Part 5: Altered States Summary and Analysis

Feynman meets Dr. John Lilly and his wife who introduce him to the sense deprivation tank. In a sense deprivation tank, a person experiences complete darkness and silence. They are also floating in liquids kept at body temperature, so they do not feel anything either. In the sense deprivation tank, it is easy to enter a trancelike state and have hallucinations.

On one of his visits to the sense deprivation tank, he meets an Indian man named Baba Ram Das, who helps him have an "out of body" experience in the chamber.

With practice, Feynman gets better and better at having hallucinations within the chamber. He enjoys analyzing the process in which this happens, much as he enjoyed analyzing the way in which he fell asleep for his research project at MIT (as chronicled in the "Always...