And when we do slow life down, we find the present is the only place in the timescape we get reliable data anyway. 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,” acknowledges cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, “and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune.” The past is less an archived library of what really happened, and more a fluid director’s commentary we’re constantly updating.
Future forecasts aren’t much better. When we try to predict what’s around the bend, we rarely get it right. We tend to assume the near future will look much like the recent past. That’s why events like the toppling of the Berlin Wall and the 2008 financial collapse caught so many analysts flatfooted. What looks inevitable in hindsight is often invisible with foresight.
But when non-ordinary states trigger timelessness, they deliver us to the perpetual present—where we have undistracted access to the most reliable data. We find ourselves at full strength. “That was another thing I noticed,” says Silva, “when I go off on a tangent and the ideas start to flow, there’s no room for anything else. Definitely not for time. People who see my videos often ask how I can find all those connections between ideas. But the reason I can find them is simple: without time in the picture, I have all the time I need.”
Effortlessness
These days, we’re drowning in information, but starving for motivation. Despite a chirpy self-improvement market peppering us with endless tips and tricks on how to live better, healthier, wealthier lives, we’re struggling to put these techniques into action. One in three Americans, for example, is obese15 or morbidly obese, even though we have access to better nutrition at lower cost than at any time in history. Eight out of ten of us are disengaged or actively disengaged at work, despite the HR circus of incentive plans, team-building off-sites, and casual Fridays. 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. And 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.
But just as the selflessness of an altered state can quiet our inner critic, and the timelessness lets us pause our hectic lives, a sense of effortlessness can propel us past the limits of our normal motivation.
And we’re beginning to understand where this added drive comes from. In flow, as in most of the states18 we’re examining, six powerful neurotransmitters—norepinephrine, dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, anandamide, and oxytocin—come online in varying sequences and concentrations. They are all pleasure chemicals. In fact, they’re the six most pleasurable chemicals the brain can produce and these states are one of the only times we get access to many of them at once. That’s the biological underpinning of effortlessness: “I did it, it felt awesome, I’d like to do it again as soon as possible.”
When psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did his initial research into flow, his subjects frequently called the state “addictive,” and admitted to going to exceptional lengths to get another fix. “The [experience] lifts the course of life to another level,”19 he writes in his book Flow. “Alienation gives way to involvement, enjoyment replaces boredom, helplessness turns into a feeling of control. . . . When experience is intrinsically rewarding life is justified.”
So, unlike the slog of our to-do lists, once an experience starts producing these neurochemicals, we don’t need a calendar reminder or an accountability coach to make sure we keep doing it. The intrinsically rewarding nature of the experience compels us. “So many people find this so great and high20 an experience,” wrote psychologist Abraham Maslow in his book Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences, “that it justifies not only itself, but living itself.”
This explains why Silva “couldn’t live without access to these states” and left a great job at Current TV for the uncertain prospect of making more videos. It’s why action and adventure athletes routinely risk life and limb for their sports and why spiritual ascetics willingly trade creature comforts for a chance to glimpse God. “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 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. When John Hagel,22 the cofounder of Deloitte consulting’s Center for the Edge, made a global study of the world’s most innovative, high-performing business teams—meaning the most motivated teams on the planet—he too found that “the individuals and organizations who went the farthest the fastest were always the ones tapping into passion and finding flow.”
This ability to unlock motivation has widespread implications. Across the board, from education to health care to business, motivational gaps cost us trillions of dollars a year. We know better; we just can’t seem to do better. But we can do better. Effortlessness upends the “suffer now, redemption later” of the Protestant work ethic and replaces it with a far more powerful and enjoyable drive.
Richness
The final characteristic of ecstasis is “richness,” a reference to the vivid, detailed, and revealing nature of non-ordinary states. 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 non-ordinary states, the information we receive can be so novel and intense that it feels like it’s coming from a source outside ourselves. But, by breaking down what’s going on in the brain, we start to see that what feels supernatural might just be super-natural: beyond our normal experience, for sure, but not beyond our actual capabilities.
Often, an ecstatic experience25 begins when the brain releases norepinephrine and dopamine into our system. These neurochemicals raise heart rates,26 tighten focus, and help us sit up and pay attention. We notice more of what’s going on around us, so information normally tuned out or ignored becomes more readily available. And besides simply increasing focus, these chemicals amp up the brain’s pattern recognition abilities,27 helping us find new links between all this incoming information.
As these changes are taking place, our brainwaves slow from agitated beta to calmer alpha,28 shifting us into daydreaming mode: relaxed, alert, and able to flit from idea to idea without as much internal resistance. Then parts of the prefrontal cortex begin shutting down.29 We experience the selflessness, timelessness, and effortlessness of transient hypofrontality. This quiets the “already know that, move along” voice of our inner critic and dampens the distractions of the past and future. All these changes knock out filters we normally apply to incoming data, giving us access to a fresh perspectives and more potential combinations
of ideas.
As we move even deeper into ecstasis, the brain can release endorphins and anandamide.30 They both decrease pain, removing the diversion of physical distress from the equation, letting us pay even more attention to what’s going on. Anandamide also plays another important role here,31 boosting “lateral thinking,” which is our ability to make far-flung connections between disparate ideas. Post-its, Slinkys, Silly Putty, Super Glue, and a host of other breakthroughs all came when an inventor made a sideways leap, applying an overlooked tool in a novel way. In part, that’s anandamide at work.
