So, when we next find ourselves thrust into the selflessness of a nonordinary state, ripped free of our waking identity and its comfortable narratives, it won’t be as shocking or disorienting. Ellie’s dispassionate reading of our biometrics gives us more accurate insight than our own self-reporting. She can help us close the gap between what Rizzo calls our “true selves” and “the self [we] want to project to the world.”
Precognition Is Here (But You Knew That Already)
In 1999, Steven Spielberg had a problem: how to translate Phillip K. Dick’s short story “Minority Report” into a box-office hit.15 A cop thriller set in the mid-twenty-first century, “Minority Report” hinges on mutant humans who can see into the future, using their “precognition” to prevent crimes before they happen. Unfortunately for Spielberg, Dick’s book contained few clues as to what this Tomorrowland world actually looked liked. So the director pulled together a collection of the world’s best futurists to help him color in the storyboards in the most believable way.
Jaron Lanier, author and virtual reality pioneer; Shaun Jones, the first director of DARPA’s Unconventional Countermeasures program; and the heads of both ’the Center for Bits and Atoms and the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all convened at Shutters, a Santa Monica, California, beachside hotel, for their secret think tank. While few moviegoers remember the intricacies of Minority Report’s plot, nearly everyone remembers the world they created—mostly because they got so much of the future right. Out of all the ideas Spielberg’s think tank came up with, they correctly anticipated head-up digital displays, gesture command, driverless cars, personalized advertising, voice-automated home appliances, and predictive crime analytics.
At first, the movie was supposed to be set in 2070, but then they dialed it back to 2054. And out of all their educated guesswork, that was their biggest mistake. They were forty years too late. And not just for the cool tech like driverless cars and head-up displays, but for precognition itself.
In 2015, we were invited to Southern California to host an event for Nike’s innovation group. Every year, to help spark new insights in their own design work, this group goes on creative field trips to learn more about the cutting edges of other fields. That year, Nike wanted to learn about precognition and group flow and how harnessing the former could get their teams more of the latter. So we designed a think tank of our own. In conjunction with colleagues from Advanced Brain Monitoring, as well as some DARPA researchers and MIT Media Lab hackers, we set out to give Nike a glimpse of a future that was already here, but not yet widely distributed.
If you think back to the embodied cognition work of Amy Cuddy, AI Ellie, and others, their big insight was that our bodies, facial expressions, posture, and voice all convey more information than we would ever suspect. And, if we change any of those things, we can substantially shift how we feel and what we think in the present moment. That’s pretty big news. But what we explored with Nike went even further than that, beyond “real-time” transformation and into “future-time” prediction—precognition itself.
Chris Berka, the founder of Advanced Brain Monitoring,16 kicked off the day, briefing the group on a few of her team’s research projects, starting with one they’d recently completed with the U.S. Navy. The project involved submariners, often considered the roughest job in the military. Getting locked into a tin can for six months at a time, never seeing sunlight, and carrying warheads that could start World War III requires a special kind of sailor. It also requires tightly coordinated teamwork and a lot of group flow. The trouble was, it had been next to impossible for the Navy to predict who could weather those conditions and still be able to drop into the zone, and who might end up stabbing someone with a fork at dinner.
So that was the puzzle Berka’s team set out to solve. First, the Navy built a full-scale dryland replica of a nuclear-class submarine. Next, Advanced Brain Monitoring took teams of submariners, hooked them up to EEG machines to track brainwaves and heart rate variability (HRV) monitors to measure the quality of their cardiac rhythms, and then put them through a sixteen-week training program that simulated all the stresses of actual deployment.
Simply by examining the biometric profile of each sailor, Berka and her team could reliably track and identify which sailors were going to excel at collaborative problem solving. With nothing more than these data printouts, they could tell the difference between a novice team still fumbling around, a sophomore team just starting to gel, and a high-performing team of experts. By the end of the full sixteen-week program, they could predict—months in advance of actual deployment—which teams were going to be able to “flip the switch” and drop into group flow together, and which ones ran the risk of flipping out a thousand feet underwater. By measuring biometrics in the present, they were literally able to see into the murky depths of the future.
And the armed forces aren’t the only ones interested in finding better ways to predict what’s around the bend. In a related study run in Barcelona,17 Spain, researchers at the ESADE Business School (twice ranked the top business school in the world by the Wall Street Journal) wanted to know if they could identify “emergent leadership” long before their students graduated. So Berka and her team took thirty-five MBA students, hooked them up to EEG and HRV monitors, and gave them a case study to solve.
