2. Titled “You Are a Receiver”: https://vimeo.com/27668695.
3. The Atlantic ran a long profile: Ross Anderson, “A Timothy Leary for the Viral Video Age,” Atlantic, April 12, 2012.
4. Al Gore’s network: For a look at Silva on Current, check out https://vimeo.com/6950613.
5. Certainly, researchers have come up with plenty of other descriptions of altered states, but we chose the four categories of STER for a specific reason: There are a lot of different breakdowns to consider, but in coming up with our analysis, the following were key: Charles Tart, Altered States of Consciousness (New York: Harper, 1990); William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (N.p.: CreateSpace, 2009); Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), pp. 43–93; Bruce Greyson, “The Near-Death Experience Scale,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 171, no. 6 (1983): 369–74; Erich Studerus, Alex Gamma, and Franz Vollenweider, “Psychometric Evaluation of the Altered States of Consciousness,” PLoS One, August 31, 2010; Ronald Pekala, Quantifying Consciousness (Boston: Springer, 1991). Also see Rick Strassman, “Hallucinogenic Drugs in Psychiatric Research and Treatment,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 183, no. 3 (1995): 127–38, Robert Thurman, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Book of Natural Liberation Through Understanding in the Between (New York: Bantam Books, 1993).
6. “[T]he self is not an unmitigated blessing”: Mark Leary, The Curse of the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 21.
7. Scientists call this shutdown: Arne Dietrich, “Functional Neuroanatomy of Altered States of Consciousness,” Conscious Cognition, June 12, 2003, pp. 231–56.
8. Psychologist Bob Kegan: See both Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), and Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
9. According to a 2015 Gallup survey: Frank Newport, “Americans’ Perceived Time Crunch No Worse Than Past,” Gallup.com, December 31, 2015, http://www.gallup.com/poll/187982/americans-perceived-time-crunch-no-worse-past.aspx.
10. “Time poverty”: Maria Konnikova, No Money, No Time,” New York Times, June 13, 2014.
11. Our sense of time isn’t localized: Much of the timelessness information comes from an author interview with David Eagelman, 2012. Also see David Eagleman, Incognito (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011), pp. 51–54.
12. In his book The Time Paradox: Philip Zimbardo, The Time Paradox (New York: Atria, 2009), p. 261.
13. In a recent study published in Psychological Science: Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker, “Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being,” Psychological Science 23, no. 10 (2011): 1130–36.
14. “[M]emory distortions are basic”: Elizabeth Loftus et al., “False Memories in Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory Individuals,” PNAS 110, no. 52 (2013): 20947–52.
15. One in three Americans, for example, is obese: National Institutes of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/Pages/overweight-obesity-statistics.aspx.
16. Big-box health clubs oversell memberships by 400 percent: Confidential author interview with senior vice president of Lifetime Fitness, June 2015.
17. And when a Harvard Medical School study confronted patients: Robert Kegan, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009), p. 1.
18. In flow, as in most of the altered states: Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman (Boston: New Harvest, 2013). Also see www.flowgenomeproject.com/stealingfiretools”.
19. “The [experience] lifts the course of life to another level”: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), p. 69.
20. So many people find this so great and high: Abraham Maslow, Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 62.
21. “In a culture supposedly ruled by the pursuit”: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), p. 197.
22. When John Hagel: Author interview with John Hagel, 2014.
23. In his first video, “You Are a Receiver”: https://vimeo.com/27668695.
24. William James experienced this during his Harvard experiments: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Create Space, 2009), p. 374.
