John c lilly dolphin research for kids
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John C. Lilly
American physician, scientist, psychonaut, and philosopher
For other people named John Lilly, see John Lilly (disambiguation).
John Cunningham Lilly (January 6, – September 30, )[1] 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 s 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.
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After watching director Denis Villeneuve’s trippy Arrival, a science-fiction film about man’s first direct encounter with alien life forms, I was left with a bad case of déjà vu. Although the storyline has strong similarities to The Day the Earth Stood Still, the protagonist, a linguistics professor played by Amy Adams, reminded me of a very real scientist who conducted similar language experiments in the s: John C. Lilly, M.D.
He had been hired by NASA to explore ways to translate an alien language in order to communicate with extraterrestrials if they should ever visit us. Clearly unable to find any actual visitors from other planets, Lilly decided to attempt interspecies communication instead. In his search for an intelligent animal, he concentrated on large-brain creatures and first explored the idea of using elephants as the subjects for his experiments. But the enormous size and potential danger of working with these powerful creatures rendered the idea impractical.
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The dolphin who loved me: the Nasa-funded project that went wrong
Like most children, Margaret Howe Lovatt grew up with stories of talking animals. “There was this book that my mother gave to me called Miss Kelly,” she remembers with a twinkle in her eye. “It was a story about a katt who could talk and understand humans and it just stuck with me that maybe there is this possibility.”
Unlike most children, Lovatt didn’t leave these tales of talking animals behind her as she grew up. In her early 20s, living on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, they took on a new significance. During Christmas , her brother-in-law mentioned a secret laboratory at the eastern end of the island where they were working with dolphins. She decided to pay the lab a visit early the following year. “I was curious,” Lovatt recalls. “I drove out there, down a muddy hill, and at the bottom was a cliff with a big vit building.”
Lovatt was met by a tall man with tousled hair, wearing an open shirt and smoki