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From: pnorton@beaux.atwc.teradyne.com (Peter Norton)
Subject: Re: Consciousness and the Senses/Brain development
Message-ID: <D0q5z0.4rE@beaux.atwc.teradyne.com>
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References: <kak112-1012940953570001@ppp19.cac.psu.edu> <3ccicu$6fb@zen.ludd.luth.se> <1994Dec12.125616.25549@dcs.warwick.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 1994 01:11:24 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.skeptic:97908 sci.psychology:31513 sci.physics:103257 sci.philosophy.meta:15539 sci.bio:23926 comp.ai.philosophy:23601

Martyn.Amos@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Martyn Amos) writes:
>atchman@zen.ludd.luth.se (Joachim Str|mbergson) writes:
>>kak112@psu.edu (Keith Kendall) writes:
>>>I believe you are referring to an isolation tank.  In it the subject is
>>>almost completely immersed in body temperature water and the tank is
>>>sealed to eliminate external sources of sound, light, and smell.  The last
>>>popular culture representation of this was in a movie starring William
>>>Hurt (sorry, I can't remember the name, but I think it came out in the
>>>early to mid 80's).
>>
>>Yep, I just didn't remember the correct term, but it sure is an isolation...
>>I have seen the movie, and apart from beeing stupid, it shows a tank like
>>you describe... Just like Feynman did.  
>
>It's called 'Altered States'.

One of my favorite movies (surprised?). The beginning and end are good-to-ok, 
the middle is kind of stupid.  Hurt does a good job as a driven academic, the
dialog is fairly realistic.  The academic characters are all pretty realistic,
I thought, unusual for a 'major motion picture', except for Hurt's wife, maybe.
The message at the end was good, how to put the Djinn back in the bottle? 

The author, Paddy Chayefsky, wrote the original
novel, but dissociated himself from the movie when they over-dramatized the
ape scene.  The scene with shamans in South America was apparently based
on a real life researcher character.  A shamanistic Indiana Jones, maybe?

We should all be so lucky as to see the wind that is blowing our lives away
like sand in a storm......


