In the same way that it takes a far less developed society to detonate a nuclear bomb than to invent one, the power of ecstasis constantly tempts those who would have no idea how to replicate it on their own. But once they see it in action, once they can map the fundamental logic, it doesn’t take much to turn it to ends that would mortify its original creators.
Soma, Delicious Soma!
If the prospect of the military-industrial complex hijacking ecstasis to pursue its own agenda is sobering, an equally likely outcome is that we end up seduced by our own desires. In fact, control not through coercion—as totalitarian states have done—but through persuasion is an even more likely prospect.
In 2007, a collection of the world’s biggest brands33—Apple, Coca-Cola, American Express, Nike, Samsung, Sony, and Ford—put up $7 million to fund a study into the neuroscience of buying behavior. They wanted to know if there were more effective ways to sell their products and joined forces to underwrite the largest neuromarketing study ever conducted—an attempt to replace misleading focus groups with straight-ahead brain scans.
Marketing researcher and consultant Martin Lindstrom teamed up with British neuroscientist Gemma Calvert for the project. Over the course of three years, they used both fMRI and EEG to scan the brains of more than two thousand people as they made a variety of buying decisions. The researchers discovered that product placement34 in TV shows and movies rarely works, that warning labels of cigarettes actually prime the urge to smoke more, and that—most surprisingly—shopping and spirituality seem to rely on similar neuronal circuitry.
When deeply religious subjects view sacred iconography or reflect on their notion of God, brain scans reveal hyperactivity in the caudate nucleus, a part of the pleasure system that correlates with feelings of joy, love, and serenity. But Lindstrom and Calvert found that this same brain region lights up when subjects view images associated with strong brands like Ferrari or Apple. “Bottom line,” Calvert reported, “there was no discernible way to tell the difference between the ways subjects’ brains reacted to powerful brands35 and the way they reacted to religious icons and figures. . . . Clearly, our emotional engagement with powerful brands. . . . shares strong parallels with our feelings about religion.”
Lindstrom’s high-profile advocacy of the neuromarketing revolution put him on Time’s list of the “100 Most Influential People.” But it triggered a backlash. Critics rightly pointed out that just because spiritual symbols and corporate logos activate similar brain regions, doesn’t make shopping a religious experience. While Lindstrom may have exaggerated the capabilities of neuromarketing in 2007 (he is, after all, a marketer), by the next decade the idea of tweaking the knobs and levers of the brain for purely commercial ends had become much more of a reality.
In 2013, for example, we were asked to keynote the annual meeting of the Advertising Research Foundation. A global consortium of just about every major brand you can think of— from Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, and Procter & Gamble to creative agencies like J. Walter Thompson, Ogilvy & Mather, and Omnicom, to tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter—the foundation wanted to learn about the use of flow in advertising. Could this state of consciousness play a role in prompting buying behavior? Could the mechanics of ecstasis be used to drive market share?
To understand this possibility, it’s helpful to understand a few of the developments that have led to today’s marketplace. At the tail end of the twentieth century, we started moving from the selling of ideas,36 the so-called information economy, toward the selling of feelings, or what author Alvin Toffler called the “experience economy.” This is why retail shops started to look like theme parks. Why, instead of stocking ammo on their shelves like Wal-Mart, the outdoor retailer Cabela’s turns their stores into a hunter’s paradise of big-game mounts, faux mountainsides, and giant aquariums. It’s how Starbuck’s can charge four dollars for a fifty-cent cup37 of coffee: because they’re providing that cozy “third place” between work and home.
But we were at the Advertising Research Foundation38 to discuss the next step: the move from an experience economy to what author Joe Pine calls the “transformation economy.” In this marketplace, what we’re being sold is who we might become—or as, Pine explains: “In the transformation economy, the customer IS the product!”
