Background

John Cunningham Lilly was born on January 6, 1915, in St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. He was the son of Richard Coyle and Rachel (Cunningham) Lilly.

Education

In his childhood, John attended Irving Public School and St. Luke's School. In 1933, he graduated from St. Paul Academy in St. Paul, Minnesota. He also studied physics and biology at the California Institute of Technology, graduating in 1938. He received a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1942, then studied biophysics and psychoanalysis.

He spent the rest of the decade studying biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on probing the physical structures of the brain and becoming absorbed in the pursuit of the conscious self hidden somewhere in those cerebral folds.

Career

John Lilly began his eclectic career as a conventional scientist doing research for universities and government. Later, he began researching unconventional topics. In the mid-1950s, Lilly began dolphin cognition and communication research, with an intensive period of work through the late 1960s. This period brought many discoveries about dolphin anatomy. Lilly devised pain-free methods for introducing electrodes deep in an animal's cortex and in 1951 published a paper showing how he could display patterns of brain electrical activity on a television-like screen.

In 1953, he took a post with the Public Health Service Commissioned Officers Corps, where he studied neurophysiology. In 1954, to strip away outside stimuli, again in the hunt for the self, he began experimenting with an isolation tank, using himself and another scientist as the first subjects, suspended for hours in warm saltwater. Lilly turned his attention to dolphins in the late 1950s when he established the Communication Research Institute on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, a center devoted to fostering human-dolphin communication.

In the early 1960s, Dr. Lilly and his co-workers published several papers showing that dolphins could mimic human speech patterns with their clicks, squeaks and rasping. During this time, he was introduced to LSD and other hallucinogens by colleagues at the National Institutes of Mental Health. He experimented with them in his explorations of his own mind. In his book ''The Center of the Cyclone,'' published in 1972, he described the first time he used LSD in an isolation tank.

By the late 1960s, he no longer worked under government grants and relied more and more on private sources of financing, as well as the efforts of a coterie of assistants. In the 1980s Lilly directed a project that attempted to teach dolphins a computer-synthesized language. He designed a future "communications laboratory" that would be a floating living room where humans and dolphins could chat as equals and develop a common language.

In 1990, Lilly moved to Maui, Hawaii. His literary rights and scientific discoveries were owned by Human Software, Inc., while his philanthropic endeavors were owned by the Human Dolphin Foundation. The John C. Lilly Research Institute, Inc. continues to research topics of interest to Lilly and carry on his legacy.

Achievements

• John C. Lilly, perhaps, is best known for his research with dolphin communication. He was an unparalleled scientific visionary and explorer, who has made significant contributions to psychology, brain research, computer theory, medicine, ethics, delphinlogy, and interspecies communication. He developed the isolation tank and two new techniques for measuring brain activity.
  
  Combining training in medicine, psychoanalysis and biophysics, Dr. Lilly carved an eclectic career that shifted between research published in scientific journals and speculation and self-experimentation codified mainly in books aimed at fellow students of spirituality and the self. Along with pioneering work probing the electrical activity in the brain and the behavior of dolphins, he experimented with hallucinogenic drugs and promoted the recreational use of the isolation tank, an enclosed saline bath he designed in 1954 for studying sensory deprivation.
  
  Dr. Lilly's work inspired two movies, ''Day of the Dolphin,'' in 1973, in which the Navy turns the animals into weapons, and ''Altered States,'' in 1980, in which scientists combining drugs and isolation tanks see reality dangerously unravel.
  
  A distinguished brain researcher even before he became a public figure, Lilly has sown the seeds of several scientific revolutions, including the theory of internal realities, the hardware/software model of the human brain/ mind, and the initiation of worldwide efforts at interspecies communications with large-brained dolphins. Over the course of his life, Lilly also wrote nineteen books. His dozen books have sold millions of copies worldwide.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Lilly on Dolphins

    (This book is a revised edition of three of Lilly's previo...)

    1975
  • John Lilly, So Far...

    (The researcher whose work was the basis for two Hollywood...)

    1989
  • The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography

    (Tells the story of John Lilly's discoveries from his earl...)

    1978
  • Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space

    (The Center of the Cyclone is an autobiographical work aut...)

    1972
  • Tanks for the Memories

    (A definitive series of talks by two acknowledged masters ...)

    1996
  • Floating in Quiet Darkness: How the Floatation Tank Has Changed Our Lives and Is Changing the World

    (Glenn Perry had a life changing experience when he floate...)

    2020
  • Communication Between Man and Dolphin

    (Discusses several experiments in communications with whal...)

    1978
  • Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory and Experiments

    (Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer ...)

    1968
  • Deep Self: PRofound Relaxation and the Tank Isolation Technique

    (A fantastic voyage into the remotest recesses of the huma...)

    1977
  • The Mind of the Dolphin: A Nonhuman Intelligence

    (In this Consciousness Classic dating from 1967, Dr. John ...)

    1967
  • The Steersman: Metabeliefs and Self-Navigation

    (In this intellectually bracing work, John C. Lilly, whose...)

    2007
  • Man and Dolphin: Adventures on a New Scientific Frontier 1961
  • Simulations of God: The Science of Belief 1975
  • The Dyadic Cyclone: The Autobiography of a Couple 1976

Views

Late in life, Dr. Lilly maintained a hope that humans and dolphins would find a common language, laying out the design for a ''future communications laboratory'' that would be a floating living room where humans and dolphins could chat.

He spoke of a time when all killing of whales and dolphins would cease - not from a law being passed, but from each human understanding innately that these are ancient, sentient earth residents, with tremendous intelligence and enormous life force.

