The room had regulated air-conditioning and a toilet in an adjacent room, and food was brought to them on request. The students were asked to stay as long as possible; they usually stayed two or three days.( Kubzansky 12-14) Eventually when they had received more funding for the project they had fabricated what they described as a "floating room". The set up was a four-by-nine foot cubicle suspended inside a fifteen-by-ten foot room. The cubicle had a bed, an icebox, and a call button or "panic button". The subjects were fed with a tube inside the cubicle next to the bed with a high caloric egg nog mixture running through it. (Kubzansky 35-36).
The subjects rarely ate any food or used the toilet. The maximum time the students would usually spend inside the chamber was about two to three hours at a time, although there were some cases of students staying in them for up to five hours. While the subject was in the deprivation room the observers would sometimes ask mathematical questions or riddles. The subjects were also interviewed after the sessions describing what they had felt or seen. Subjects described such physical reactions as numbness or tingling in the extremities or feeling like they were floating in mid-air, and could no longer feel the bed. Subjects often commented on the effortless or dreamlike quality of thinking. Some students would experience brief periods of anxiety which actually progressed to panic in two subjects. Apparent hallucinations were noted on two occasions when one subject described "[ ] a fantasy of a hunting trip, so vivid it seemed as if I were really there.", and a vision that another person had of "[ ] a little German man walking down the road away from me"( Kubzansky 103-108).
In the late 1960's, and early 1970's, immersion tanks were starting to be used for the sensory deprivation experiments. The first immersion or isolation tanks were invented by Dr.