with a simple question; “What would happen if the mind was deprived of as much external stimulus as possible.” In the original deprivation tank, people were submerged into 160 gallons of water wearing a black-out mask (a latex mask engineered to allow one to breath, but block out any light from one’s eyes). The water and air temperature were kept as the same temperature of one’s skin; roughly 34 degrees Celsius.
The masks were eventually done away with as people found having their heads wrapped with latex to be distracting. Also, people didn’t need to be completely submerged anymore. Water was saturated with 800 pounds of Epsom salt, which made the water so dense that one’s entire body could float at or near its surface.
Inside the tank, there was not even a speck of light. The silence was so intense that people could hear their muscles tense, their heart beat, and their eyelids close. The buoyancy of the water gave the environment an almost zero-gravity quality.
Lilly was one of the first people to try out the tank. He claimed that it allowed him to make contact with creatures from other dimensions and civilizations far more advanced than our own. Lilly’s experience however, is apparently not shared by others who have been in the tank. Mild hallucinations, heightened levels of introspection, and the sensation that the mind has left the body are the more common experiences among users. So what do you think; do our senses help us to perceive reality or do they limit us from exploring its full potential.