25. Often, an ecstatic experience: This overview is mainly intended to track what happens in the brain as we enter a flow state. In other instances of ecstasis, like meditation, you can get a decrease in cortico-adrenal response, a boost in DHEA and GABA and other neurochemicals in a different sequence than we are describing here. That said, as the below notes make clear, there is considerable overlap with what happens in flow as in meditation and mystical states and psychedelic states. For a solid layperson’s overview of how flow changes the brain, see Herbert Benson and William Proctor, The Breakout Principle (New York: Scribner, 2003), pp. 46–58. For a little more technical approach, see Dieter Vaitl et al., “Psychobiology of Altered States of Consciousness,” Psychological Bulletin 131, no. 1 (2005): 98–127, and M. Bujatti, “Serotonin, Noradrenaline, Dopamine Metabolites in Transcendental Meditation-Technique,” Journal of Neural Transmission 39, no 3 (September 1976): 257–67. It should also be emphasized this is a broad overview, with lots of questions remaining to be solved as measurement tools improve and researchers start to conduct comparative studies between different ecstatic techniques.
26. These neurochemicals raise heart rates:” Raja Parasuraman, The Attentive Brain (Cambridge, MA: A Bradford Book/MIT Press, 2000), pp. 34–44. A good general-purpose overview of both norepinephrine and dopamine can be found in Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (New York: Henry Holt, 2004). For a great discussion of dopamine’s role in flow, see Gregory Burns, Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), pp. 146–74.
27. These chemicals amp up the brain’s pattern recognition abilities: P. Krummenacher, C. Mohr, H. Haker, and P. Brugger, “Dopamine, Paranormal Belief, and the Detection of Meaningful Stimuli,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22, no. 8 (2010): 1670–81; Georg Winterer and Donald Weinberger, “Genes, Dopamine, and Cortical Signal-to-Noise Ration in Schizophrenia,” Trends in Neuroscience 27, no. 11 (November 2004); and S. Kroener, L. J. Chandler, P. Phillips, and Jeremy Seamans, “Dopamine Modulates Persistent Synaptic Activity and Enhances the Signal to Noise Ratio in the Prefrontal Cortex,” PLoS One 4, no. 8 (August): e6507. Also see Michael Sherman’s great talk on how dopamine/pattern recognition lead to strange beliefs: http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_on_believing_strange_things?language=en.
28. As these changes . . . are taking place: The literature surrounding altered states of consciousness and brainwaves is considerable. For a general review of brainwave function, see Ned Harrrmann, “What Is The Function of Various Brainwaves,” ScientificAmerican.com, December 22, 1997, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-function-of-t-1997-12-22/.
For a good overview of brainwave activity during flow, see Sally Adee, “Zapping the Brain to Get into Flow,” Washington Post, February 13, 2012. Also Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman (Boston: New Harvest, 2013), pp. 32–41. Lastly, a paper that isn’t yet peer-reviewed but is interesting in its findings: Jan Van Looy et al., “Being in the Zone: Using Behavioral and EEG Recording for the Indirect Assessment of Flow,” available at https://peerj.com/preprints/2482.pdf. For psychedelics: E. Hoffmann, J. M. Keppel Hesselink, and Yatra-W.M. da Silveria Barbosa, “Effects of a Psychedelics, Tropical Tea, Ayahuasca, on the EEG Activity of the Human Brain during a Shamanic Ritual,” MAPS Magazine, Spring 2001. For contemplative and spiritual practices: Yuji Wada et al., “Changes in EEG and Autonomic Nervous Activity During Meditation and Their Association with Personality Traits,” International Journal of Psychophysiology 55, no. 2 (February 2005): 199–207. Also, J. Polichj and B. R. Cahn, “Medit
ation States and Traits,” Psychological Bulletin 132, no. 2 (2006): 180–211.
29. Then parts of the prefrontal cortex begin shutting down: For psychedelics: R. L. Carhart-Harris et al., “Neural Correlates of the Psychedelic State as Determined by fMRI Studies with Psilocybin,” PNAS, 2012, doi/10.1073/pnas.1119598109. For flow: Arne Dietrich, “Functional Neuroanatomy of Altered States of Consciousness,” Conscious Cognition, June 12, 2003, pp. 231–56. For meditation: Judson Brewer et al., “Meditation Experience Is Associated with Difference in Default Mode Network Activity and Connectivity,” PNAS 108, no. 50 (2011): 20254–59. Judson Brewer also gave a good TEDx talk on his work, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE1j5Om7g0U. For a thorough review of the neurobiology of out-of-body experiences and other “mystical” phenomena, see Andra Smith and Claude Messier, “Voluntary Out-of-Body Experience: An fMRI Study, Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, February 10, 2014. And for a great book on the early research into the neuroanatomical changes produced by spiritual experiences: Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquilli, Why God Won’t Go Away (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002).
