Lilly John. The Scientist. A Metaphysical Autobiography

Berkeley, 1997. - 278 p. Third edition. In English
The first edition was published in 1988. Scan.This book by Dr. Lilly is about himself and his experiments on consciousness, on dolphins and friends.
Lilly was one of the greatest scientists and pioneers on the limits of human possibility of modern times but after his death a collective amnesia has descended and his is now almost forgotten.
Lilly was a generation (or more) ahead of his time. He is almost single-handedly responsible for the great interest in dolphins (which led to the Marine Mammal Protection Act in the USA and helped to find the animal rights movement). In 1958 he noted that the brains of elephants and cetaceans were larger than ours, that we should not abuse them and that it was one of our most important projects to communicate with them. He invented sensory isolation tanks (at NIMH in 1954) and
used them extensively with and without powerful psychoactive drugs at a time when it was thought that either the brain would shut down or one would go insane if external stimuli were eliminated.
He created methods for implanting electrodes in mammal brains and was planning to do it to himself. He was one of the first to make serious use of computers in bioscience research and created the hardware and software to make the first attempts to communicate with dolphins. He self experimented with dangerous physiological investigations in high altitude medicine for the military during WW2, took LSD with dolphins and movie stars, submitted himself to the rigors of
Arica training, and taught classes at Esalen. He was the first one to investigate the bizarre sychedelic ketamine, and his results (published in the last two chapters of his book `The Scientist`) are still the best data on the dose/effect relation of any psychedelic on one person. And all this happened before most of us were born!
He had courage,honesty and integrity that is rare anywhere and almost nonexistentin science. (Excerpt from review)