Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
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“optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best,” flow refers to those “in the zone” moments where focus gets so intense that everything else disappears. Action and awareness start to merge.
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The idea that nonordinary states of consciousness could improve performance was spreading out of the extreme and into the mainstream.
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everywhere we went, someone was trying to steal the kykeon.
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every one of these groups has been quietly seeking the same thing: the boost in information and inspiration that altered states provide.
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the insights they receive in those states are what make all the difference.
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ecstasis—the act of “stepping beyond oneself.” Davis had his own word as well. He called it “the switch,” the moment they stopped being separate men with lives and wives and things that matter.
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Plato described ecstasis as an altered state where our normal waking consciousness vanishes completely, replaced by an intense euphoria and a powerful connection to a greater intelligence.
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description, for the SEALs, once that switch was flipped, the experience was unmistakable. Their awareness shifted. They stopped acting like individuals, and they started operating as one—a single entity, a hive mind.
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what it takes to get a SEAL ready for combat—total out to roughly $500,000 per head. Which is to say, the Navy SEALs are among the most expensive collections of warfighters ever assembled.
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“Grit” is the term psychologists use to describe that mental toughness—a catch-all for passion, persistency, resiliency, and, to a certain extent, ability to suffer.
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The conscious mind is a potent tool, but it’s slow, and can manage only a small amount of information at once. The subconscious, meanwhile, is far more efficient. It can process more data in much shorter time frames. In ecstasis, the conscious mind takes a break, and the subconscious takes over.
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“practicing meditation, being in flow, or taking psychedelic drugs rely on shared neural substrates. What many of these routes have in common is activation of the serotonin system.”
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At the same time, brainwaves slow from agitated beta to daydreamy alpha and deeper theta. Neurochemically, stress chemicals like norepinephrine and cortisol are replaced by performance-enhancing, pleasure-producing compounds such as dopamine, endorphins, anandamide, serotonin, and oxytocin.
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researchers now know that the center of that target actually correlates to changes in brain function—like brainwaves in the low-alpha, high-theta range—and this unlocks all kinds of new training options.
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meditators can be hooked up to neurofeedback devices that steer the brain directly toward that alpha/theta range.
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these tanks were specifically designed to help people shut off the self (since the brain uses sensory inputs to help create our sense of self, by removing those inputs, you can dial down this sense).
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By using the tanks to eliminate all distraction, entrain specific brainwaves, and regulate heart rate frequency, the SEALs are able to cut the time it takes to learn a foreign language from six months to six weeks.
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many of the company’s legendary efforts to create a seamless live/work environment—from Wi-Fi enabled commuter shuttles to farm-to-table dining rooms to pre-booked tickets for weekend adventures—were also attempts to minimize interruptions and keep employees in flow.
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By doing everything possible to keep people out of their heads and absorbed in their projects, Google is trying to make that same vocational ecstasy they found in the desert a permanent part of their on-campus lives.
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much of the live music industry reflects a desire for state-changing collective experience, we zeroed in on an ascendant and uniquely qualified genre: electronic dance music (EDM).
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We don’t pay extra to see more, we pay it to feel more—and think less.
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Added all together, the Altered States Economy totals out to roughly $4 trillion a year.
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even though much of our seeking is haphazard and often counterproductive, this $4 trillion total stands as a pretty good metric for how badly we want to get out of our heads, and how much we’re willing to spend for even a shot at relief.
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Jason Silva1 posted a short, strange video on the internet. Titled “You Are a Receiver,”
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“I was stunned. The stuff coming out of my mouth? Jaw-dropping connections between ideas. I had no idea where the insights were coming from. It was me, but it wasn’t me.”
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First they gave me freedom from myself; then they gave me freedom to express myself, then they showed me what was actually possible.
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“look like different experiences from the outside, but they feel similar from the inside. It’s a shared commonality, a bond linking all of us together. The ecstatic is a language without words that we all speak.”
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once we get past the narrative wrapping paper—what researchers call the “phenomenological reporting”—we find four signature characteristics underneath: Selflessness, Timelessness, Effortlessness, and Richness, or STER for short.
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When you think about the billion-dollar industries that underpin the Altered States Economy, isn’t this what they’re built for? To shut off the self. To give us a few moments of relief from the voice in our heads.
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They act as an off switch. In these states, we’re no longer trapped by our neurotic selves because the prefrontal cortex, the very part of the brain generating that self, is no longer open for business.
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“without self-talk to stir up negative emotions, the mystical experience is free of tension.” And with tension out of the way, we often discover a better version of ourselves, more confident and clear.
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when we can move from being subject to our identity to having some objective distance from it, we gain flexibility in how we respond to life and its challenges.
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This means that the self is more about movement through different forms of consciousness than about defending and identifying with any one form.”
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“When [you] are juggling time,” Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan recently told the New York Times, “. . . you borrow from tomorrow, and tomorrow you have less time than you have today. . . . It’s a very costly loan.”
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Without the ability to separate past from present from future, we’re plunged into an elongated present, what researchers describe as “the deep now.” Energy normally used for temporal processing gets reallocated for focus and attention. We take in more data per second, and process it more quickly. When we’re processing more information faster, the moment seems to last longer—which explains why the “now” often elongates in altered states.
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And when we do slow life down, we find the present is the only place in the timescape we get reliable data anyway.
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“when I go off on a tangent and the ideas start to flow, there’s no room for anything else. Definitely not for time.
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without time in the picture, I have all the time I need.”
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they’re the six most pleasurable chemicals the brain can produce and these states are one of the only times we get access to many of them at once. That’s the biological underpinning of effortlessness: “I did it, it felt awesome, I’d like to do it again as soon as possible.”
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“the individuals and organizations who went the farthest the fastest were always the ones tapping into passion and finding flow.”
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“It’s creative inspiration or divine madness or that kind of connection to something larger than ourselves that makes us feel like we understand the intelligence that runs throughout the universe.”
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Conscious processing can only handle about 12033 bits of information at once. This isn’t much. Listening to another person speak can take almost 60 bits. If two people are talking, that’s it. We’ve maxed out our bandwidth.
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We have terabytes of information available to us; we just can’t tap into it in our normal state.
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creativity is essential for solving complex problems—the kinds we often face
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we have very little success training people to be more creative. And there’s a pretty simple explanation for this failure: we’re trying to train a skill, but what we really need to be training is a state of mind.
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even four days of meditation produced significant improvement in attention, memory, vigilance, creativity, and cognitive flexibility.
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Rather than pulling a caffeinated all-nighter to force a eureka insight, or devoting decades to becoming a monk, we now know that even a few days’ training in mindfulness can up the odds of a breakthrough considerably.
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“The billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogens on a regular basis. These are people who are trying to be very disruptive. They look at problems in the world and they try to ask entirely new questions.”
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Even when religions are built on the epiphanies of their founders, attempts to repeat those original experiments are strongly discouraged.
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So whether we’re talking about students popping pills or shamans taking psychedelics, the bias is the same. It’s a question of effort.
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