30. . . . brain releases endorphins and anandamide: The literature on neurochemistry and altered states is considerable, but for a good overview see both J. Allan Hobson, The Dream Drugstore (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), and Dean Hamer, The God Gene (New York: Anchor, 2005). For endorphins, see James Henry, “Possible Involvement of Endorphins in Altered States of Consciousness,” Ethos 10 (1982): 394–408; Henning Boecker et al., “The Runner’s High: Opiodergic Mechanisms in the Human Brain,” Cerebral Cortex 18, no. 11 (2008): 2523–31; A. Dietrich and W. F. McDaniel, “Endocannabinoids and Exercise,” British Journal of Sports Medicine 38 (2004): 536–44. Also see Etzel Cardena and Michael Winkelman, Altering Consciousness (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), p. 171. A good overview of different psychedelic plants and their impact on neurochemistry and spiritual experience can be found in Elaine Perry and Valerie Laws’s article, “Plant Gods and Shamanic Journeys,” in New Horizons in the Neuroscience of Consciousness (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2010), pp. 309–24. Lastly, Boecker, “Brain Imaging Explores the Myth of Runner’s High.”
31. Anandamide also plays another important role here: S. Hao, Y. Avraham, R. Mechoulam, and E. Barry, “Low Dose Anandamide Affects Food Intake, Cognitive Function, Neurotransmitter and Corticosterone Levels in Diet-Restricted Mice,” European Journal of Pharmacology 392, no. 3 (March 31, 2000): 147–56.
32. . . . an afterglow of serotonin and oxytocin: Lars Farde et al., “The Serotonin System and Spiritual Experiences,” American Journal of Psychiatry 160 (2003): 1965–69; Umit Sayin, “Altered States of Consciousness Occurring During Expanded Sexual Response in the Human Female,” NeuroQuantology 9, no. 4 (2011); N. Goodman, “The Serotonergic System and Mysticism,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 34, no. 3 (2002): 263–72. Also, John Ratey and Eric Hagerman, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain (New York: Little, Brown, 2008).
33. Conscious processing can handle only about 120: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), pp. 28–30. Also, for one of the best books on this subject, see Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (New York: Penguin, 1990).
34. Umwelt is the technical term: Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman gives a great, detailed explanation of the neuroscience of our umwelt in “Can We Create New Senses,” his 2015 TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans?language=en.
35. Red Bull Hacking Creativity Project: The project has a great website where many of their findings are described: http://hackingcreativity.com.
36. “wicked problems” of today: Jon Kolko, “Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, Stanford Social Innovation Review, March 2012. Also, John Camillus, “Strategy as a Wicked Problem,” Harvard Business Review, May 2008.
37. The ability to face constructively the tension: Roger Martin, The Opposable Mind: Winning Through Integrative Thinking (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2009), p. 15.
38. Research done on Tibetan Buddhists: Kathy Gilsinan, “The Buddhist and the Neuroscientist,” Atlantic, July 4, 2015.
39. They arise primarily during binding: John Kounios and Mark Beeman, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight,” Annual Review of Psychology 65 (2009): 71–93.
40. Initial studies showed eight weeks of meditation: Fadel Zeidan, Susan Johnson, Bruce Diamond, and Paula Goolkasian, “Mindfulness Meditation Improves Cognition: Evidence of Brief Mental Training,” Consciousness and Cognition (2010); Lorenza S. Colzato, Ayca Szapora, Dominique Lippelt, and Bernhard Hommel, “Prior Meditation Practice Modulates Performance and Strategy Use in Convergent- and Divergent-Thinking Problems,” Mindfulness (2014) doi:10.1007/s12671-014-0352-9.
