it’s something i read in an old popular mechanics issue. it must have been from the 50s or 60s. a volunteer diver (USN?) named Bannon allowed himself to be subjected to near-total isolation. this could scare some people to death. it does me sometimes when i think about it:
the diver wore breathing gear with air supplied using rubber hoses (and little else.) he was immersed in a large tank filled with water kept at body temperature. the walls and bottom of the tank were opaque and it had an opaque lid. floaters/sinkers strapped to his body kept him at neutral bouyancy. so he was right in the middle of the tank. and then they closed the lid.
i don’t recall if he had a way to talk to the scientists but sensors were glued to his body which the scientists can monitor. so a few seconds inside the tank and he was totally blind. a minute or two and his skin had no sense of touch. a few more minutes and he started to lose his orientation (up or down,) except for occasional bubbles near his ear which he can still feel and tell him which way was up. in time he started hallucinating. he told scientists he was spinning and tumbling faster and faster (when they knew he was perfectly still.) i think he threw up once.
when the (mad) scientists finally opened the lid and fished him out, they told him he had just a record of sorts (some consolation.) i do recall the experiment was somewhat life-threatening.
I have no idea, either, but will just add that this was the plot of the pilot of the original “Hawaii Five-O” series. In fact, the opening scene is a person in a “sensory deprivation tank.”
I suspect the account the OP recalls reading may have been exaggerated by whomever wrote it up. Richard Feynman describes in one of his autobiographies participating in a series of somewhat similar experiments while under the influence of LSD - he didn’t find it to be unpleasant at all, IIRC.
pretty sure it was PM. it was a bound compilation, with black and white pictures and all the ads were black-ink illustrations. there’s this one-page regular article i liked: “i’d like to see them make…” wherein readers would write letters describing things they want to come out of the market."
but i could be wrong since people used to treat PM and PS as one and the same. i’m sure about the name bannon.
Aren’t sensory deprivation tanks pretty common in alternative therapy now? Lisa and Homer tried it on the Simpsons some years back…
What sounds really scary is the “coffin cure” Larry Niven described in his early novel A Gift from Earth. Same idea, but used as a torture device to soften somebody up for interrogation. The victim was immobilized in the sensory deprivation chamber and not allowed to sleep, then left for a few days, which seemed like forever to them…
Memories are not as accurate as we’d like to think, especially decades later.
When I was about 7 years old, there was a particular comic book that I wanted very badly, but my parents would not let me buy it. The cover art and subject of the cover story were burned into my memory, and when I got old enough, I went to quite a few back-issue magazine stores and comic-book conventions in search of it. The effort was so fruitless that I sometimes wondered if I had imagined the whole thing.
Finally, about 35 years after the comic was published, I found it on EBay. I was amazed at how the general picture of the cover was very much as I had remembered it, while several details were distinctly – and to my great disappointment, undeniably – different from how I remembered it.
(In gratitude to the guy who put it on EBay, I did bid on the comic, even though my curiosity had been quenched. But when I lost the auction, I declined to pursue it any further.)
Also, more than a few old tv shows and movies somehow changed something or other, during the decades between when I first saw them and when I finally saw them again.
Here’s the problem–google books, using “popular mechanics” and “bannon” shows nothing, and all their issues are searchable. So, either NOT PM, or NOT Bannon.
Popular Science July 1967 page 66. And sorry guys, his name is Robert Gannon. He spent 90 minutes in the tank. First page illustration is just as I remember it and there’s an “I’d like to see them make…” page just before it.
and there’s an “I’d like to see them make…” page just before it.