QAA Podcast - Evil Neuroscience Part 2: ECCO Chamber (Premium E336) Sample

Episode Date: May 17, 2026

In part 2 of this 2 part episode, this continued examination of John C. Lilly's life leads Jack into a sensory deprivation tank. Building upon the research done by Canadian psychologist Donald Hebb, Lilly's use of sensory deprivation tanks (and a lot of hallucinogens) led him to develop the concept of the Earth Coincidence Control Office (ECCO). ECCO would ultimately consume Lilly, dramatically altering the course of his life and he would later attribute it to nearly ending it on a few occasions. Along the way, prolonged isolation of graduate students who need to be "toileted", elements of Lilly's research end up in a CIA interrogation manual, "Tron is us", and rules for humans such as: You are expected to expect the unexpected every minute, every hour of every day and of every night. Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Check out our new podcast series network Cursed Media! All episodes of Spectral Voyager Season 2 are out now! Binge the entirety of Truly Tradly Deeply by Annie Kelly and Megan Kelly as well as Science in Transition by Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows: cursedmedia.net Produced by Liv Agar & Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Jake Rockatansky. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com) qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

If you're hearing this, well done. You found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast Premium Episode 336, Evil Neuroscience Part 2, Echo Chamber. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakitansky, Jack LaRoche, Julian Field, and Travis View. I'm standing naked in a small, brightly lit room with questionable small paintings of beaches on the walls. The building is next to both a busy freeway and the building. a bridal shop. It's the least sketchy location that could take me on such short notice. I'm wondering if this is a good idea. Brad was all enthusiasm when I talked to him about it,

but I'm having second thoughts. I'm not entirely sure there aren't cuts on my skin, given that I handle critters on a regular basis, along with a husky that jumps now and then. The lights in the room flicker and then dimmed down to what's meant to be a soothing ambient glow. What the hell? I step into the sensory deprivation tank. I immediately slip, but I catch myself on the oh shit handle. I realize, after I lay down in the mix of Epsom salt and 93 degree water, that I forgot to put earplugs in. I hit the switch to turn the lights off,

then immediately fumble for an embarrassingly long period of time in absolute darkness to hit the switch that turns the music off. The next 90 minutes are spent in total darkness and absolute silence, save for the low rumbling roar of the occasional truck that goes by outside. I lose all sense of my body quickly. Uncertain how much of me is submerged in the water and how much is still floating above it. My joints pop.

The throbbing in my knee intensifies and dissipates in slow waves before finally turning into a familiar feeling I can only describe as television static. Above me, the darkness swirls into the spiral form of a snake, never quite solidifying, but still perceptible. I'm completely alone with my thoughts. Shit. Damn, a terrifying experience too.

be sure. Yeah, I've never tried that. Well, it has an interesting history. The only thing I know about it is basically from the movie Altered States, which, you know, I love, but I highly doubt that that's, you know, kind of an accurate portrayal of what happens when one goes into one of these tanks. What, you mean, you don't turn into a monster? Yeah. I mean, is it just easy to float? Is there just so much salt in there that you're just zero G's? Essentially, yes. It is a startling amount of salt. So, you You just gently get cushioned by it almost. Yeah. But because it's so warm, you don't really feel it even though you're laying in it.

It's a very unusual sensation. How deep is it? Like, is it like being in the tub where you can like, you know, feel the bottom of it? Or is there, does it feel like there's nothing beneath you? You can touch the bottom with effort, like a tub. But because you're so buoyant in it, it takes a little bit of effort, too. And it was a lot larger than I expected. I could completely spread my arms out and not touch the sides.

Whoa. So this was a lot larger than the pods that are more commonly, well, were more commonly used. I highly recommend it personally. Well, yeah, I was going to say, was it a pleasant experience overall?

Oh, yeah, I'm planning to go back. You know, I want to see how much weird shit can happen if I go in there. Yeah. Cool. Maybe you'll become a dolphin. Yeah, maybe I will.

