Adult Swim: How John C. Lilly Got Groovy (and Took the Dolphin with Him), 1958–1968

D. Graham Burnett

What did it mean to be "groovy" circa 1970? It meant knowing how to hang, how to float, how to be at one with others, with animals, with the universe itself. I believe we can treat the following text as paradigmatic of the project as a whole:

I suspect that whales and dolphins quite naturally go in the directions we call spiritual, in that they get into meditative states quite simply and easily. If you go into the sea yourself, with a snorkel and face mask and warm water, you can find that dimension in yourself quite easily. Free floating is entrancing. ... Now if you combine snorkeling and scuba with a spiritual trip with the right people, you could make the transition to understanding the dolphins and whales very rapidly.

Spiritual cetaceans? Trippy, collective, free-floating ethology of the odontocetes? Where are we?

The short answer is that we are located firmly in the head — the very heady head — of one of the most important, and one of the strangest, scientists of the 1960s: John C. Lilly, the man whose work with brains and behaviors of dolphins had lasting implications for cultural understanding of human beings' nearest aquatic kin (fig. 1.1). A pioneering neurophysiologist, a troubled military psychologist, an apostate cetologist and animal fantasist, ultimately a Pied Piper of whale hugging and cosmonaut of heightened consciousness — John C. Lilly traced a fascinating trajectory across the postwar period. Retracing a parabolic portion of his path (he rose and he fell) will allow us, I think, to catch several striking views of what we may indeed want to call "groovy science."

Lilly and the Cetacean Brain

Born in 1915, Lilly, from a well-to-do family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, took a bachelor of science degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1938 and studied at Dartmouth Medical School for two years before moving to the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed his MD in 1942 and remained on the faculty. There, under the influence of Britton Chance and Detlev Bronk, Lilly pursued research in biophysics, including applied investigations into real-time physiological monitoring — work linked to wartime service in military aviation, where techniques for assaying the respiration of airmen were needed. Lilly had contact through his family with the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in the later 1940s and developed an interest in neuroanatomy and the electrophysiology of the brain. By 1953 he had been appointed to the neurophysiology laboratory of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), where he worked under Wade Marshall as part of a joint research program with the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness.

By the mid-1950s Lilly's lab in Bethesda, Maryland, was performing in vivo electrical stimulation of the brains of macaques — work aimed at cortical mapping by means of correlating point applications of currents at varying thresholds with specific behaviors and reactions in subject animals. Reporting on some of these investigations at a conference on the reticular formation of the brain, held in Detroit in 1957, Lilly would explain,

The neurophysiologist has been given a powerful investigative tool: the whole animal can be trained to give behavioral signs of what goes on inside. ... We are in the position of being able to guess with less margin of error what a man might feel and experience if he were stimulated in these regions.

This was, in many ways, unpleasant business, Lilly acknowledged, pointing out that he had "spent a very large fraction of my working time for the last eight years with unanaesthetized monkeys with implanted electrodes." In addressing the nebulous region where neurology, psychology, and animal behavior overlapped, Lilly permitted himself some observations on the affective universe of his scientific subjects:

When an intact monkey grimaces, shrieks, and obviously tries to escape, one knows it is fearful or in pain or both. When one lives day in and day out with one of these monkeys, hurting it and feeding it and caring for it, its experience of pain or fear is so obvious that it is hardly worth mentioning.

It would not be the last time that Lilly would reflect on the inner lives of his experimental animals with considerable confidence. But his experimental animal was about to change. Like a number of American psychology researchers in the mid-1950s — including the echolocation researrcher Winthrop Kellogg — Lilly was in the process of leaving monkeys behind for the bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus.

His first brush with the study of cetaceans came in 1949 when, during a visit to a neurosurgeon friend on Cape Cod, Lilly learned that a recent storm had beached a whale on the coast of southern Maine. A plan took shape for an impromptu expedition north, with a view toward collecting a novel brain. As it happened, Lilly was acquainted from his days at the University of Pennsylvania with the Swedish-Norwegian physiologist and oceanographer Per F. "Pete" Scholander, who had also worked with Detlev Bronk in aviation physiology during World War II and had then moved to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Scholander — something of a daredevil, and fascinated by the physiology of extreme environments — had published research on dive physiology and decompression, and while still living in Scandinavia he had conducted a number of pioneering studies on the deep-diving capabilities of marine mammals, particularly whales. Lilly looked up Scholander and recruited him for the trip, and the three men suited up for a drive to Maine. Shortly after reaching the carcass (a large pilot...