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

by Steven Kotler

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.

So, in the same way that the biological mechanisms underpinning certain non-ordinary states are remarkably consistent, our experiences of these states are, too. To be sure, the actual content will vary wildly across cultures: a Silicon Valley computer coder may experience a midnight epiphany as being in “the zone” and see streaming zeros and ones like the code from The Matrix; a French peasant girl might experience divine inspiration and hear the voice of an angel; an Indian farmer might see a vision of Ganesh in a rice paddy. But 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.

This was Silva’s monologue too, but he stumbled onto a curious fact—altered states can silence the nag. 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. 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. Woody goes quiet.

When free from the confines of our normal identity, we are able to look at life, and the often repetitive stories we tell about it, with fresh eyes. Come Monday morning, we may still clamber back into the monkey suits of our everyday roles—parent, spouse, employee, boss, neighbor—but, by then, we know they’re just costumes with zippers. Psychologist Robert Kegan,8 chair of adult development at Harvard, has a term for unzipping those costumes. He calls it “the subject-object shift” and argues that it’s the single most important move we can make to accelerate personal growth. For Kegan, our subjective selves are, quite simply, who we think we are. On the other hand, the “objects” are things we can look at, name, and talk about with some degree of objective distance. And 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.

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.

Big-box health clubs oversell memberships by 400 percent16 in the certain knowledge that, other than the first two weeks in January and a brief blip before spring break, fewer than one in ten members will ever show up.

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.

“In a culture supposedly ruled by the pursuit21 of money, power, prestige, and pleasure,” Csikszentmihalyi wrote in Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, “it is surprising to find certain people who sacrifice all those goals for no apparent reason. . . . By finding out why they are willing to give up material rewards for the elusive experience of performing enjoyable acts we . . . learn something that will allow us to make everyday life more meaningful.” But

In his first video, “You Are a Receiver,”23 Silva explains it like this: “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.” 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.” And that feeling, of waking up to some ineffable truth that’s been in us all along, can feel deeply significant. In

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.

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.

In a recent 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. Subjects were then given a classic test of creative problem solving: the nine-dot problem. Connect nine dots with four lines without lifting pencil from paper in ten minutes. Under normal circumstances, fewer than 5 percent of the population pulls it off. 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.

And this isn’t a one-off finding. 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.

Several decades ago, James Fadiman,44 a researcher at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, in Menlo Park, California, helped bring together twenty-seven test subjects—mainly engineers, architects, and mathematicians drawn from places like Stanford and Hewlett-Packard—for one specific reason: for months prior, each of them had been struggling (and failing) to solve a highly technical problem. Test subjects were divided into groups of four, with each group receiving two treatment sessions. Some were given 50 micrograms of LSD; others took 100 milligrams of mescaline. Both are microdosages, well below the level needed to produce psychedelic effects. Then subjects took tests designed to measure nine categories of cognitive performance enhancement (from heightened concentration to the ability to know when the right solution presents itself), and spent four hours working on their problems. While everyone experienced a boost in creativity—some as much as 200 percent—what got the most attention were the real-world breakthroughs that emerged: “Design of a linear electron accelerator beam-steering device, a mathematical theorem regarding NOR-gate circuits, a new design for a vibratory microtome, a space probe designed to measure solar properties, and a new conceptual model of a photon.”

In 1172, the English invaded Ireland, planted their flag, and built a great big fence. That barrier, known as the English Pale1—from pale, meaning a stake or picket—defined the world for those invaders. Within their pale, all was safe, true and good, a civilized land ruled by English law and institutions. Beyond the pale, on the other hand, lay bad news. That’s where mayhem, murder, and madness resided. Most who ventured beyond it were never heard from again. And the few who did manage to return weren’t always welcomed with open arms. They were no longer trustworthy; they might have seen too much.

In 1962, attempting to settle this skin-bag debate, Walter Pahnke conducted one of the more famous psychedelic experiments12 in history. A graduate student in theology at Harvard Divinity School, Pahnke gathered a group of twenty seminary students at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel on Good Friday. To see if mind-altering drugs could produce “authentic” mystical experiences, he gave half the group psilocybin, the other half the active placebo niacin (which produces similar physiological changes without the cognitive effects), then everyone went into chapel to attend the Good Friday service. 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.” So life-enhancing, in fact, that nine out of the ten seminary students who received psilocybin ended up becoming ministers, while none of the placebo group stayed on the path to ordination.

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.

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.

As Nietzsche said: “madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, political parties, nations and eras, it’s the rule.”

Except, as Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson later noted,1 “in all probability . . . hocus pocus is nothing else but a corruption of hoc est corpus (“this is the body”), [a] ridiculous imitation of the priests of the Church.”

So Erhard repackaged an assortment of Esalen-inspired13 practices into a business-friendly format, creating EST, short for the Erhard Seminars Training. The seminar deliberately reproduced Price’s accidental transformation, engineering a “breakdown-to-breakthrough” experience via a series of marathon, fourteen-hour days, without food or breaks, and with lots of yelling and profanity—the fabled “EST encounter.”

While EST itself made an impact, with almost one million people going through those original seminars, Landmark, the latest incarnation of Erhard’s teachings, boasts corporate clients including Microsoft,14 NASA, Reebok, and Lululemon.

In 2011, Griffiths gave three grams of psilocybin to a group of terminal cancer patients, in an attempt to provide them with relief from fear-of-death anxiety (which is understandably hard to alleviate). Afterward, he administered a battery of psychological tests, including a standard fear-of-dying metric, the Death Transcendence Scale, at one- and fourteen-month intervals. Just as with Britton’s NDE survivors, 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.

