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

by Steven Kotler

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.’”