Richard Feynman, one of the great physicist of the 20th century, used floatation therapy to revisit some of his earliest memories.
In his youth Feynman experimented with floatation therapy. He used it to experiment with hallucinations and out-of-body experiences. He subjected himself to at least a dozen 2 1⁄2 hour float sessions. During these he experienced many hallucinations and out-of-body experiences. He arrived at the following conclusions. Hallucinations are not real. Imaging things are real does not represent true reality. “The reason, I believe, that I had an out-of-body experience was that we were discussing out-of-body experiences just before I went into the tank. And the reason I had a hallucination about how memories are stored in the brain was, I think, that I had been thinking about that problem all week.”
So in a sense what Feynman’s experiments showed him personally was that false memories were not real but influenced by suggestion. Psychologists have found that our recollection of everyday events may not be as dependable as we would believe. Moreover, even once information has been committed to memory, it can be altered. Our recollection of memories can be manipulated and even entire sets of events can be confabulated.