Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

by Steven Kotler

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. As this occurs, a number of performance-enhancing neurochemicals flood the system, including norepinephrine and dopamine. Both of these chemicals amplify focus, muscle reaction times, and pattern recognition. With the subconscious in charge and those neurochemicals in play, SEALs can read micro-expressions across dark rooms at high speeds.

The Curse of the Self. “It is single-handedly responsible for many, if not most of the problems that human beings face as individuals and as a species . . . [and] conjures up a great deal of personal suffering in the form of depression, anxiety, anger, jealousy, and other negative emotions.”

Scientists call this shutdown7 “transient hypofrontality.” Transient means temporary. “Hypo,” the opposite of “hyper,” means “less than normal.” And frontality refers to the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that generates our sense of self. During transient hypofrontality, because large swatches of the prefrontal cortex turn off, that inner critic comes offline.

“You start . . . constructing a world that is much more friendly to contradiction, to oppositeness, to being able to hold onto multiple systems of thinking. . . . This means that the self is more about movement through different forms of consciousness than about defending and identifying with any one form.”

“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.”

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

In a recent study published in Psychological Science,13 Zimbardo’s Stanford colleagues Jennifer Aaker and Melanie Rudd found that an experience of timelessness is so powerful it shapes behavior. In a series of experiments, subjects who tasted even a brief moment of timelessness “felt they had more time available, were less impatient, more willing to volunteer to help others, more strongly preferred experiences over material products, and experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction.”

But the cascade of neurobiological change that occurs in a non-ordinary state lets us perceive and process more of what’s going on around us and with greater accuracy. In these states, we get upstream of our umwelt. We get access to increased data, heightened perception, and amplified connection. And this lets us see ecstasis for what it actually is: an information technology. Big Data for our minds.

First, creativity is essential for solving complex problems—the kinds we often face in a fast-paced world. Second, 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.

Turns out, you can cut quite a few corners. Initial studies showed eight weeks of meditation40 training measurably sharpened focus and cognition. Later ones whittled that down to five weeks.

he’d done a back-of-the-envelope calculation comparing the injuries and deaths caused by horseback riding—which he dubbed “equasy”—to those produced by MDMA. But even when he discounted the downstream costs of drug use such as addiction, violent behavior, and traffic accidents, his numbers showed the dangers of equasy and ecstasy several orders of magnitude apart. For every 60 million tablets of MDMA consumed, Nutt found 10,000 adverse events, or one for every 6,000 pills popped. He then compared that number to the 1-in-350 tally for horseback riding and published the results.

In 2012, psychologist Michael Mithoefer discovered that even a single dose28 of MDMA can reduce or cure post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in survivors of child abuse, sexual abuse, and combat. “It was completely cathartic,” reported an Army ranger who suffered a broken back and severe head trauma in Iraq. “The next day [after just one session] the nightmares were gone. I was glowing and extroverted for the first time since getting blown up. MDMA gave me my life back.”

In a 2014 paper published in the Journal of Occupational Therapy, Rogers reported that after as little as five weeks in the waves, soldiers had a “clinically meaningful improvement in PTSD symptom severity and in depressive symptoms.”

A recent study done by the military found that 84 percent of PTSD subjects who meditated for a month could reduce or even stop taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). In contrast, the control group—who didn’t meditate and stayed on antidepressants—experienced a 20 percent worsening in PTSD symptoms during that same period.

And these whole-body perceptions can be easily influenced. If someone gives you a cup of icy cold water8 to hold, then introduces you to a stranger, as researchers at Yale did, you’ll treat this newcomer with suspicion and rate them as colder and more distant on personality scales. But if they give you a cup of hot coffee and make the same introduction, trust comes more easily.

Transformational leaders not only regulated their own nervous systems better than most; they also regulated other people’s. In the same way that multiple clocks on a wall end up synchronizing to the one with the biggest pendulum, emergent leaders can entrain their entire teams and create a powerful group flow experience.

“During ecstatic prayer or meditation, energy normally used for drawing the boundary of self gets reallocated for attention. When this happens, we can no longer distinguish self from other. At that moment, as far as the brain can tell, you are one with everything.”

Even a quick glance at today’s dire mental health statistics—the one in four Americans now on psychiatric medicines;23 the escalating rate of suicide24 for everyone from ages ten to seventy-eight—shows how critically overtaxed our mental processing is these days.

In more contemporary terms, both Siegel and Samorini have argued that animals consume psychoactive plants because they promote “lateral thinking,” or problem solving through indirect and creative approaches. Lateral thinking involves big intuitive leaps between ideas. These are outside-the-box insights far more than iterative improvements, and much more difficult to achieve during normal waking consciousness. With our self forever standing guard over our ideas, crazy schemes and hare-brained notions tend to get filtered out long before they can become useful. But intoxication lessens those constraints.

