Mapping Cloud 9: Part 3 - Steven Kotler | Flow Research Collective Radio

And suddenly he stimulates this portion of this woman's brain and she has a full-on vision of herself giving birth to her daughter, which had taken place decades earlier. And she just relives the experience out of nowhere as if it was happening again in real time. Now, nothing like this had ever happened before, right? Scientists knew that electrical stimulation could produce motions, leg twitches, hand claps, shoulder spasms, right? And some tactile stuff. Burning and tingling and numbness. But this wasn't a motor response, it wasn't a sensory response, right? This was a vivid, vivid memory. And Penfield's note to himself was, "This was a strange moment for her to talk of that previous experience." Right? He's very— he's still very clinical. But this was only the beginning. Over the coming years, by stimulating the temporal lobe, he produced all kinds of stuff that was far stranger than vivid recall. Hey there.

If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur, and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2:00. So then somewhere in Sort of Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is an entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up. And I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com.

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Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Rhian Dorris here with Flow Research Collective Radio. And welcome to today's episode, which is from Steven Kotler's book, Mapping Cloud Nine. Now, Mapping Cloud Nine, of all of Steven's books, has, for me personally, the coolest subtitle. And the subtitle really is going to describe the essence of what this episode is focused on. The subtitle is Neuroscience, Flow, and the Upper Possibility Space. Of human experience. And that's what Steven in this book today is going to be talking about. It's a chapter from Mapping Cloud Nine. You're going to hear Steven's voice going deep on the topic Steven knows best and is most passionate about. So, with that, enjoy today's episode. It's a fantastic one and a real treat to get a sample of Mapping Cloud Nine, one of Steven's books, which came out a couple of years ago. So, enjoy. And until next time, all the best.

Welcome to session 3, Mysticism Decoded. Now, what we're gonna do in our third session is we're gonna walk the clock all the way back, right? This is the mystical adventure, and now we want to jump all the way back to William James and pick the story up again with William James and walk it forward, right? As I said, back then there was no separate category for flow. Everything was still mystical experience. And James really did feel that these experiences were fundamental to science. We had to understand them if we were going to understand human consciousness. In fact, one of his most famous quotes is this: no part of the unclassified residuum of human experience has usually been treated with a more contemptuous scientific disregard than the massive phenomenon generally called mystical. Physiology will have nothing to do with them. Orthodox psychology turns its back on them. Medicine sweeps them out, or at most, when in an anecdotal vein, records a few of them as effects of imagination, a phrase of mere dismissal whose meaning in this connection, if it is impossible to make precise, All the while, however, the phenomena are there, lying broadcast over the surface of history. And remember, he is talking about everything— flow states, trance states, meditative states, every kind of ecstatic state. So an alcohol-fueled mystical experience, psychedelic-fueled mystical experience, right? And remember that when James was talking about mystical experiences, he said they were psychologically real, right? They changed people. They had long-term consequences, irregardless because of the fact that the ideas behind the experiences could be totally false. He was really clear, James was, about the grounds to judge religion and spirituality. He said, by their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots, meaning he was a pragmatist. And this also led him to realize that all these mystical experiences had 4 overlapping characteristics. Remember, we sort of laid out Young's characteristics a little bit of these experiences and Maslow's characteristics. Well, James also had a list, and he was really the first Western scientist to try to classify what actually went on in a mystical experience. He said there are 4 characteristics that matter. He said, first of all, they're ineffable. You can't talk about them. They exist beyond language. And if you try to wrap them up in language, you're just going to make yourself look silly. He said they were noetic, meaning they're illuminating, they're revelating, they're insight and truth, and they feel realer than real. He also said that these states are states. They're transient, they're brief, they're states of consciousness, not stages of development, right? And he also said they were passive, but he didn't exactly mean passive. He meant that they— when they happen to us, we feel like we are being steered by powers that are greater than ourselves, that effortless effort that shows up in flow. You're still working really hard, you're really in pain, but it feels like it's moving through you, right? And James, as I said, was a strict Darwinist, right? So even though these ideas won't really come back for another 90 years, he really felt that religion, that mystical experiences, that spiritual experiences all of them had to either serve an evolutionary function or possibly a sexual selection function, right? So either they helped us survive or they helped us get laid. That's what he thought our spirituality might be useful for, right? And whatever the case, he was absolutely certain there was biology underneath these phenomenon and that figuring out that biology didn't diminish the quality of the experience, it actually heightened it. So as I said, Freud comes along, these ideas disappear for almost 100 years, but they show up accidentally in the 1930s. And this is where things get really interesting. So in the 1930s, at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, Canada, there's a scientist named Wilder Penfield. Now, Penfield is going to go on to be one of the most celebrated neurosurgeons of the 20th century, right? That was years away back then. Back