He aspired to find some way to bridge the gaps between humans and dolphins, although he always acknowledged that their separate kinds of intelligence were worlds apart. In the process, he steadily migrated away from mainstream science.

Lilly turned his attention to dolphins in the late 1950s when he established the Communication Research Institute on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, a center devoted to fostering human-dolphin communication. Here, in 1965, Lilly conducted his most notorious and highly criticized experiment.

For ten weeks his young assistant, Margaret Howe, volunteered to live in confinement with Peter, a bottlenose dolphin, in a house flooded with water, allowing them both to live, sleep, eat, wash and play intimately together. The objective of the experiment was to see whether a dolphin could be taught human speech and became the focus of a 2014 documentary The Girl Who Talked To Dolphins.

Membership

• 

  The American Physiological Society

  1945 - 1967

• The American Electroencephalographic Society

  1947 - 1967

• 

  The Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers

  1951 - 1967

• 

  The Society of the Sigma Xi

  1952 - 2001

• 

  Aerospace Medical Association

  1945

• 

  Biophysical Society

  1967

• The American Medical Authors

  1964

• 

  The New York Academy of Science

  1949 - 1959

• The Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis

  1958

• Order of the Dolphin

  1961

Personality

Lilly has lived in the company of associates and intimates including Nobel physicists Richard Feynman and Robert Milliken, philosophers Buckminster Fuller, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Watts, psychotherapy pioneers R.D. Laing and Fritz Perls, spiritual teachers Oscar Ichazo and Baba Ram Dass, and a host of luminaries, inventors, writers, and Hollywood celebrities.

John Lilly was the twentieth century's foremost scientific pioneer of the inner and outer limits of human experience. He was a relentless adventurer whose "search for Reality" led him repeatedly to risk life and limb, but whose quests resulted in astonishing insights into what it means to be a human being in an ever more mysterious universe.

It’s worth bearing in mind, Lilly often conducted experiments with mind-altering drugs, including ketamine and lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as LSD.

Quotes from others about the person

• ''Before him, whatever we knew about dolphins came from performing animals in oceanaria. He got people really thinking about big brains in other body forms - this thing that looked like a fish, but had this intelligence. He was pretty far-reaching and pretty far out for a lot of people, but he really did stimulate a lot of research and ideas." - Dr. Diana Reiss, a senior research scientist and expert on dolphin intelligence at the New York Aquarium in Brooklyn
  
  “John was like a Zen master, with sparkling extraterrestrial eyes, in top form, more brilliant than ever at 76, laughing, creating and bursting realities like soap bubbles. John is very direct and ruthlessly compassionate, more knowledgeable than a library of encyclopedias yet as innocent and curious as a small child.”

Connections

Lilly was married three times.Dr. Lilly's marriages to Mary Louise Crouch and Elisabeth Christine MacRobbie ended in divorce. He later married Antoinetta Lena Oshman, who died in 1986.

He is survived by five daughters, Cynthia Lilly Cantwell of Paradise, Calif., Pamela Lilly Krans of Dover, N.H., Nina Lilly Castellucio and Lisa Lilly, both of Malibu, Calif., and Barbara Clarke Lilly of Kihei, Hawaii; three sons, John C. Jr. of Zacatecas, Mexico, Charles R. of Haiku, Hawaii, and Philip Hansen Bailey of Makawao, Hawaii. He also had several grandchildren.

Father:

Richard Coyle Lilly

4 November 1884 - 22 October 1959

Richard Coyle Lilly was the president of the First National Bank of St. Paul.

Mother:

Rachel (Cunningham) Lilly

Daughter:

Lisa Lilly

Daughter:

Nina Lilly

Daughter:

Cynthia Lilly

Daughter:

Pamela Lilly

Son:

Charles Lilly

Daughter:

Barbara Jane Lilly

Son:

John Lilly

Wife:

Antonietta Ficorotta

ex-wife:

Mary Louise Crouch

Brother:

Richard Lilly Jr.

Brother:

David Maher Lilly

ex-wfe:

Elisabeth Christine MacRobbie

Friend:

Richard Feynman

May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988

Richard Phillips Feynman was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model.

Friend:

Robert Milliken

March 22, 1868 – December 19, 1953

Robert Andrews Millikan was an American experimental physicist honored with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for the measurement of the elementary electric charge and for his work on the photoelectric effect.

Friend:

Buckminster Fuller

July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983

Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion", ephemeralization, synergetic, and "tensegrity".

Friend:

Aldous Huxley

26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher.

Friend:

Alan Watts

6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973

Alan Wilson Watts was a British writer and speaker known for interpreting and popularizing Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism for a Western audience.

Friend:

R.D. Laing

7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989

Ronald David Laing, usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness – in particular, the experience of psychosis. Laing’s views on the causes and treatment of psychopathological phenomena were influenced by his study of existential philosophy and ran counter to the chemical and electroshock methods that had become psychiatric orthodoxy.

Friend:

Fritz Perls

July 8, 1893 – March 14, 1970

Friedrich (Frederick) Salomon Perls, better known as Fritz Perls, was a noted German-born psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and psychotherapist.

Friend:

Oscar Ichazo

July 24, 1931 – March 26, 2020

Oscar Ichazo was the Bolivian-born founder of the Arica School, which he established in 1968.

Friend:

Baba Ram

April 6, 1931 – December 22, 2019

Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert, also known as Baba Ram Dass, was an American spiritual teacher, psychologist, and author.

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Non-Fiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television, and Other Fields In response to the escalating need for up-to-date information on writers, Contemporary Authors New Revision Series brings researchers the most recent data on the worlds most-popular authors.
  2010