Once again, by examining the neurophysiological profile of these students, Berka was able to identify “emergent leaders”—those individuals who would have an outsize positive impact on the team and its decision making—in as little as thirty minutes. While there was no correlation between emergent leadership and how much students talked or even what they said, there was a direct relationship between their neurophysiological responses and those of their classmates. Transformational leaders not only regulated their own nervous systems better than most; they also regulated other people’s.
In the same way that multiple clocks on a wall end up synchronizing to the one with the biggest pendulum, emergent leaders can entrain their entire teams and create a powerful group flow experience. In this study at ESADE, this shared experience helped the groups arrive at more creative and ethical solutions (as rated by a panel of faculty and experts). Furthermore, these young leaders’ ability to create group coherence proved to be a reliable indicator of effective decision making later in their careers. Until now, this was a latent, invisible capacity, not predictable, and definitely not trainable.
Now, thanks to advances in neurobiology, we can map and develop these ineffable skills with little more than some basic sensors and algorithms. Our understanding of the science has progressed to the point where we can not only shift how we think and feel in the present, but also make accurate predictions about how we’re going to think and feel in a future that has yet to occur.
The Birth of Neurotheology
Dr. Andrew Newberg doesn’t look like a rebel.18 With his curly brown hair, boyish face, and easy manner, he’s more soccer dad than academic cultural outlaw. Nothing about his demeanor suggests that this was the guy to overturn a hundred years of scientific thinking. But that’s exactly what happened.
Back in the early 1990’s, science and religion weren’t on speaking terms. Serious researchers didn’t study spirituality. Newberg felt differently. A neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, he had a deep interest in the fundamental nature of reality and the differences between the world that we perceive and the world as it really is. And this led him to reconsider mystical experiences—especially the experience known as “unity.”
“Unity,” Newberg explains, “is the feeling of being one with everything. It’s a foundational notion in pretty much every religious tradition. There are thousands of depictions of the experience. And if you read through them, you’ll find that people often describe unity as more ‘fundamentally real’ than anything else they’ve ever experienced. More real than reality. Well, what does that mean? I think it means that in trying to answer this question we need to take
into account both the science and the spirituality, that we can’t just dismiss the latter because it makes us uncomfortable as scientists.”
Newberg’s inquiry coincided with rapid advancements in neural imaging technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET). With these developments, researchers went from trying to understand the structure of the brain to trying to understand its function. Questions like what is the brain doing when we laugh or shop or have an orgasm were suddenly answerable. Newberg thought that if those experiences could be decoded, why not mystical experiences? Why not unity?
At the time, these were controversial questions. “When I got interested in the subject,” continues Newberg, “very few scientists thought mystical experiences were real. Telling a shrink you felt one with everything was a good way to get locked in a padded cell and trying to do research on it was an easy way to get denied tenure.”
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.
It’s an important boundary. People who suffer a stroke or brain damage to this area struggle to sit down on a couch because they don’t know where their leg ends and the sofa begins. It’s also a flexible boundary. When race car drivers feel the road beneath their pedals, or blind people feel the sidewalk through the tips of their cane—or, for that matter, when SEALs merge with their team on a night op—it is partially the result of the right parietal lobe blurring the boundary of self.
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.”
In finding biology beneath spirituality, Newberg helped bridge the gap between science and religion. For the first time, mystical experiences were understood not as a symptom of mental illness or divine intervention, but rather as the by-product of normal brain function. Almost overnight, an area once off-limits to researchers opened for exploration. It was the birth of the field known as neurotheology—the application of the tools of modern brain science to the study of religious experience.
And unity is only the first in a long series of those experiences that researchers have now decoded. “It’s amazing how far neurotheology has come,” explains Newberg. “Different types of meditation, chanting, singing, flow, prayer, mediumship, speaking in tongues, hypnosis, trances, possession, out-of-body-experiences, near-death experiences, and sensed presences—they’ve all been examined using high-powered imaging.”
A good way to get a sense of neurotheology’s rapid progress is to examine the work of Dr. Shahar Arzy, director of the neuropsychiatry lab at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and one of the researchers following in Newberg’s footsteps. While Newberg was intrigued by one of the more widely reported mystical experiences (unity), Arzy, in 2011, became interested in one of the rarest: the doppelganger, or seeing a vision of one’s double.19
Back in the thirteenth century, the Jewish mystic Abraham Abulafia,20 the founding father of Ecstatic Kabbalah, developed a meditation system supposedly able to produce this experience. Combining an elaborate series of instructions, this method not only created a doppelganger, but, Abulafia claimed, allowed you to ask it questions and seek guidance.