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 2007, working with Iraq War veterans at Camp Pendleton, occupational therapist Carly Rogers of the University of California, Los Angeles blended surfing (a reliable flow trigger) and talk therapy into a treatment for PTSD. It was essentially the same protocol Mithoefer used, only with the flow generated by action sports substituting for MDMA. Much like in Mithoefer’s study, sufferers experienced nearly immediate relief. “After just a few waves, they [the soldiers with PTSD] were laughing in the surf lineup,” reported Outside magazine. “‘Oh my God, our Marines are talking,’ said the lieutenant who approved the experiment. ‘They don’t talk. Ever.’”

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.” And surfing isn’t the only non-pharmacological intervention to show promise. 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.

In her book Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain,29 science writer Sharon Begley highlights this problem, describing the history of psychology as one favoring remediation over transformation: “Science has always focused . . . on people and conditions that are pathological, disturbed, or at best normal. . . . In the past thirty years, there have been about forty-six thousand scientific studies on depression and an underwhelming four hundred on joy. . . . As long as someone can obtain nonsickness that is deemed sufficient. As 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.’”

But Bob Kegan, the Harvard psychologist whom we first met in Chapter 2, upended that assumption by doing something psychologists before him hadn’t done too much of: longitudinal research. Kegan tracked a group of adults as they aged. His goal was simple: understand how they changed and grew over time, and determine if, in fact, there were upper limits to who we can become. Kegan spent three decades tracking this group,32 seeing what happened to their psychological maturity and capacity along the way. He discovered that while some adults remained frozen in time, a select few achieved meaningful growth. Right around middle age, for example, Kegan noticed that some people moved beyond generally well-adjusted adulthood, or what he called “Self-Authoring,” into a different stage entirely: “Self-Transforming.” Defined by heightened empathy, an expanded capacity to hold differing and even conflicting perspectives, and a general flexibility in how you think of yourself, self-transforming is the developmental stage we tend to associate with wisdom (and Roger Martin’s Opposable Mind).

But in all of this developmental research, buried in the footnotes33 about those self-transcending 5 percenters, lay a curious fact. A disproportionate number of them had dabbled in ecstasis: often beginning with psychedelics and, after that, making meditation, martial arts, and other state-shifting practices a central part of their lives. Many of them described their frequent access to non-ordinary states as the “turbo-button” for their development.

And we now know why. Our facial expressions are hardwired5 into our emotions: we can’t have one without the other. Botox lessens depression because it prevents us from making sad faces. But it also dampens our connection to those around us because we feel empathy by mimicking each other’s facial expressions. With Botox, mimicry becomes impossible, so we feel almost nothing at all. No wonder Nicole Kidman was relieved to get a few wrinkles back.

But the bigger point is that these studies reflect a sea change in how we think about thinking. They move us from “disembodied cognition,” the idea that our thinking happens only in the three pounds of gray matter tucked between our ears, to “embodied cognition,” where we see thinking for what it really is: an integrated, whole-system experience. “The body, the gut, the senses,6 the immune system, the lymphatic system,” explained embodied cognition expert and University of Winchester emeritus professor Guy Claxton to New York magazine, “are so instantaneously and complicatedly interacting that you can’t draw a line across the neck and say ‘above this line it’s smart and below the line it’s menial.’” In fact, we’re not smart and we have bodies—we’re smart because we have bodies.7 The heart has about 40,000 neurons that play a central role in shaping emotion, perception, and decision making. The stomach and intestines complete this network, containing more than 500 million nerve cells, 100 million neurons, 30 different neurotransmitters, and 90 percent of the body’s supply of serotonin (one of the major neurochemicals responsible for mood and well-being). This “second brain,” as scientists have dubbed it, lends some empirical support to the persistent notion of gut instinct.

Five thousand years ago, early yoga practitioners were tinkering with embodied cognition to prompt higher states of awareness. If simply standing like Wonder Woman for a few minutes is enough to produce meaningful changes in our hormonal profile, imagine what practicing a full sequence of yoga postures every morning would do. “There’s all this evidence that [movement sequences] have an impact on stress,”11 Peter Strick, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s Brain Institute, writes in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “it has an effect on how you project yourself and how you feel.” Fifteen hundred years ago, Shaolin monks in China became the ultimate Buddhist warriors by training their bodies to elevate their minds. They spent years practicing nearly impossible physical feats—smashing bricks with their hands, stopping spears with their necks, balancing all their weight on two fingers—as a way of training their minds. In direct contrast to skin-and-bone ascetics who sought ecstasis by ignoring or denying the body, these monks believed transcendence began with its total mastery. In the West, though, we inherited a different legacy, that mind-body split. It began with a healthy dose of Judeo-Christian guilt—that our bodies were not to be trusted—and was cemented by an increasingly industrial economy, where 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 hea...

“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.”

“Ellie’s the third leg of the stool,” explains Rizzo. “For the past century, scientists only had good data about two of the three streams of information we can glean from people. There’s what people say about themselves, self-reporting, and what the body can tell us, biophysical data like heart rate and galvanic skin response. But there’s also behavior—our movements and facial expressions. These have always been hard to assess and, typically, we could only get at them through subjective observations. Ellie gathers objective, high-quality data.” With

And people prefer talking to Ellie14 than to actual humans. Even trained psychologists tend to judge. Ellie never does. In a 2014 study, the USC team discovered that patients were twice as likely to disclose personal information to her than to a human therapist.

But Newberg persisted, becoming the first person to use advanced brain imaging technology to examine mystical experiences. 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.

What Newberg discovered is that extreme concentration can cause the right parietal lobe to shut down. “It’s an efficiency exchange,” he explains. “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.”