then, he was just inventing what is known as the Montreal Procedure, which is what made him famous. The Montreal Procedure was a radical treatment in epilepsy, and it is when science truly crossed the spiritual divide. So what Wilder Penfield was doing was he had sawed open the skulls of epileptics, people who couldn't be treated any other way, and their tremors, shakes were destroying their lives, their seizures were just destroying their lives. And what he was doing was, while the patient was awake, there are no nerves in the brain and the skull, so you can do this, he was using a glass-handled platinum electrode, and he was working his way through the brain. He was applying a tiny little electrical current to the brain. He was asking the patients to describe what they felt, and then he was recording their answer in a notebook. Right, and he would number that spot in the brain and then move a few millimeters deeper and do it again, right? One postage stamp at a time, he became the first person to map the brain. And the cartography was sort of besides the point. What he was trying to do was trigger what is known as an aura. So before an epileptic has a seizure, they experience an aura. Now, this can sometimes be a smell. The smell of burnt toast is actually fairly common. Sometimes they'll see colors. Hear sounds, that sort of thing. And so he was trying to trigger an aura. You know, they'll get zigzag lines of bright lights, right? And once you've located the aura, it's an indicator. I don't know if that's the diseased portion of the brain. And if everything goes as planned, Penfield can then surgically remove it, right? That's the whole point. It's a radical treatment for epilepsy, but he does— he wants to remove as small a portion of the brain as possible. So he's literally trying to like trigger the aura to get there. So back in 1931, right, things do not quite go as planned. He's hunting for faulty tissue and he's working his way through the temporal lobe of a patient, a woman. And temporal lobe is the part of the brain that's responsible for sensory processing and emotional association. And suddenly he stimulates this portion of this woman's brain and she has a full-on vision of herself giving birth to her daughter. Which had taken place decades earlier, and she just relives the experience out of nowhere as if it was happening again in real time. Now, nothing like this had ever happened before, right? Scientists knew that electrical stimulation could produce motions— leg twitches, hand clasp, shoulder spasms, right? And some tactile stuff— burning and tingling and numbness. But this wasn't a motor response. It wasn't a sensory response, right? This was a vivid, vivid memory. And Penfield's note to himself was, "This was a strange moment for her to talk of that previous experience." Right? He's very— he's still very clinical. But this was only the beginning. Over the coming years, by stimulating the temporal lobe, he produced all kinds of stuff that was far stranger than vivid recall. Right? He could produce powerful emotions seemingly at will. The science fiction author Philip K. Dick memorialized this in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which is the book that became became the movie Blade Runner. And in that book, there's something called the Penfield Mood Organ that literally would create moods on demand. But Penfield also started provoking really powerful spiritual feelings and downright mystical phenomenon— auditory and visual hallucinations, déjà vu, jamais vu, out-of-body experiences, cosmic unity, right? Even on occasion, that sense presence, which is sort of like the feeling of like a god or a ghost or an angel being there in the room with you. And the interesting thing is a lot of these experiences would overlap, right? Dreams, memories, and hallucinations and out-of-body, they would all rise together, kind of like one bleeding to the other. So it was really hard to separate them into discrete experiences. Now, you have to understand what an incredibly groundbreaking discovery this was, right? Until Penfield comes along these experiences are like mystics, myth fits, and madmen are the only people who get to have these experiences, right? We call them paranormal, meaning they're outside the bounds of natural phenomenon. But if dreams and memories are showing up in the same part of the brain that produces out-of-body experiences and cosmic unity and divine presences, right? And these phenomena are created by neural mechanism, right? Then they are just as normal as beating hearts and breathing lungs. They are the product of basic physiology. Now, I'm going to pause here to make an important point, which is none of this science, nothing I'm going to talk about, answers the big why question. It just doesn't. Is there a God? Isn't there a God? Who the hell knows? Still no answer to this question in the science. All the science says is if there's something else going on in the universe, it is biologically mediated. We experience spirit through biological mechanisms, which, if you're at all rational and at all interested in a spiritual path, I think should make you feel better about your spiritual path, not less good. A lot of people hear the science stuff and think, oh my God, they're disproving spirituality or mysticism. No, we're not. This is no comment on the validity or the non-validity of the experience. All I'm saying is, hey, there's biology here. That's what I'm talking about. There's biology underneath it. So that takes place back in the 1930s and '40s. In the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s, not a whole lot is taking place actually, like, inside of science proper, right? If you go to places like Esalen, things that are a little more on the cutting edge, you're seeing gestalt therapy and primal scream therapy and all these kinds of people trying to, like, invent ways to take Maslow's ideas about self-actualization and make them real. Right. But nothing is going on really in the science of mystical experience until the 1990s. Now, I want to— we have to talk a little bit about where science was in the '90s, because you have to understand what a huge breakthrough some of this stuff is. So, like, In the 1990s, just to give you a simple example, emotions are not real. Emotions are still not a real topic for science, right? In the '80s, scientists like Richie Davidson, who's at the University of