Dr. John Lilly, 86, died Sept. 30, 2001 in
Los Angeles.
He combined training in medicine, psychoanalysis and biophysics, while living an eclectic life that shifted between "official" research published in scientific journals and speculative musings on psychedelic self-experimentation published mostly in books aimed at fellow students of spirituality and the self.
Along with ground breaking work studying the brain's electrical activity and the behavior of dolphins, he experimented with LSD and isolation tanks, an enclosed body temperature,saline bath he designed in 1954 as a tool 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 enter a world where reality dangerously unravels.
He wrote 12 books among which were several accounts of his work with dolphins, including "Man and Dolphin" and "The Mind of the Dolphin," which popularized the study of marine mammals and aroused public fascination and curiosity with dolphins, whose brains are 40 percent larger than those of humans.