41. “Simply stated”: “Brief Meditative Exercise Helps Cognition,” Science Daily, April 19. 2010, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100414184220.htm.
42. In a recent University of Sydney study: Richard Chi and Allan Snyder, “Brain Stimulation Enables Solution to Inherently Difficult Problem,” Neuroscience Letters 515 (2012): 121–24.
43. When neuroscientists at DARPA and Advanced Brain Monitoring: ABM CEO Chris Berka gave a great TEDx talk about this research: http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Whats-next-a-window-on-the-brai;TEDxSanDiego. Also, “9-Volt Nirvana,” Radiolab, June 2014, http://www.radiolab.org/story/9-volt-nirvana/; Sally Adee, “Zap Your Brain into the Zone,” New Scientist, February 1, 2012.
44. Several decades ago, James Fadiman: James Fadiman, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2011), p. 133.
45. Author and venture capitalist Tim Ferriss: Author interview with Tim Ferriss, 2016.
46. As Ferriss explained on CNN: “Can LSD Make You a Billionaire,” CNN, January 25, 2015. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz9yZFtRJjk.
47. A 500 percent boost in productivity: Susie Cranston and Scott Keller, “Increasing the ‘Meaning Quotient’ of Work,” McKinsey Quarterly, January 2013.
Chapter Three: Why We Missed It
1. The English Pale: There are lots of potential references, but in this case Wikipedia does a really solid job: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pale.
2. James Valentine is a tall, thin man: Author interviews with James Valentine, 2015 and 2016.
3. Consider Joan of Arc: If you’d like to consider Joan of Arc try Mark Twain, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), and George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan (New York: Penguin, 2001).
4. At her trial for heresy: Regine Pernoud, “Joan of Arc by Herself and Her Witnesses, trans. Edward Hyams (New York: Stein & Day, 1962),” p. 184.
5. The prejudice that whatever matters: Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Intelligence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 5
6. In 2012, a study conducted: American Academy of Pediatrics, May 1, 2014. See EurekaAlert: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-05/aaop-mil042514.php.
7. By 2015, that number had jumped to one in three: Nita Farahany, “Colleges Should Allow Students to Take Smart Drugs,” Washington Post, November 3, 2015. See also, “Monitoring the Future 2013 Survey Results: College and Adults,” National Institute of Drug Abuse, https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/infographics/monitoring-future-2013-survey-results-college-adults.
8. “Are Smart Drugs Cheating?”: Karen Weintraub, “Some Students Don’t See ADHD Drug Use as Cheating,” USA Today, May 3, 2014; Princess Ojiaku, “‘Smart Drugs’ Are Here—Should College Students Be Allowed to Use Them?,” Washington Post, November 3, 2015; “Is Taking Smart Drugs Cheating?,” Newsy, November 17, 2015; Matt Tinoco, “Are You a Cheater If You’re Using Smart Drugs to Get Ahead,” Vice, April 13, 2005.
9. “archaic techniques of ecstasy”: Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Bollingen Series (Princeton, NJ: Pri
nceton University Press, 2004).
10. “Narcotics, he argued”: Ibid., p. 401.
11. “The ultimate wisdom of enlightenment”: Sam Harris, Waking Up (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), p. 124.
12. Walter Pahnke conducted: For a good review of the experiment, see John Horgan, Rational Mysticism (Boston: Mariner Books, 2004).
13. “[Psilocybin] subjects ranked their experiences”: Ibid. p. 27.
14. Researchers have twice gone back to double-check Pahnke’s: Rick Doblin, ”Pahnke’s ‘Good Friday Experiment’: A Long Term Follow-Up and Methodological Critique,” Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 23, no. 1 (1991); Roland Griffiths et al., “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance,” Psychopharmacology 187 (2006), doi:10.1007/s00213-006-0457-5.
15. When author Michael Pollan asked him: Michael Pollan, “The Trip Treatment,” New Yorker, February 9, 2015.
Stealing Fire Page 25