And, if we go really deep, our brainwaves shift once again, pushing us toward quasi-hypnotic theta, a wave we normally produce only during REM sleep that enhances both relaxation and intuition. To wrap it all up, we can experience an afterglow of serotonin and oxytocin,32 prompting feelings of peace, well-being, trust, and sociability, as we start to integrate the information that has just been revealed.
And revealed is the right word. 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. And all umwelts are not the same. Dogs hear whistles we cannot, sharks detect electromagnetic pulses, bees see ultraviolet light—while we remain oblivious. It’s the same physical world, same bits and bytes, just different perception and processing. But the cascade of neurobiological change that occurs in a non-ordinary state lets us perceive and process more of what’s going on around us and with greater accuracy. In these states, we get upstream of our umwelt. We get access to increased data, heightened perception, and amplified connection. And this lets us see ecstasis for what it actually is: an information technology. Big Data for our minds.
Wicked Solutions to Wicked Problems
Now that we’ve mapped out the biology and phenomenology beneath STER, we’re going to turn our attention to a different couple of questions: While these states may make us feel better, can they help us think better? Do these short-term peaks enable us to solve real-world problems?
In 2013 we were invited to participate in the Red Bull Hacking Creativity project,35 a joint effort involving scientists at the MIT Media Lab, a group of TED Fellows, and the namesake energy drink company. Conceived by Dr. Andy Walshe, Red Bull’s director of high performance (and a member of Flow Genome Project’s advisory board), the project was the largest meta-analysis of creativity research ever conducted, reviewing more than thirty thousand research papers and interviewing hundreds of other subject-matter experts, from break dancers and circus performers to poets and rock stars. “It was an impossible goal,” Walshe explained, “but I figured if we could crack something as hard to pin down as creativity, we could figure out almost anything after that.”
As of late 2016, with the initial phases of the research completed, 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.
Conventional logic works really well for solving discrete problems with definite answers. But the “wicked problems” of today36 require more creative responses. These challenges defy singular stable solutions: issues as serious as war or poverty, or as banal as traffic and trends. Throw money, people, or time at any of these and you may fix a symptom, but you create additional problems: financial aid to the developing world, for example, often breeds corruption in addition to its intended relief; adding more lanes to the highway encourages more drivers and more gridlock; fighting wars to make the world safer can make it more dangerous than ever.
Solving wicked problems requires more than a direct assault on obvious symptoms. Roger Martin of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management conducted a lengthy study of exceptional leaders stretching from Procter & Gamble’s then-CEO A. G. Lafley to choreographer Martha Graham and discovered that their ability to find solutions required holding conflicting perspectives and using that friction to synthesize a new idea. “The ability to face constructively the tension37 of opposing ideas,” Martin writes in his book The Opposable Mind, “. . . is the only way to address this kind of complexity.”
But developing Martin’s “opposable mind” isn’t easy. You have to give up exclusively identifying with your own, singular point of view. If you want to train this kind of creativity and problem solving, what the research shows is that the either/or logic of normal consciousness is simply the wrong tool for the job.
Scientists have discovered a better tool. The amplified information processing and perspective that non-ordinary states provide can help solve these types of complex problems, and they can often do so faster than more conventional approaches. Take meditation. Research done on Tibetan Buddhists38 in the 1990s showed that longtime contemplative practice can produce brainwaves in the gamma range. Gamma waves are unusual. They arise primarily during “binding,”39 when novel ideas come together for the first time and carve new neural pathways. We experience binding as “Ah-Ha insight,” that eureka moment, the telltale signature of sudden inspiration. This meant that meditation could amplify complex problem solving, but, since the monks needed to put in more than 34,000 hours (roughly thirty years) to develop this skill, it was a finding with limited application.
So researchers began to consider the impact of short-term meditation on mental performance. Was it possible, they wondered, to cut some monastic corners and still get similar results? Turns out, you can cut quite a few corners. Initial studies showed eight weeks of meditation40 training measurably sharpened focus and cognition. Later ones whittled that down to five weeks.
Then, in 2009, psychologists at the University of North Carolina found that even four days of meditation produced significant improvement in attention, memory, vigilance, creativity, and cognitive flexibility. “Simply stated,” lead researcher Fadel Zeidan explained41 to Science Daily, “the profound improvements we found after just four days of meditation training are really surprising. . . . [They’re] comparable to results that have been documented after far more extensive training.” Rather than pulling a caffeinated all-nighter to force a eureka insight, or devoting decades to becoming a monk, we now know that even a few days’ training in mindfulness can up the odds of a breakthrough considerably.
In the field of flow research, we see the same thing: being “in the zone” significantly boosts creativity. 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. It’s for this reason that, when the global consultancy McKinsey did a ten-year global study of companies, they found that top executives—meaning those most called upon to solve strategically signi
ficant “wicked problems”—reported being up to 500 percent more productive in flow.
Similar results have also been showing up in psychedelic research. 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.”
None of these practical, technical achievements are the kind of result that most people associate with the navel-gazing world of psychedelics. But similar outcomes are happening in Fadiman’s current survey of microdosing among professionals. With more than four hundred responses from people in dozens of fields, the majority, as Fadiman recently explained, report “enhanced pattern recognition [and] can see more of the pieces at once of a problem they are trying to solve.”
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