John C. Lilly
John Cunningham Lilly was an American physician, neuroscientist, psychoanalyst, psychonaut, philosopher, writer, and inventor. He was a member of a group of counterculture thinkers that included Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, and Werner Erhard, all frequent visitors to the Lilly home. He often stirred controversy, especially among mainstream scientists.
Lilly conducted high-altitude research during World War II and later trained as a psychoanalyst. He gained renown in the 1950s after developing the isolation tank. He saw the tanks, in which users are isolated from almost all external stimuli, as a means to explore the nature of human consciousness. He later combined that work with his efforts to communicate with dolphins. He began studying how bottlenose dolphins vocalize, establishing centers in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and later San Francisco, to study dolphins. A decade later, he began experimenting with psychedelics, including LSD, often while floating in isolation. His work inspired two Hollywood movies, The Day of the Dolphin and Altered States.
Early life and education
Lilly was born to a wealthy family on January 6, 1915, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His father was Richard Coyle Lilly, president of the First National Bank of St. Paul. His mother was Rachel Lenor Cunningham, whose family owned the Cunningham & Haas Company, a large stockyards company in St. Paul. Lilly had an older brother, Richard Lilly Jr., and a younger brother, David Maher Lilly. A fourth child, Mary Catherine Lilly, died in infancy.Lilly showed an interest in science at an early age. At thirteen years old, he was an avid chemistry hobbyist, supplementing his makeshift basement laboratory with chemicals given to him by a pharmacist friend. Students at his parochial Catholic grade school called him "Einstein Jr." At age 14 he enrolled at St. Paul Academy, a college preparatory academy for boys, where his teachers encouraged him to pursue science further and conduct his experiments in the school laboratory after hours.
While at SPA, Lilly also further developed his interest in philosophy. He studied the works of many of the great philosophers, finding himself especially attracted to the subjective idealism of Irish theologian and philosopher George Berkeley.
Despite his father's wish that he go to an eastern Ivy League university to become a banker, Lilly received a scholarship at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, where he studied biology. He was the president of the ski club and a member of the drama club, and lived in Blacker House. After his first year, Caltech learned that Lilly was from a wealthy family and cancelled his scholarship, forcing him to go to his father for help. Dick Lilly set up a trust fund to pay the tuition and eventually became a benefactor of the college. Lilly continued to draw on his family wealth to fund his scientific pursuits throughout his life.
In 1934, Lilly read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The pharmacological control methods of Huxley's dystopia and the links between physical chemical processes of the brain and subjective experiences of the mind helped inspire Lilly to give up his study of physics and pursue biology, eventually focusing on neurophysiology.
Lilly was engaged to Mary Crouch at the beginning of his junior year at Caltech. Months before their wedding, he took a job with a lumber company in the Northwest to soothe a bout of "nervous exhaustion" brought on by the pressures of academia and his upcoming marriage. During this sabbatical he was hospitalized after injuring his foot with an ax while cutting brush. His time in the trauma ward inspired him to become a doctor of medicine.
In 1937, while Lilly was looking for a good medical school, his wealthy and well-connected father arranged a meeting between Lilly and Charles Horace Mayo of the famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Following Mayo's advice, Lilly applied and was accepted to Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he became good friends with Mayo's son, Charles William Mayo. Lilly graduated from Caltech with a Bachelor of Science degree on June 10, 1938, and enrolled at Dartmouth the following September.
At Dartmouth, Lilly launched into the study of anatomy, performing dissections on 32 cadavers during his time there. He once stretched out an entire intestinal tract across the length of a room to determine its actual length with certainty.
During the summer after his first year at Dartmouth, Lilly returned to Pasadena to participate in an experiment with his former Caltech biochemistry professor Henry Borsook. The purpose of the experiment was to study the creation of glycocyamine, a major source of muscle power in the human body. The experiment involved putting Lilly on a completely protein-free diet while administering measured doses of glycine and arginine, the two amino acids that Borsook hypothesized were involved in the creation of glycocyamine. The experiments pushed Lilly to extreme physical and mental limits; he became increasingly weak and delirious as the weeks went on. The results of the experiment confirmed Borsook's hypothesis and Lilly's name was included among the authors, making it the first published research paper of his career. It was also one of the first instances of a lifelong pattern of experimenting on his own body to the point of endangering his health.
