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

by Steven Kotler

“Time poverty,”10 as this shortage is known, comes with consequences. “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.”

Our sense of time isn’t localized11 in the brain. It’s not like vision, which is the sole responsibility of the occipital lobes. Instead, time is a distributed perception, calculated all over the brain,

calculated, more specifically, all over the prefrontal cortex. During transient hypofrontality, when the prefrontal cortex goes offline, we can no longer perform this calculation.

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 ...

With our prefrontal cortex offline, we can’t run those scenarios. We lose access to the most complex and neurotic part of our brains, and the most primitive and reactive part of our brains, the amygdala, the seat of that fight-or-flight response, calms down, too.

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.”

“[M]emory distortions are basic14 and widespread in humans,” acknowledges cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, “and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune.”

But the reason I can find them is simple: without time in the picture, I have all the time I need.”

These days, we’re drowning in information, but starving for motivation.

In flow, as in most of the states18 we’re examining, six powerful neurotransmitters—norepinephrine, dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, anandamide, and oxytocin—come online in varying sequences and concentrations.

That’s the biological underpinning of effortlessness: “I did it, it felt awesome, I’d like to do it again as soon as possible.”

“So many people find this so great and high20 an experience,” wrote psychologist Abraham Maslow in his book Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences, “that it justifies not only itself, but living itself.”

Effortlessness upends the “suffer now, redemption later” of the Protestant work ethic and replaces it with a far more powerful and enjoyable drive.

The Greeks called that sudden understanding anamnesis. Literally, “the forgetting of the forgetting.” A powerful sense of remembering. Nineteenth century psychologist William James experienced this during his Harvard experiments24 with nitrous oxide and mescaline, noting it’s “the extremely frequent phenomenon, that sudden feeling . . . which sometimes sweeps over us, having “been here before” as if at some indefinite past time, in just this place . . . we were already saying just these things.”

Often, an ecstatic experience25 begins when the brain releases norepinephrine and dopamine into our system. These neurochemicals raise heart rates,26 tighten

focus, and help us sit up and pay attention. We notice more of what’s going on around us, so information normally tuned out or ignored becomes more readily available. And besides simply increasing focus, these chemicals amp up the brain’s pattern recognition abilities,27 helping us find new links between all this incoming information.

As these changes are taking place, our brainwaves slow from agitated beta to calmer alpha,28 shifting us into daydreaming mode: relaxed, alert, and able to flit from idea to idea without as much internal resistance. Then parts of the prefrontal cortex begin shutting down.29 We experience the selflessness, timelessness, and effortlessness of transient hypofrontality. This quiets the “already know that, move along” voice of our inner critic and dampens the distractions of the past and future. All these changes kno...

As we move even deeper into ecstasis, the brain can release endorphins and anandamide.30 They both decrease pain, removing the diversion of physical distress from the equation, letting us pay even more attention to what’s going on. Anandamide also plays another important role here,31 boosting “lateral think...

And, if we go really deep, our brainwaves shift once again, pushing us toward quasi-hypnotic theta, a wave we normally produce only during REM sleep that enhances both relaxation and intuition. To wrap it all up, we can experience an afterglow of serotonin and oxytocin,32 prompting feelings of peace, well-being, trust, and sociability, as we start to integrate the information that has just been revealed.

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. But if we remember that our unconscious processing can handle billions of bits at once, we don’t need to search outside ourselves to find a credible source for all that miraculous insight. We have terabytes of information available to us; we just can’t tap into it in our normal state.

Umwelt is the technical term34 for the sliver of the data stream that we normally apprehend. It’s the reality our senses can perceive. And all umwelts are not the same. Dogs hear whistles we cannot, sharks detect...

In these states, we get upstream of our umwelt.

And this lets us see ecstasis for what it actually is: an information technology. Big Data for our minds.

In 2013 we were invited to participate in the Red Bull Hacking Creativity project,35 a joint effort involving scientists at the MIT Media Lab, a group of TED Fellows, and the namesake energy drink company. Conceived by Dr. Andy Walshe, Red Bull’s director of high performance (and a member of Flow Genome Project’s advisory board), the project was the largest

meta-analysis of creativity research ever conducted, reviewing more than thirty thousand research papers and interviewing hundreds of other subject-matter experts, from break dancers and circus performers to poets and rock stars.

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.

Solving wicked problems requires more than a direct assault on obvious symptoms. Roger Martin of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management conducted a lengthy study of exceptional leaders stretching from Procter & Gamble’s then-CEO A. G. Lafley to choreographer Martha Graham and discovered that their ability to find solutions required holding conflicting perspectives and using that friction to synthesize a new idea. “The ability to face constructively the tension37 of opposing ideas,” Martin writes in his book The Opposable Mind, “. . . is the only way to address this kind of complexity.”

Research done on Tibetan Buddhists38 in the 1990s showed that longtime contemplative practice can produce brainwaves in the gamma range. Gamma waves are unusual. They arise primarily during “binding,”39

when novel ideas come together for the first time and carve new neural pathways.

