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

by Steven Kotler

This “second brain,” as scientists have dubbed it, lends some empirical support to the persistent notion of gut instinct.

But if they give you a cup of hot coffee and make the same introduction, trust comes more easily. The act of feeling physical warmth is enough to trigger a cognitive change: you literally warm up to people, no thinking required.

“Weightlessness, weightedness and rotation10 are the nectar of gravity games,” explains professional climber and filmmaker Jimmy Chin. “They provide easy access to flow, and that’s what keeps us coming back for more.”

“People are in a constant state of impression management,”13 explains USC psychologist Albert “Skip” Rizzo, the director of the institute. “They have their true self and the self they want to project to the world. And we know the body displays things that sometimes people try to keep contained.”

Transformational leaders not only regulated their own nervous systems better than most; they also regulated other people’s.

For research subjects, he chose Franciscan nuns and Tibetan Buddhists. During moments of intense prayer, the nuns report unio mystica, or oneness with God’s love. Peak meditation, meanwhile, brings the Buddhists into “absolute unitary being” or, as they say, “oneness with the universe.” By using single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) to take pictures of their brains during these sublime moments, Newberg tested those claims. The scans showed significant deactivation in the right parietal lobe, a key component in the brain’s navigation system. This part of the brain helps us move through space by judging angles and distances. But, to make these judgments, this region must first decide where our own body ends and the rest of the world begins, essentially drawing a boundary line between self and other.

Abraham Maslow once famously said,22 “When all you’ve got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” What he meant was, when it comes to problem-solving, we tend to get locked into using familiar tools in expected ways. The technical term for this is the Law of the Instrument.

Every issue we encounter, we try to solve by thinking.

Rather than treating our psychology like the unquestioned operating system (or OS) of our entire lives, we can repurpose it to function more like a user interface (or UI)—that easy-to-use dashboard that sits atop all the other, more complex programs. By treating the mind like a dashboard, by treating different states of consciousness like apps to be judiciously deployed,

we can bypass a lot of psychological storytelling and get results faster and, often, with less frustration.

Dogs lick toads for the buzz, horses go crazy for locoweed, goats gobble magic mushrooms, birds chew marijuana seeds, cats enjoy catnip, wallabies ravage poppy fields, reindeer indulge fly agaric mushrooms, baboons prefer iboga, sheep delight in hallucinogenic lichen, and elephants get drunk on fermented fruit (though they’ve also been known to raid breweries).

This has led Siegel to a controversial conclusion: “The pursuit of intoxication with drugs is a primary motivational force in organisms.”

Researchers have been pondering this for a while now, and have concluded that intoxication does play a powerful evolutionary role—“depatterning.”

“The principle of conservation6 tends to rigidly preserve established schemes and patterns,” writes Italian ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini in his book Animals and Psychedelics, “but modification (the search for new pathways) requires a depatterning instrument . . . capable of opposing—at least at certain determined moments—the principle of conservation. It is my impression that drug-seeking and drug-taking behavior, on the part of both humans and animals, enjoys an intimate connection with . . . depatterning.”

“Most cultures,” explains Pollan, “curiously, promote one plant8 for this purpose, or two, and condemn others. They fetishize one and they have taboos on others.”

Franciscan priests arrived in Mexico9 and found the peyote cactus at the center of the local religion, they outlawed the plant, and enforced their own preference for sacramental wine (despite catastrophic consequences for the native populations, who were missing a key enzyme to metabolize ethanol). Conversely, in 1920’s Prohibition America,10 growing apples—which could be fermented into hard cider—was against the law, but tinctures of opium and marijuana were readily available at the local pharmacy.

And these newly discovered mechanisms shed more light on two of the fundamental characteristics of ecstasis: selflessness and richness.

“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.”

Initially, he turned his attention to melatonin but, disappointed with the results, soon decided to focus on its cousin DMT (dimethyltryptamine). DMT made sense as a candidate. It occurs naturally in the human body yet when vaporized or injected, becomes a powerful psychedelic.

If you put this all together, what seems to be emerging in the aftermath of Shulgin, Carhart-Harris, and Strassman is a kind of “agnostic Gnosticism,” an experience of the infinite rooted in the certainty that all interpretations are personal, provisional, and partial.

thousand? A picture is starting to emerge of the worlds inside us. And while it’s no less strange, it is arguably a good deal more accurate than the singular epiphanies that have come before.

“Look,” Potter once explained, “I know the dark secret.3 I know my options. I can sit on a cushion and meditate for two hours and maybe I get a glimpse of something interesting—and maybe it lasts two seconds—but I put on a wingsuit and leap off a cliff and it’s instantaneous: Whammo, there I am, in an alternate universe that lasts for hours.”

This trend, of technological innovation providing wider and safer access to altered states, isn’t limited to adventure sports. As we’ll see in the rest of this chapter, it’s showing up across many disciplines, allowing more people than ever before to sample what these experiences have to offer.

In recent years, scientists have found that a great many of the world’s oldest religious sites have peculiar acoustic properties. While studying the Arcy-sur-Cure caves10 in France, University of Paris music ethnographer Iegor Reznikoff discovered that the largest collection of Neolithic paintings are found more than a kilometer deep. They’d been intentionally located at the most acoustically interesting spots in the cave: the parts with the most resonance.

“Reznikoff’s theory,”11 writes author Steven Johnson in How We Got to Now,” “is that Neanderthal communities gathered beside the images they had painted, and they chanted or sang in some kind of shamanic ritual, using the reverberations of the cave to magically widen the sound of their voices.”

In Greece, churches12 were designed with narrow walls to produce a “slap echo,” sort of a threefold sound bounce

meant to represent the flapping of an angel’s wings. In France, the Gothic arches of Notre Dame and Chartres13 cathedrals act as giant subwoofers for the pipe organs.

