“The prefrontal cortex is where thinking happens,” he explains. “It’s where we take simple ideas and add all kind of layers of complexity to them. But I was slipping into flow of a regular basis and always amazed by the clarity of the state. All that complexity was gone. Decisions were easy and automatic. It was like the opposite of thinking.” So Dietrich started to wonder how the brain was eliminating this complexity—which is when it dawned on him: the brain wasn’t eliminating complexity, it was eliminating the very structures that created this complexity. “We had it backward,” he says. “In
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