You know, maybe I'll get the prehensile penis of my dreams. And hopefully, a partner who's willing to flood their house. Sensory deprivation. Up until 1954, the bulk of John Lilly's research had been focused on neural mapping. He developed a technique that allowed brainwave readings to be taken from the cortex of unanestasized animals by implanting electrodes in their brain, and another technique that allowed for the

stimulation of the pain and pleasure centers of mammalian and avian species. Both techniques he also practiced on himself to prove the viability of it in general. He had worked for the National Institute of Mental Health, of Don Bluth fame, as well as the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness, both part of NIH and Bethesda, Maryland. It was only natural that his mind would next turn to what would happen to the brain if it were deprived of all external stimuli. So can you describe what you see here? The diagram of an observer and a subject in a special room, and the observer has some sort of headphones on, and the subject is floating in liquid inside of the room, and it shows off some

vibration-proof concrete, and yeah, it looks, I don't know, kind of disturbing. It's like the subject, the little stick drawing of the subject looks like a hanged person. Yeah. I was going to say this looks like a very complicated game of hangman. Extremely creepy. Yeah, so thankfully this is not what I experienced. The original design of the isolation tank had the floater suspended upright in the water with a skin diver's mask over their face and a breathing apparatus strapped onto it that

snicked out of the tank. water filtration devices, heaters, and Epsom salts for all later innovations that made it into a much more comfortable experience. The original thought was that if you were deprived of all external stimulation, the brain would just go quiet and that you'd fall asleep. Because, you know, what could be more boring than just floating in total silence and darkness for who knows how long? An interview with the magazine Omni in 1983 explained Lily's train of thought. There was a problem in neurophysiology at the time. Is brain activity self-contained or not? One school of thought said the brain needed external stimulation or it would go to sleep, become unconscious,

while the other school said, no, there are automatic oscillators in the brain that keep it awake. So I decided to try a sensory isolation experiment, building a tank to reduce external stimuli, auditory, visual, tactile, temperature, almost to nil. So the trouble with this is that Lily was leaving a lot out. John Lilly was not the first to experiment with this sort of sensory deprivation, although he arguably perfected the technique. As early as 1951, psychologists with ties to the U.S., UK, and Canadian militaries were having regular meetings in Montreal

to discuss the possibility of brainwashing. What techniques could be used to extract information, or even implant false information into the minds of the unwilling. Could you even induce false confessions with right techniques? These were all very exciting things to consider. The Canadian psychologist Donald Head was the first to propose the idea of a sensory deprivation chamber. If deprived of external stimuli for a long enough period, he proposed, the mind would become susceptible to the implantation of new or different ideas.

The military absolutely ate this up. He was granted either $30,000 or $10,000 I've seen differing numbers with this, but he was granted that over three years by the Canadian Defense Research Board to conduct experiments at McGill University to see if this would indeed work. We know some of how this turned out. Prolong solitary confinement doesn't really do positive things to the brain. The original McGill experiments were done on graduate students who clearly weren't being tortured enough. For $20 a day, they were forced into a state of what Gen Z calls

bed rot. White noise was pumped into their ears continuously through headphones shaped like cushions. They wore black-painted ski goggles, and their arms and hands were enclosed in cardboard tubes. Doctoral students were tasked with feeding them, watering them, and quote-unquote toileting them. The minimum amount of time they stayed in the state was three days. Hemp had hoped they would last for six weeks. Nobody did. Oh my God. Yeah, no shit.

They did like Chris Marker-Lerreterte to them. Yeah, this looks awful. This looks like a barbaric, like, execution method. You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast. For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA. Travis, why is that such a good deal? Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month. For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes plus all of our miniseries.

That includes 10 episodes of Manclan with Julian and Annie, 10 episodes of Pervers with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View. It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting. for once, I agree with you. And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion. It's a fact. You're so right, Jake.

We love and appreciate all of our listeners. Yes, we do. And Travis is actually crying right now, I think, out of gratitude maybe? That's not true. The part about be crying. Not me being grateful. I'm very grateful.