On the surface, the idea that we would favor products that could help us become who we want to be doesn’t sound bad. Take the fitness industry. In the experience economy, one of the undisputed leaders is Equinox Gyms, which blends state-of-the art equipment, boutique lobbies, and eucalyptus steam baths to create a luxury workout. You may or may not get as lean as those models39 in the black-and-white photo spread, but you’ll certainly feel like a million bucks while you’re there.
In the transformational economy, CrossFit charges almost as much but offers none of those perks. Instead, what you get is the promise that after three months of sweating in their stripped-down boxes (as CrossFitters call their workout spaces), you’ll become a radically different person. You’ll look different, for certain, but because of their emphasis on embracing challenge and pushing boundaries, you’ll stand a chance of acting and thinking differently as well. That’s a positive “transformation” that many are willing to suffer and pay a premium for.40
Yet, it doesn’t take much to bend this desire for personal change in more commercial directions. Consider a recent Jeep campaign,41 where they built mud bogs at county fairs. With thumping music and flashing lights amplifying the joyride, Jeep let fairgoers hop into one of their stationary rigs, floor the motors, spin the tires, and send dirt flying. The novelty of the experience; the rapid shift in sensations; the lights, music, and cheering crowd, was all more than enough to trigger the brain’s pleasure machinery and get red-blooded twenty-somethings fixating over no-money-down leasing options for weeks to come.
That Jeep campaign worked so well because it effectively created a state of peak arousal for its participants and then sold them on an imagined transformation of their lives (starting with the purchase of a 4x4). Under those amped-up conditions, salience—that is, the attention paid to incoming stimuli—increases. But, with the prefrontal cortex down-regulated, most impulse control mechanisms go offline too. For people who aren’t used to this combination, the results can be expensive.
The video game industry may have gone further down this path than anyone. “Games are a multi-billion dollar industry that employ the best neuroscientists42 and behavior psychologists to make them as addicting as possible,” Nicholas Kardaras, one of the country’s top addiction specialists, recently explained to Vice. “The developers strap beta-testing teens with galvanic skin responses, EKG, and blood pressure gauges. If the game doesn’t spike their blood pressure to 180 over 140, they go back and tweak the game to make it have more of an adrenaline-rush effect. . . . Video games raise dopamine to the same degree that sex does, and almost as much as cocaine does. So this combo of adrenaline and dopamine are a potent one-two punch with regards to addiction.”
Armed with knowledge of our deepest longings, and an understanding of exactly how to prime them, large corporations are at a distinct advantage in the influence game. In the same way that Google tailors searches based on our past histories and targeted ads follow us around the internet until we buy, we are entering an era where our cravings for transcendence can be used to co-opt our decision making.
Once you understand what Lindstrom calls “buyology,” you can imprint unsuspecting consumers with all the pleasure-producing neurochemistry you can coax out of them. And as with the intelligence community’s efforts, ecstasis at 100 percent is transformational, but ecstasis at 80 percent is, well, pretty much whatever you want it to be.
With the advancement of the four forces, finding ways to shape decisions we’re not even aware we’re making has become increasingly straightforward. Less than a year after our presentation to the Advertising Research Foundation, DARPA ran an experiment demonstrating just how simple this really
was.
In their study, a trained storyteller told an audience43 wired to EEG sensors and heart rate monitors a heart-wrenching tale of childhood bullying. Then she asked for donations to an organization working to end this behavior. Simply by reviewing the biometrics, DARPA scientists were able to predict with 70 percent accuracy who was most deeply moved by the story and who would choose to give money to the cause. Physiological data alone was enough to predict future spending.
They also discovered how to prompt that impulse. For the pitch to be most effective—that is, to earn the most money—it had to be highly engaging and display significant contrast between positive and negative story elements. Since the speaker was wearing a discreet earpiece while onstage, the researchers could use biofeedback to provide instant feedback, telling her to change the story on the fly, increasing tension, deepening empathy, and constantly priming the audience to alter their behavior.
