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

by Steven Kotler

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.”