Trance—ecstatic singing and dancing, wild movements and cries, perhaps rhythmic rocking, or catatonia-like rigidity or immobility . . . [is a] profoundly altered state; and whilst it can be achieved by a single individual, it often seems to be facilitated in a communal group.”

When listening to music, brainwaves move from the high-beta of normal waking consciousness down into the meditative (and trance-inducing) ranges of alpha and theta. At the same time, levels of stress hormones like norepinephrine and cortisol drop, while social bonding and reward chemicals like dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, and oxytocin spike. Add in entrainment—where people’s brains synch to both the beat and to the brains of those around them—and you’ve got a potent combination for communitas.

“What we’re building in the Dance Temple,”18 explained one of its designers, “is a piece of

tech to disintegrate peoples’ egos en masse.”

“It’s impossible to separate the feedback I get, online or in person, from the creative process itself,” says Jones. “It’s no longer just a one-way experience. I get all this nonverbal feedback—likes, shares, etc.—that directly informs the work.”

Research conducted at Stanford supports Jones’s hunch. A 2012 study found that encounters with perceptual vastness, be it the endless spiral of galaxies in the night sky or Jones’s’ larger-than-life projections, triggers a self-negating, time-dilating sense of awe.

In March 2015, Jones upped the impact of his work even further. Joining forces with a group of Russian monks living in Thailand (who, improbably, happened to be tech whizzes), he moved from projecting his art onto flat 2-D surfaces into fully immersive 3D experiences. The coder-monks crafted Jones’s original media files into a string of modular scenes. When stitched together and projected onto the smooth 360-degree canvas of an enclosed geodesic dome, the screen seems to extend far beyond the physical space. Rather than looking up at the curved vault of the Sistine Chapel to view a singular mural, you can now walk through an immersive and infinitely changeable landscape, a dream state filled with gods and demons, stardust and galaxies, and anything else Jones can dream up.

You think you know where the boundaries are, but you see this stuff and think, if this thing I’m looking at is possible, what else might be possible?”

So Siegel decided to build better tools, birthing the field that has come to be called “enlightenment engineering.”

“They’re mapping a territory. And a whole slew of researchers, myself included, have begun using that map to create what you could call ‘tech-assisted self-awareness devices,’ or devices that can help us tune our internal environments.”

In his work with heart rate variability, Siegel’s found that by upgrading the tone to include a visual display, and adding in an EEG layer—so there’s neurofeedback to go along with the biofeedback—he can get whole groups of people to synchronize their heart rates and brainwaves and drive them into group flow.

Since Siegel was living in Silicon Valley, he was obliged to form a company, Consciousness Hacking,22 around these ideas. He, alongside Nichol Bradford and Jeffery Martin, also cofounded the Transformative Technology Conference23 and started organizing consciousness-hacking meet-ups. In about nine months, with exactly zero spent on marketing, what began with a handful of people in one Northern California location has become a network of more than ten thousand people in twenty-three locations worldwide.

It’s why, over the past several years, we’ve been collaborating with some of the top experience designers, biohackers, and performance specialists to help develop the Flow Dojo— a training and research center25 explicitly designed to merge these technologies in one place. Equal parts Cirque du Soleil, X Games, and hands-on science museum, it’s a learning lab dedicated to mapping the core building blocks of optimum performance.

In the fall of 2015, we had the opportunity to bring a prototype of the Dojo to Google’s26 Silicon Valley headquarters and engage in a joint-learning project. For six weeks, a handpicked team of engineers, developers, and managers committed to a flow training program, and then capped that off with two weeks in a beta version of the training center.

Each day, participants engaged in a range of activities, from sleep tracking, to diet and hydration, to functional movement (designed to undo

the imbalances of deskbound lives), to brain entraining audio and respiration exercises. With just those basic practices, subjects reported a 35 to 80 percent increase in incidents of flow during their workdays.

Time after time, they told us it came down to two things: the right triggers and gravity.

So, we brought together a team of engineers to develop kinetic training gear that could deliver those experiences—think extreme playground equipment built for grown-ups. Giant looping swings that send you upside down and twenty feet off the ground, and pull more than three g’s when you push through the arc’s bottom. Momentum-powered gyroscopes and surf swings, complete with Doppler sound effects and LED cues, that let you flip, spin, and twist without risking a hospital visit.

The designers also integrated sensors and audio-visual feedback into the gear, so users get real-time data on physics (like g-force, RPM, and amplitude) and personalized biometrics (like EEG, HRV, and respiration). Taking that kind of data off smart watches and laptops—and away from the conscious mental processing of the prefrontal cortex—gets users out of themselves and into the zone with less distraction.

It’s why the SEALs say “you don’t ever rise to the occasion, you sink to your level of training” and then proceed to overtrain for every scenario possible. It’s a more advanced corollary to Amy Cuddy’s power-posing advice: Once you get the basics down, start upping the ante. Try remaining centered under more challenging conditions (like managing heart and brain activity while swinging upside down).

Google’s other founder, Larry Page, gave one of Mikey Siegel’s newest creations a try: a mix of 3D surround sound and visual feedback designed to prompt connection between people. Sitting in an enclosed dome, he and his wife put on small backpack subwoofers (so they literally felt the bass through their bodies, not their ears). They then watched two digital flowers blossom and contract on the screen surrounding them. But there was a trick to the setup—Larry was feeling his wife’s heart beat and watching his flower pulse to her heart’s rhythms, and she was watching and feeling his. By deliberately crossing the feedback loops, the installation creates technologically mediated empathy, no talking required.

But we now know they can heal trauma, amplify creativity and accelerate personal development.

“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” —William Blake