Flotation Helps Creativity

Flotation has been proven time and time again to help people with their creativity. Michael Hutchinson, the author of The Book of Floating, along with Dr. Thomas Taylor of Texas A&M has conducted some research to support these ideas.

Creative Isolation

Numerous profound aesthetic experiences, and moments of creative illumination, insight, or revelation have occurred in circumstances in which sensory input has been reduced in some way. We know stories of artists or scientists whose sudden creative intuitions or revelations have come to them in the confines of the “artist’s garret” or while staring into the fireplace or walking on the beach with attention turned inward. In fact, one the essential elements of all creative thought is concentration gained through some sort of restriction of sensory stimulation.

Theta Brain Waves and Creativity

The Greens and other researchers have remarked that many great discoveries have resulted from hypnagogic imagery experienced in theta state. The chemist Friedrich Kekule, for example, vividly described his state of “reverie” in which he suddenly saw a mental image of atoms forming a chain, and of snakes biting their tales; subsequent discovery that organic compounds occur in occur in closed rings has been describes as ” the most brilliant piece of prediction to be found the whole range of organic chemistry.” There are countless stories of such moments of inspiration and creativity occurring when the thinker is nodding off to sleep, or gazing into the sky, or wandering lonely as a cloud. Virtually all of them speak of the drowsiness, the physical relaxation, the vivid imagery appearing unexpectedly, that mark them as examples of the theta state. The tank cannot make geniuses of us all, but its ability to put us into a theta state suggests that it can be a valuable aid in promoting creativity.

Visualization and Creativity

Researchers in the field of mental imagery now believe that about 15 percent of all people ” visualizers” who experience virtually constant, vivid mental imagery; another 15 percent of the population are “verbalizers,” operating mostly (but not entirely) in a world of words and verbal thoughts, ideas, and structures. The remaining 70 percent lie on a spectrum between these two types. Tests made from the earliest days of infancy through adulthood show that males are consistently superior to females show a similar distribution of verbalizers and visualizers. Studies show that high visualizers breathe more regularly than they normally do when doing spatial tasks that require visualization. Write Gordon Rattray Taylor cites studies showing that “high imagers are more relaxed, more creative, more mature, more flexible than lower imagers…We have a clue in the fact that absence of imagery is correlated with stronger defenses against impulses.

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