Read on Twitter
A few people have laughed at this line in my essay about the origins of sensory deprivation: “Dolphins are floating all the time." I wanted to explain that more in a thread, because it is a bizarre story / https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/magazine/negation-culture.html
This guy, John C. Lilly, invented sensory deprivation tanks in the 1950s while he was working as government scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health.
He created them to test if human consciousness or selfhood still existed without sensory input, so he built these handmade tanks with air pumps and scuba masks to float in the dark. He tested them out himself — the self persisted, of course
But Lilly started taking ketamine and LSD while floating and came to believe that aliens were controlling him in order to elevate human consciousness via sensory deprivation (and also telling him to divorce his wife)
Lilly floats for longer and longer periods at a time and loves it; the experience is described on his amazing very vintage website http://www.johnclilly.com/stagesx.html
So Lilly wonders what it would be like to be floating all the time. His friend says, “Well, dolphins are always floating.” So Lilly has an epiphany: dolphins must be extremely enlightened!
Lilly's research pioneered the idea that dolphins are superintelligent animals and he was the first to study dolphin brains, all because of sensory deprivation
eventually Lilly dropped out of mainstream science and devoted himself to dolphin research, starting a lab in the Virgin Islands that was the subject of this surreal Radiolab episode on living with a dolphin in a half-underwater apartment https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/hello
Lilly died in 2001 but sensory deprivation tanks survived as word-of-mouth operations built by rich people in their houses; AIDS fears really dampened enthusiasm for them in the 80s and 90s…
But now sensory deprivation has returned as a wellness trend, its radical nature normalized and negated, turned into a late-capitalist productivity hack as I recount in the essay https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/magazine/negation-culture.html
science becomes psychedelia becomes aliens becomes dolphin sex becomes an expensive suburban spa treatment — kind of a galaxy brain meme as @delia_cai said
and that’s what the essay is about: No artifact of culture is so radical or weird or extreme that 21st-century capitalism can’t recycle it as a commodified mirror image of itself, and that’s why this malaise is so hard to escape — how do we imagine anything outside of it?