Building off Newberg’s work on the parietal lobe, Arzy theorized that a region right next door—the temporal-parietal junction—might be responsible for this doppelganger effect. By integrating data about vision, touch, balance, and time, this part of the brain answers the question, Where am I right now? Abulafia’s method, Arzy suspected, was specifically designed to scramble this function.
The Kabbalist’s formula combines breathing, visualization and prayer and with a series of head movements: when you pronounce the first letter of God’s name, slowly tilt your face to the sky; when you pronounce the second letter, thrust your neck backward and head forward like a woodpecker. “The temporal-parietal junction sits right atop the region that processes motion,” explains Arzy. “It’s possible these head movements trick this region into sending out body position error messages. This could compound the [state-changing] effects of the visualization and meditation and produce a doppelganger.”
Arzy confirmed his hunch when he was able to use fMRI to examine an epileptic girl who had been seeing visions of her double. The scan revealed damage to her temporal-parietal junction, providing a neurological explanation for a formerly mystical experience. He then found a way to precipitate this phenomenon in healthy people.21 By using virtual reality to force viewers to toggle perspective back and forth between two versions of themselves, he created a high-tech update to Abulafia’s meditation. And it worked. Almost instantaneously, study subjects could no longer tell their real selves from their simulated doppelgangers—no belief or practice required.
In the fifteen years since Newberg founded the field of neurotheology, we’ve gone from initial investigations of these effects to being able to reproduce them at will. Both developments provide a clearer understanding of the mechanics of ecstasis—essentially a Clif Notes version of esoteric techniques that took thousands of years to evolve. Consider that most religions have lengthy recipes for encountering the divine. Hundreds of ingredients: what to eat, what to wear, whom to marry, how to act, what to believe, and, of course, what kind of spiritual practices to perform. But out of that entire list, there’s only a fraction of “active ingredients” that reliably impact brain function and alter consciousness.
Neurotheology lets us validate which ingredients actually make a difference. “In unexpected ways,” writes David Brooks in the New York Times, “science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. . . . We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.”
Possibly very big cultural effects. Because this work is nondenominational, it speaks to a wider swath of people than established orthodoxies ever could. Certainly, atheists have used the fact that there’s neuronal function beneath mystical experience to claim that spirituality is merely a trick of the brain. But neurotheology takes a faith-neutral position. All this work proves is that these experiences are biologically mediated. If you’re a believer, it offers a deeper understanding of divine methods. If you’re a nonbeliever, it provides another consciousness-altering tool upon which to draw. Either way, these advances do more than just provide an academic explanation for the ecstatic—they provide a user manual on how to get there.
OS to UI
Abraham Maslow once famously said,22 “When all you’ve got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” What he meant was, when it comes to problem-solving, we tend to get locked into using familiar tools in expected ways. The technical term for this is the Law of the Instrument. Give someone a hammer and, indeed, they’l
l look for nails to pound. But present them with a problem where they need to repurpose that same hammer as a doorstop, or a pendulum weight, or a tomahawk, and you’ll typically get blank stares.
We may be facing a similar situation when it comes to our minds. At least as far back as the French Enlightenment and Descartes’s cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore, I am), we’ve relied on our rational selves—what psychologists call our “egos”—to run the whole show. It’s a Maslow’s hammer kind of reaction. Every issue we encounter, we try to solve by thinking.
And we know it’s not working. Even a quick glance at today’s dire mental health statistics—the one in four Americans now on psychiatric medicines;23 the escalating rate of suicide24 for everyone from ages ten to seventy-eight—shows how critically overtaxed our mental processing is these days. We may have come to the end of our psychological tether. It might be time to rethink all that thinking.
With the recent advancements in neurobiology, we now have options: Embodied cognition teaches us that how we move our bodies affects our brains and minds. AI therapy proves that our subconscious expressions can reflect our inner state more accurately than we do. Precognition demonstrates that we can anticipate how we’re going to feel and think in the future by tracking (and even altering) our biometrics in the present. Neurotheology integrates all of these findings and lets us reverse-engineer a whole host of nonordinary states, just by working backward from our neurophysiology.
Rather than treating our psychology like the unquestioned operating system (or OS) of our entire lives, we can repurpose it to function more like a user interface (or UI)—that easy-to-use dashboard that sits atop all the other, more complex programs. By treating the mind like a dashboard, by treating different states of consciousness like apps to be judiciously deployed, we can bypass a lot of psychological storytelling and get results faster and, often, with less frustration.
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