“A lot of the earlier imaging work on altered states gave us static pictures of the brain. So we made correlations: when we’re on LSD, this region deactivates; when we’re meditating, that region deactivates. But the technology has improved and we can now take dynamic pictures. This is how we know that the vanishing of self is not really about specific regions deactivating. It’s bigger than that. It’s more like whole networks disintegrating.”

One of the most important networks to disintegrate is the default mode network. Responsible for mind-wandering and daydreaming, this network is active when we’re awake but not focused on a task. It’s the source of a lot of our mind chatter, and with it, a lot of our unhappiness. But, like many of the brain’s systems, the default mode network is fragile. A little trouble in a couple of nodes is all it takes to knock it offline. “Early psychologists used terms like ‘ego disintegration’ to describe the effects of an altered state,” says Carhart-Harris. “They were more correct than they knew. The ego is really just a network, and things like psychedelics, flow, and meditation compromise those connections. They literally dis-integrate the network.”

The scans revealed that psychedelics created highly synchronized connections between far-flung areas of the brain, the kinds of linkages we don’t normally make. So when researchers like James Fadiman discovered that psychedelics could enhance creative problem solving—these far-flung connections were the reason why.

Carhart-Harris set out to take real-time pictures of the unconscious and when he did, he saw the unconscious actively hunting for new ideas. It’s a discovery that helps to legitimize these substances as performance-enhancing tools for solving wicked problems.

When tunes were playing, the distance between housemates decreased by 12 percent, while chances of cooking together increased by 33 percent, laughing together by 15 percent, inviting other people over by 85 percent, saying “I love you” by 18 percent, and, most tellingly, having sex by 37 percent.

When deeply religious subjects view sacred iconography or reflect on their notion of God, brain scans reveal hyperactivity in the caudate nucleus, a part of the pleasure system that correlates with feelings of joy, love, and serenity. But Lindstrom and Calvert found that this same brain region lights up when subjects view images associated with strong brands like Ferrari or Apple. “Bottom line,” Calvert reported, “there was no discernible way to tell the difference between the ways subjects’ brains reacted to powerful brands35 and the way they reacted to religious icons and figures. . . . Clearly, our emotional engagement with powerful brands. . . . shares strong parallels with our feelings about religion.”

But we were at the Advertising Research Foundation38 to discuss the next step: the move from an experience economy to what author Joe Pine calls the “transformation economy.” In this marketplace, what we’re being sold is who we might become—or as, Pine explains: “In the transformation economy, the customer IS the product!”

The video game industry may have gone further down this path than anyone. “Games are a multi-billion dollar industry that employ the best neuroscientists42 and behavior psychologists to make them as addicting as possible,” Nicholas Kardaras, one of the country’s top addiction specialists, recently explained to Vice. “The developers strap beta-testing teens with galvanic skin responses, EKG, and blood pressure gauges. If the game doesn’t spike their blood pressure to 180 over 140, they go back and tweak the game to make it have more of an adrenaline-rush effect. . . . Video games raise dopamine to the same degree that sex does, and almost as much as cocaine does. So this combo of adrenaline and dopamine are a potent one-two punch with regards to addiction.”

“In [George Orwell’s] 1984 . . . people are controlled by inflicting pain,” wrote NYU professor Neil Postman. “In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting47 pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that our fears will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.” And while the possibility of a nation deliberately invading our minds to shape and control behavior may feel like a relic of Cold War paranoia, the prospect of multinational corporations deliberately tweaking our subconscious desires to sell us more stuff is already here.

It’s why Burning Man advises people to not make any life-changing decisions for at least a month following the event,3 and why online psychedelic message boards like Erowid are filled with advice like “Don’t believe everything you think.”

In 2009, Swiss neurologist Peter Brugger discovered that people4 with more dopamine in their systems are more likely to believe in secret conspiracies and alien abductions. They’re suffering from apophenia, “the tendency to be overwhelmed by meaningful coincidence,” and detecting patterns where others see none.

This leaves us with four rules of thumb to carry into our exploration of these states. It’s not about you and it’s not about now help us balance ego inflation and time distortion. While don’t become a bliss junky and don’t dive too deep ensure that we don’t get seduced by the sensations and information that arise in altered states.

This calculus is reflected in the different treatments for PTSD we examined in the chapter on psychology. A one-day session with MDMA produces a marked decrease or abatement in symptoms, but you have to be willing to ingest an amphetamine to experience it. Five weeks of surfing—potentially less risky than a drug intervention—achieves a similar result, but entails learning a new sport in an unfamiliar and sometimes dangerous environment. Meanwhile, meditation—both simpler and safer than surfing—requires twelve weeks and offers a slightly lessened benefit. These three approaches produce a similar reward (relief from trauma), but they come with varying degrees of risk and investment of time.

Experiencing the selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness of nonordinary states of consciousness can accelerate learning, facilitate healing, and provide measurable impact in our lives and work.