Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
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“The alternative is unconsciousness,1 the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.” —David Foster Wallace
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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. And while this is accurate—SEALs are gritty as hell—it’s only part of the picture. Grit only refers to individual toughness, and the secret to becoming a SEAL has everything to do with team.
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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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When we say ecstasis we’re talking about a very specific range of nonordinary states of consciousness (NOSC)
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Instead of following the breath (or chanting a mantra or puzzling out a koan), meditators can be hooked up to neurofeedback devices that steer the brain directly toward that alpha/theta range. It’s a fairly straightforward adjustment to electrical activity, but it can accelerate learning, letting practitioners achieve in months what used to take years.
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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. For a specialized unit deployed across five continents, shutting off the self to accelerate learning has become a strategic imperative.
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“Tell me what you value and I might believe you,” management guru Peter Drucker once said, “but show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I’ll show you what you really value.”
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social media. What makes these online distractions so sticky is how effectively they prime our brains for reward (mainly the feel-good neurochemical dopamine). Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky calls this priming the “magic of maybe.” When we check our email or Facebook or Twitter, and sometimes we find a response and sometimes we don’t, the next time a friend connects, Sapolsky discovered that we enjoy a 400 percent spike in dopamine. This can become distracting to the point of addicting.
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we think it’s safe to assume that a good part of what we’re habitually doing online is more to forget ourselves for a moment than inform ourselves for the long haul.
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we find four signature characteristics underneath: Selflessness, Timelessness, Effortlessness, and Richness, or STER for short.
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No one built an off switch for the potent self-awareness that made it all possible. “[T]he self “is not an unmitigated blessing,”6 writes Duke University psychologist Mark Leary in his aptly titled book, 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.”
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By stepping outside ourselves, we gain perspective. We become objectively aware of our costumes rather than subjectively fused with them. We realize we can take them off, discard those that are worn out or no longer fit, and even create new ones. That’s the paradox of selflessness—by periodically losing our minds we stand a better chance of finding ourselves. Timelessness
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When our attention is focused on the present, we stop scanning yesterday for painful experiences we want to avoid repeating. We quit daydreaming about a tomorrow that’s better than today. 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.
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Our memories of the past are unstable and constantly subject to revision—like a picture-book honeymoon overwritten by a bitter divorce. “[M]emory distortions are basic14 and widespread in humans,”
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These days, we’re drowning in information, but starving for motivation.
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when a Harvard Medical School study confronted patients17 with lifestyle-related diseases that would kill them if they didn’t alter their behavior (type 2 diabetes, smoking, atherosclerosis, etc.), 87 percent couldn’t avoid this sentence. Turns out, we’d rather die than change.
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But you don’t have to take extreme risk or give up material reward to experience this benefit. It shows up wherever people are deeply committed to a compelling goal.
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the study came to two overarching conclusions. 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.
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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.
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“This experience of ego-death seems to entail an instant merciless destruction of all previous reference points in the life of an individual.” In short, Alice didn’t wander into Wonderland—she fell down the rabbit hole.
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Griffiths found significant, sustained change: a marked decrease in their fear of death, and a significant uptick in their attitudes, moods, and behavior. Ninety-four percent of his subjects said taking psilocybin was one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives. Four out of ten said it was the most meaningful.
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Buddhist scholar Alan Watts put it, ‘Western scientists have an underlying assumption that normal is absolutely as good as it gets and that the exceptional is only for saints, that it is something that cannot be cultivated.’”
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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. The act of feeling physical warmth is enough to trigger a cognitive change: you literally warm up to people, no thinking required.
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“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.”
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our bodies were less and less needed. And today, with so much of our emotional and social lives mediated by screens, we’ve become little more than heads on sticks, the most disembodied generation of humans that has ever lived.
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Transformational leaders not only regulated their own nervous systems better than most; they also regulated other people’s.
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mild to moderate depression. Instead of moping around, hoping for things to get better on their own, we can scan our UI and choose an alternate program to run. We could get on a treadmill25 (studies show exercise is effective for depression in all but severe cases), or get some natural sunshine26 (70 percent of Americans are deficient in vitamin D, which has a direct impact on mood), or practice meditation for fifteen minutes27 (a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association found it as effective as SSRI’s and without the side effects). None of these approaches require thinking ...more