While this study focused on a relatively benign example of persuasion, the very fact that DARPA was the one funding it should give us pause. Imagine newscasters or politicians wielding similar technology, able to pluck heartstrings, stoke outrage, inspire hope, and even trigger communitas, just by reading and tuning our neurobiology. If “focus-group politics” leaves us with a bad taste, how will “biofeedback politics” go down?
Kevin Kelly, futurist and the cofounder of Wired magazine, has a few ideas. In a 2016 article on virtual reality darlings of the moment, Oculus and Magic Leap, Kelly examines VR’s potential as a technology of surveillance and control. “It’s very easy to imagine a company that succeeds in dominating the VR universe44 quickly stockpiling intimate data on not just what you and three billion other people ‘favorite’ but . . . a thousand other details. To do that in real life would be expensive and intrusive. To do that in VR will be invisible and cheap.”
Soon VR systems are going to track everything from eye gaze to vocal tone to—as DARPA-style biometrics get further integrated—neurochemistry, hormones, brainwaves, and cardiac coherence. “This comprehensive tracking of your behavior inside these worlds,”45 continues Kelly, “could be used to sell you things, to redirect your attention, to compile a history of your interests, to persuade you subliminally, to quantify your actions for self-improvement . . . and so on. If a smartphone is a surveillance device we voluntarily carry in our pocket, then VR will be a total surveillance state we voluntarily enter.”
So imagine the kind of immersive visionary experience that Android Jones is creating, one already designed to prompt state change, then add in this kind of biofeedback loop. In exchange for the thrill of getting higher, we’ll willingly give up intimate details about ourselves. It’ll be the new cost of getting our minds blown.
Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World, gave us a look at exactly how this could happen. Set in the year 2054, Huxley described a hypercommercialized world in which people were conditioned with brainwashing, sexual diversions (in the forms of group “orgy-porgies”), and soma—a psychedelic antidepressant offering “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”46
“In [George Orwell’s] 1984 . . . people are controlled by inflicting pain,” wrote NYU professor Neil Postman. “In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting47 pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that our fears will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.” And while the possibility of a nation deliberately invading our minds to shape and control behavior may feel like a relic of Cold War paranoia, the prospect of multinational corporations deliberately tweaking our subconscious desires to sell us more stuff is already here.
Ecstasy Wants to Be Free
So if these two dynamics—commercialization and militarization—are powerful enough to co-opt our deepest drives, what chance do we really have of maintaining our independence? To be sure, it’s asymmetrical warfare. Compared to each of us finding our way one step at a time, governments and corporations have a much larger stake in and budget for controlling ecstasis. Playing by those old rules, we don’t stand a chance.
In The Master Switch, Tim Wu acknowledges as much, describing the struggle over any information technology as an inevitable tug-of-war between nation-states and corporations—and that either of them, left unchecked, creates imbalances. States can overreach. Companies can monopolize. Instead, Wu calls for constraining “all power that derives from the control of information.”48 “If we believe in liberty,” he writes, “it must be freedom from both private and public coercion.”
It’s for this reason that so many of the Prometheans we’ve met in this book have taken a stand for open sourcing. When the government came knocking, John Lilly demanded his ideas remain declassified. When Sasha Shulgin got that first hint of a DEA crackdown, he published all his pharmacological recipes. It’s there in the democratizing effects of Mickey Siegel’s consciousness-hacking meet-ups, it’s why OneTaste has built an Orgasmic Meditation app downloadable anywhere in the world, it’s what fuels the volunteers of the Burning Man diaspora. Open-sourcing ecstasis remains one of the best counterbalances to private and public coercion.
And once we do take those freely shared ideas and use them to unlock nonordinary states for ourselves, what do we find? A self-authenticating experience of selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness. In short, all the ingredients required for a rational mysticism. It cuts out the middlemen, and remains rooted in the certainty of the lived experience. This ability to continually update and advance our own understanding, ahead of anyone else’s attempts to constrain or repurpose them may be the key to breaking the stalemate.