Initial studies showed eight weeks of meditation40 training measurably sharpened focus and cognition. Later ones whittled that down to five weeks.

“Simply stated,” lead researcher Fadel Zeidan explained41 to Science Daily, “the profound improvements we found after just four days of meditation training are really surprising. . . . [They’re] comparable to results that have been documented after far more extensive training.”

University of Sydney study,42 researchers relied on transcranial magnetic stimulation to induce flow—using a weak magnetic pulse to knock out the prefrontal cortex and create a twenty-to-forty-minute flow state.

In the control group, no one did. In the flow-induced group, 40 percent connected the dots in record time, or eight times better than the norm.

When neuroscientists at DARPA and Advanced Brain Monitoring43 used a different technique—neurofeedback—to prompt flow, they found that soldiers solved complex problems and mastered new skills up to 490 percent faster than normal.

“A shift began about four or five years ago,” author and venture capitalist Tim Ferriss45 told us. “Once Steve Jobs and other successful people began recommending the use of psychedelics for enhancing creativity and problem solving, the public became a little more open to the possibility.”

In Christianity, it shows up as the tension between chapter-and-verse Roman Catholics and holy-rolling Pentecostals; in Islam, it’s solemn imams versus twirling Sufis; in China, it’s by-the-book Confucians against go-with-the-flow Taoists. In each case, a small community figures out a more direct path to knowledge and, because they blossom without the sanction of the orthodoxy, they are persecuted for it.

The Pale of the Church is why, despite millennia of bold experimentation, the insights of mystics rarely survive. Their beliefs are ridiculed and their motives maligned. Lest anyone try to follow in their footsteps, their recipes for ecstasy are torn to pieces and scattered to the wind. Even when religions are built on the epiphanies of their founders, attempts to repeat those original experiments are strongly discouraged.

What he realized is that we are confined by a cultural assumption—call it the Pale of the Body—that ranks the stuff we are (biology) above the stuff we make (technology).

And the skin-bag bias extends beyond tools that augment our bodies, to techniques that enhance our minds. In 2012, a study conducted by the American Pediatric Association found that one out of five Ivy League college students was taking “smart drugs” to help improve academic performance6. By 2015, that number had jumped to one in three7 (in all college students).

So whether we’re talking about students popping pills or shamans taking psychedelics, the bias is the same. It’s a question of effort. Studying all night for an exam takes work. Adderall feels like cheating. The same goes for grueling hours of drumming, chanting, and meditation versus the near-certain transformation produced by mind-altering plants.

Afterward, subjects rated the service for a variety of mystical qualities: sacredness, ineffability, distortion of time and space, and a sense of oneness with the divine. “[Psilocybin] subjects ranked their experiences13 much higher in mystical qualities than members of the control group did,” explains John Horgan in his book Rational Mysticism. “Six months later, the psilocybin group reported persistent beneficial effects on their

attitude and behavior; the experience had deepened their religious faith. . . . The experiment was widely hailed as proof that psychedelic drugs can generate life-enhancing mystical experiences.”

Consider Laurentian University neuroscientist Michael Persinger’s God Helmet.16 More than fifty years ago, researchers discovered that electrical stimulation of the right temporal lobe can produce visions of God, sensed presences, and other notable altered states. Persinger built a helmet that directs electromagnetic pulses toward this brain region. More than two thousand people have tried out the device, and the majority have had some form of nonordinary experience.

In very simple terms, the states of consciousness we prefer are those that reinforce established cultural values. We enshrine these states socially, economically, and legally. That is, we have state-sanctioned states of consciousness. Altered states that subvert these values are persecuted, while the people who enjoy them are marginalized.

The 1.2 million Americans who tried meth24 last year were breaking bad, while the 4.4 million American children who took ADHD drugs were striving to become better students. Same drugs, different contexts.

These states can be destabilizing. It’s why psychologists use terms like “ego death” to describe the experiences. “[It’s] a sense of total annihilation,”29 writes psychiatrist Stanislav Grof in his book The Adventure of Self-Discovery. “This experience of ego-death seems to entail an instant merciless destruction of all previous reference points in the life of an individual.”

Isn’t that why Harvard professor Timothy Leary, whose greatest crime was telling undergrads to “tune in, turn on, and drop out,” ended up branded by President Richard Nixon “the most dangerous man in America”?

“Communitas” is the term University of Chicago anthropologist Victor Turner31 used to describe this ecstatic sense of unity. This feeling tightens social bonds and ignites enduring passion—the kind that lets us come together to plan, organize, and tackle great challenges. But it’s a double-edged sword. When we lose ourselves and merge with the group, we are in danger of losing too much of ourselves.

It’s why, Turner argued, communitas is too potent to unleash without proper checks and balances: “Exaggerations of communitas,32 in certain religious or political movements of the leveling type, may be speedily followed by despotism.”

According to Fuhrer confidant Ernst Hanfstaengl, “the ‘Sieg Heil’34 used in political rallies was a direct copy of the technique used by American college football cheerleaders. American college type music was used to excite the German masses who had been used to . . . dry-as-dust political lectures.”