After two years at Dartmouth, Lilly decided that he wanted to pursue a career in medical research, rather than therapeutic practice as was standard for Dartmouth medical students at that time. He decided to transfer to the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, which would provide him with better opportunities for conducting research.
At the University of Pennsylvania, Lilly met Professor H. Cuthbert Bazett, a protege of British physiologist J. B. S. Haldane. Bazett introduced Lilly to Haldane's view that scientists should never conduct an experiment or procedure on another person that they have not first conducted on themselves, a view Lilly embraced and attempted to exemplify throughout his career. Bazett took a liking to the young, enthusiastic graduate student, and set Lilly up with his own research laboratory. While working under Bazett, Lilly created his first invention, the electrical capacitance diaphragm manometer, a device for measuring blood pressure. While designing the instrument, he received electrical engineering advice from biophysics pioneer Britton Chance. Chance also introduced Lilly to the world of computers, which was still in its infancy.
While finishing his degree at the University of Pennsylvania, Lilly enrolled in a class entitled "How to Build an Atomic Bomb." He and several other students transcribed their notes from the class into a book with the same title. The director of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, attempted to suppress publication of the book, but was unable to because no classified data were used in writing the book.
Lilly graduated with a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1942.
Career overview
Lilly was a physician and psychoanalyst. He made contributions in the fields of biophysics, neurophysiology, electronics, computer science, and neuroanatomy. He invented and promoted the use of an isolation tank as a means of sensory deprivation. He also attempted communication between humans and dolphins.Lilly's career as a scientist began doing research for universities and government. He gradually began researching less conventional topics. He published 19 books, including The Center of the Cyclone, which describes his own LSD experiences, and Man and Dolphin and The Mind of the Dolphin, which describe his work with dolphins.
In the mid-1950s, Lilly began dolphin cognition and communication research, with an intensive period of work through the late 1960s. This period brought many discoveries about dolphin anatomy and brain structure, as well as behavioral and communication observations. Originally researching at Coconut Grove, Florida, Lilly purchased a property in Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands in 1960. The seaside lab was converted into a dolphin–human cohabitation house by intentionally flooding part of the building.
In the 1980s Lilly directed a project that attempted to teach dolphins a computer-synthesised language. He designed a future "communications laboratory" that would be a floating living room where humans and dolphins could chat as equals and develop a common language. In the 1990s Lilly moved to Maui, Hawaii where he lived most of the remainder of his life.
Research
During World War II, Lilly researched the physiology of high-altitude flying and invented instruments for measuring gas pressure. After the war, he trained in psychoanalysis at the University of Pennsylvania, where he began researching the physical structures of the brain and consciousness. In 1951 he published a paper showing how he could display patterns of brain electrical activity on a cathode ray display screen using electrodes he devised specially for insertion into a living brain. Furthermore, Lilly's work on electrical stimulation of the nervous system gave rise to biphasic charge balanced electrical stimulation pulses, now an established approach to design of safe electrical stimulation in neuroprosthetics. In the 1960s he sponsored research on human–animal communication with a dolphin.Development of the isolation tank
In 1953, Lilly began a job studying neurophysiology with the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Officers Corps. At the N.I.M.H. in 1954, with the aim of isolating a brain from external stimulation, he devised the first isolation tank, a dark soundproof tank of warm salt water in which subjects could float for long periods in sensory isolation. Lilly and a research colleague were the first subjects of this research. What had been known as perceptual isolation or sensory deprivation was reconceptualized as Restricted Environmental Stimulation Technique.Lilly later studied other large-brained mammals and during the late 1950s he established a facility devoted to fostering human–dolphin communication: the Communication Research Institute on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. During the early 1960s, Lilly and coworkers published several papers reporting that dolphins could mimic human speech patterns.