Wu agrees. “The Cycle is powered by disruptive innovations49 that . . . bankrupt the dominant powers, and change the world. Such innovations are exceedingly rare, but they are what make the Cycle go.” An open-source approach to non-ordinary states makes Wu’s “disruptive innovations” a little less rare, and the ability to share and distribute them less susceptible to co-optation. And while the four forces don’t guarantee a bloodless revolution, they do ensure that more people get to decide for themselves.
And that’s the ultimate paradox of these states: all that liberation comes with an unavoidable dose of responsibility. While these states provide access to heightened performance and perspective, the upsides come at a cost. Between our own wayward tendencies and the dangers of militarization and commercialization, it’s easier than ever to fall asleep at the Switch.
Chapter Ten
Hedonic Engineering
So if the responsibility to democratize ecstasis falls squarely on us, we need to remember that we’re no longer protected by the pale. We’re out here on our own. When it comes to exploring consciousness, as Sasha Shulgin used to say,1 “there are no casual experiments.”
That’s the goal of this final chapter, to provide a set of guidelines for training nonordinary states, and share a few key ideas from the research in this domain. We’ll identify known dangers, places where the overzealous typically blow themselves up, and suggest a handful of solutions to the more common problems people encounter. Think of it as a user manual for ecstasis.
“Known Issues” of STER
At the end of the chapter on neurobiology, we introduced a potential upgrade for making sense of ecstasis: repurposing our egos from our operating system (OS) to a user interface (UI). Making this switch can help us unburden our psychology and manage the intensity of a wider range of states without overclocking our processors. But, when it comes to exploring those states, we still have to contend with a whole set of “known issues.” Call them the downsides of STER. Exposure to the selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness of an ecstasis can go wrong, and wrong in predictable ways. For each of these experiences, there is a corresponding danger that, if we know about it ahead of time, we have a chance to avoid.
Selflessness: It’s Not About You
You could call it a messiah complex and you wouldn’t be wrong. Certainly, the messiahs come in droves. But so do Virg
in Marys, King Davids, and at least one Samson—who proved his virility by smashing through a wall of the psychiatric hospital in Old Jerusalem. There are thousands of cases on record, pilgrims who visit the city and get kicked out of reality by the weight of all that holy history. Rather than deciding, “Wow, I just had a mystical experience where I felt like Jesus Christ!” they conclude, “Wow, I am Jesus Christ. Clear the decks, people, I’ve got things to do!”
First identified back in the 1930s,2 “Jerusalem Syndrome” is a temporary fit of madness brought on by a visit to one of the world’s most sacred sites. It’s an overdose of spiritual awe, where historical significance and religious potency team up to overwhelm the unprepared. Occasionally, it afflicts people with preexisting mental conditions; mostly it hits people with devout religious beliefs. Every now and again, it fells average tourists.
Psychologists call this reaction “extreme ego inflation.” Often, the experience of selflessness is so new and compelling that it feels like no one else has ever felt this way before—that it’s evidence of some kind of sacred anointment. When triggered by an awe-inspiring encounter with the Wailing Wall, the result is Jerusalem Syndrome. But the same thing can happen with any ecstatic experience. It’s why Burning Man advises people to not make any life-changing decisions for at least a month following the event,3 and why online psychedelic message boards like Erowid are filled with advice like “Don’t believe everything you think.”
In nonordinary states, dopamine often skyrockets, while activity in the prefrontal cortex plummets. Suddenly we’re finding connections between ideas that we’ve never even thought of before. Some of those connections are legitimate insights; others are flights of fancy. In 2009, Swiss neurologist Peter Brugger discovered that people4 with more dopamine in their systems are more likely to believe in secret conspiracies and alien abductions. They’re suffering from apophenia, “the tendency to be overwhelmed by meaningful coincidence,” and detecting patterns where others see none.
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