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

by Steven Kotler

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...