Altered States

Edward Jessup is a whizzkid scientist working in New York on dangerous experiments with schizophrenics involving human consciousness. Despite childhood visions of Christ, he takes a strictly rationalist stance in his search for a meaning behind man's existence. In his spare time, Jessup makes use of a sensory deprivation tank to experiment on himself and hallucinates back to the event of birth and beyond. He drops this work when he marries Emily, an anthropologist, and moves on to teach at Harvard. Some years later he discovers a mysterious formula from Mexican indians, and continues his tank experiments with the help of two fellow scientists. The results are so devastating his colleagues refuse to accept the evidence... © Warner Bros Inc.