The Samadhi Tank Company's Floatation Information Page
URL: "http://www.floatation.com/"
This is a commercial site maintained by a hot tub/spa company that wishes to promote the use of sensory deprivation tanks to "rejuvenate the spirit." The site includes a brief history of isolation tanks and references to float tank organizations. There is also an extensive Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page, and an explanation of the mechanics of a tank. The company makes sure to give its address and ordering information in case you'd like to order a float tank for yourself.The Isolation Tank
URL: "http://www.garage.co.jp/lilly/isolationx.html"
This site is an offshoot of the web site erected for John C. Lilly, the parapsychologist who invented the sensory deprivation tank. The page was created with the intention of giving more information about Lilly, and the experiments he conducted using the tanks. Thus, this page focuses more heavily upon the present and past scientific use of isolation tanks, rather than their design. One interesting feature of this page is that the viewer is able to download pictures of the face masks that the original tank users wore in the 1950's. Scary!Picture Yourself in a Sensory Deprivation Tank.
URL: "http://www.maine.com/pictureyourself/float.htm"
Picture Yourself is a type of "lifestyle store" that specializes in the "progressive relaxation" of their clients. Picture Yourself sells a variety of organic health products and gives advice about how to relieve stress from your life. The company endorses isolation tanks as a means to achieve the perfectly relaxed lifestyle, and therefore offers information about the floating experience and about the tanks themselves. If you email the store, they'll provide you with the location of a float center near you and/or any information concerning the purchase of a tank.
This British article gives a first-person account of a tank experience after the author visited a business that rents out the tanks at an hourly rate. The article gave the rate (22 pounds per hour), a brief history of isolation tanks, and long-term beneficial side effects of floating. The article gives a good general view of tanks and what it's like to float in one for the first time.
This is just a basic book about sensory deprivation tanks, with general, non-expert readers in mind as the audience. The book gives a solid history of floatation tanks, and includes numerous first-person accounts of sensory deprivation experiences. The book gives all the possible side-effects that accompany floating, both beneficial and detrimental. It is an all-around good guide to sensory deprivation tanks.
This article focuses upon the debate surrounding athletes' use of sensory deprivation tanks to gain a competitive edge. Some say that floating away in a tank enables athletes to better visualize their competitive success. Others say that it's just a waste of time. The story offers a good look at the practical (or not so practical) applications of floatation tanks, with athletes and trainers being the target audience.
This book, written by the inventor and most frequent user of the sensory deprivation tank, John C. Lilly, details the construction of an isolation tank and gives instruction on how to use it. The Deep Self is written with the belief that the isolation tank is the perfect device for discovering one's true inner self. includes numerous first-person accounts of others' sensory deprivation experiences.
This is a scientific-based article concerning sensory deprivation tanks' ability to help people overcome psychological addictions. The article includes testaments from doctors who say that their research shows that time spent in isolation tanks helps reduce certain hormones that lead to alcoholism and other chemical dependencies. Tank time also helps addicts by giving them ample time to themselves cope with their problems. In Australia, doctors regularly prescribe isolation tanks as treatment.
- Hunting for info on the Internet puts an excessive amount of data right in front of you. The hard part of your job is wading through all of it and filtering out all of the extraeneous junk data. Unfortunately, filtering out all of the junk often leaves you with very little quality catchings. Then, you must go back into the junk pile and weed out whatever nuggets of decent information you can find. Th is is the elimination method of searching.
Print source searching is the opposite. Any data pertinent to your topic is usually good enough to use; finding it is the hard part. This accumulation method of searching left me feeling better about the searching process. However, it probably took more time, because I had to physically acquire all sources, rather than just sitting in my chair in front of the computer and clicking away.
The WWW generally has more commercialism involved in its information dissemination. At no point throughout my information search in the print sources did I find any advertisements asking me to purchase a product or service. But ads were all over the Web. At times, while hunting for info on the Internet, I felt like the web sites' authors were telling me all sorts of positive, interesting things just so I would buy their product. It made me doubt the validity of the information.
- Although I hate to admit this, I preferred collecting information about sensory deprivation tanks through print sources rather than via the World Wide Web. This is not because I dislike navigating around the Web, nor is it because I dislike having volumes of information at my fingertips, all at one terminal. I most definitely prefer to do research over the Internet. However, the information concerning floatation tanks on the Web was scarce to begin with, and most of the sites that did deal with the tanks exclusively were nothing more than one-dimensional advertisements. The print sources had a much larger variety of information, including first-person tank reviews, scientific debate over the validity of the tanks' rejuvenation ablilities, and how-to construction manuals. In the future, I should pick research topics that have more information about them accessible on the Web.
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