LESS IS MORE — THE SENSORY RESTRICTION TRADITION

The Discovery of the Blind Pew Effect

I was about four when I had my first experience of the nature of sensory deprivation. My father was reading me Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. We'd reached the exciting chapter in which Jim Hawkins and the sea captain are seated in the Admiral Benbow Inn; suddenly Pew, a blind beggar, comes in, finding his way hesitantly, tapping a cane, until he reaches the captain, whereupon he gives him a message bearing the dreaded Black Spot and races out of the inn. "But wait", I said: "How can this blind man, who could barely find his way into the inn without tripping over chairs and tables, now race out of the tavern so easily?" My father explained that blind people, because they had to rely on senses other than sight, were able to develop those other senses to a very high degree. Blind Pew, he assured me, could certainly find his way out of any place he entered, because as he found his way in he was unconsciously visualizing the floor plan in his head. It is, he said, like a sixth sense.

I immediately decided I would keep my eyes shut and pretend I was blind until I could make use of that sixth sense. In the coming days I spent a lot of time stumbling into chairs, tripping over curbs, and sitting in the total darkness of an empty refrigerator box I'd discovered in the garbage, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't seem to generate that elusive inner sense. Then, while sitting in the coal bin in the basement, I realized that I was anticipating the tuna casserole mother was making for dinner. Hold on — I hadn't even known what she was cooking! Then I understood that real knowledge had come to me unconsciously through my nose and ears. Excitedly I paid attention, heard my mother talking to herself upstairs, and every pot clanking, every floorboard squeaking, every odor took on meaning. I could visualize her every movement. I was the blind Pew of my coal cellar! I could hear the sounds, and from the sounds create an inner vision: of my friends playing stickball amid the traffic outside and flipping baseball cards on the front stoop, my sisters chattering as they put on their roller skates, the baseball game on the radio from across the street. The world was going on outside me, and without seeing it I could experience it inside me more clearly than I usually did with my eyes open ... and suddenly I opened my eyes.

There I was in the dim cellar sitting on a pile of hard coal. Somehow the sounds seemed to have been turned down; all the richness and timeless complexity of the noise of a whole neighborhood went away. But I was thrilled. I had an image of my mind as something like a balloon — if you squeezed it in one place it swelled up someplace else. I had made a discovery that must be one of the first every child makes, and one of the earliest realizations of our ancient ancestors: When one or more senses are restricted, the sensitivity of the other senses is expanded.

Such experiences are probably universal. Dr. Andrew Weil believes they flow from an innate human drive. As he wrote in The Natural Mind: "Human beings are born with a drive to experience modes of awareness other than the normal waking one; from very young ages, children experiment with techniques to change consciousness. Such experiences are normal."

But though this universal drive to alter consciousness is a source of great pleasure to children, it is not mere child's play. Weil sees it as "evolutionary," representing an "innate capacity of the nervous system," and concludes: "It is valuable to learn to enter other states deliberately and consciously because such experiences are doorways to fuller use of the nervous system, to the realization of untapped human potential, and to better function in the ordinary mode of consciousness."

This need to alter consciousness, then, is not some frivolous desire to escape, but rather one of the most fundamental of human characteristics — perhaps, in fact, the characteristic that has led to our development of culture and civilization. The point is at once so obvious, so important, and so easily forgotten: To be human is to explore and make use of altered states of consciousness.

Probably the most satisfactory and popular way of altering consciousness — a method that humans have developed over literally millions of years of testing and exploring — is to restrict the operation of one or more of their senses, that is, to put themselves into a state of sensory deprivation. One of the main assumptions of this book is that the floatation tank makes use of this sensory deprivation effect to bring about a gentle, pleasant, controllable, and temporary shift in consciousness in anyone who floats. Among the ideas proposed here is that this shift in consciousness is healthy, that it is educational, and that it can be manipulated, explored, and used in such a way as to cause changes in attitude, physiology, and behavior that persist even after one emerges from the tank.

Floating in Artist's Garret, Polar Icecap, and Monk's Cell

The float tank is a valuable specific tool for cutting down the amount of external stimuli that reach our senses, probably the best sensory deprivation device ever created. But humans have been using tools and techniques of various sorts for exactly this purpose for thousands, probably millions of years. The following are just a few of the most common:

Preparation for the Hunt. In primitive societies, like those our own civilization has evolved from, men prepare themselves before going out on a hunt by withdrawing from normal activities and "purifying" themselves through fasting, silence, steam baths, and/or isolation, either within a small shelter or...