My Out-of-Body Experience

Two years ago, I decided to do nothing. Not for the rest of my life, of course—for two hours. As a neuroscientist, I was already familiar with the evidence that mindfulness meditation, or attending to the present moment, is beneficial for stress and anxiety. So I had been meditating regularly for about a half a year, looking to enhance my practice. And although I didn’t know it yet, there were already scientific studies showing that the more extreme form of “doing nothing” that I was now interested in—floating in a sensory reduction tank—could significantly reduce stress, blood pressure, and cortisol levels.

And so it was my plan, in the first week of March 2020, on what would become the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, to enter a commercial float studio in West Los Angeles, called Float Lab. It’s down the road from UCLA, where I worked studying consciousness in a neuroscience lab. Naturally, I was curious: Some neuroscientists use float setups with their clinical populations to investigate how a stimulus-free environment