Wisconsin, is fundamental to kind of meditation research. We're going to talk about him later. He is pioneering affective neuroscience, the neuroscience of human emotion. This is not a real topic for serious science, or for that matter, you know, I graduated high school in 1985, and I spend a lot of time these days talking to businessmen about creativity and flow and passion and things like that. If I would have walked into a boardroom in 1985 and started talking about passion or flow or creativity, I would have been laughed out. These were not serious subjects anywhere, definitely not in science, and definitely not in business. And what changes is around 1996, '97, '98, Washington State University neuroscientist named Jaak Ponssepp is doing his work and he publishes a very famous book called Affective Neuroscience. Affective, A-F-F-E-C-T-I-V-E, meaning the neuroscience of emotion, right? And what Ponssepp did is he mapped out the 7 basic primary emotions, rage, fear, lust, play, care, panic, and seeking in rats, in guinea pigs, in chickens, and finally in humans. So suddenly, like Darwin's idea that emotional systems are conserved, suddenly there's proof. And he maps out, almost going neuron by neuron by neuron, these basic systems of the brain. And suddenly, for the very first time, emotions are a real topic. Now, interestingly, towards our topic on the science of spirituality, Pancep does something interesting in his studies. He decides to see if more spiritual emotions like awe are conserved in animals. So one of the easiest ways to detect awe is through the goosebumps. When people listen to music and have the experience of awe, it's often accompanied by goosebumps. So Pancep decides he is going to play thousands and thousands and thousands of records to chickens. And he's going to record what their skin does, right? And he discovers that chickens do in fact experience awe and they do get goosebumps. And the music that actually most produces that experience in chickens happens to be Pink Floyd's The Final Cut. So go figure. But this is where we are in the 1990s. So another thing that is going on at this point, so going all the way back to Jung. Jung is the very first person because of archetypes. All personality testing starts with Jung. So the Big Five, all that stuff that dates back to Jung. So in the '90s is the very first time that one, we get a genetic and a neurobiological layer underneath our personality testing. And this is because of the work of a University of Washington in St. Louis psychologist and neuroscientist named Robert Cloninger. And Robert Cloninger comes up with what is known as the Temperament and Character Inventory in 1994. And what is cool about it is it's the very first psychological profile that takes spiritual feelings into account. He's got a category in there called self-transcendence. So self-transcendence means you believe in things like spirit and God and the possibility of becoming oneness with everything and generally are mystically inclined, etc., etc. And what's interesting is he argues that there are 3 systems underneath it, 3 neurochemical systems: the serotonin system, the noradrenaline system, which is norepinephrine, and the dopaminergic system. So dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine underneath all spiritual feelings in Robert Kloninger's work. And then Dean Hamer, who's an NIH geneticist, comes along and While he's wrong about this, he discovers a gene known as VMAT2 that codes for dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, and he labels it the God gene. Now, this is a big deal. We start the '90s with an absolute hostility for science towards anything spiritual, right? Can't even talk about emotions. Definitely can't talk about consciousness. And yet in one decade, we suddenly go, oh, wow. Spiritual feelings are heritable. There's an evolutionary current to them. They go all the way back. They're real in that way. Robert Kloninger says not only are they real, they're fundamental and they're heritable and they're parts of our personality. You can measure them. And Dean Hamer comes along and finds a gene that codes for them. Now, we now know that there are a ton of other genes that code for norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine. And while VMAT2 is a little important, it's definitely not the God gene. And this was an early warning about the arrogance or the mistakes of trying to put too much credence on one kind of genetic discovery. This is something we seem to be learning over and over and over again. It gives you a good idea of where we are in the '90s. The '90s are also a time where we pick up James' idea that religions, that spirituality must serve an evolutionary purpose, right? And so out of this, we get books like Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, The God Delusion and things along those lines. And there's a couple of really big ideas here that get advanced from James, which is one of the explanations for religion and spirituality is we are meaning-making machines. And what I said that earlier, and what that really means is what neurons do at a really basic level is pattern recognition. They link like with like, right? You do that over time, you get cause and effect. You do that over time, you get meaning-making. Right? And the byproduct of having a brain that is a meaning-making machine faced with a world that doesn't make sense, faced with volcanoes and earthquakes and things happening, right? One of the things the brain always does is it looks for a cause. Where did that come from? If there's no cause, well, maybe it'll make one up, right? We see this all the time. The brain will often confabulate and make stuff up rather than be confused. Brains do this all the time. So one of the thinking is, oh, we made up gods and goddesses and religion and spirituality because we are a meaning-making machine and we don't like uncertainty. And so this makes us feel much more certain, right? This is also at a time where we are starting— one of the big arguments for religion had always been that evolution can't explain incredibly complicated things like the human eye. Well, this This is where we start to figure out that, wait a minute, the eye evolved 17 different ways, and that the human eye turns out to have tons of flaws. So not only is it not a perfect organ, but eyes aren't all that special after all. Evolution has done it 17 different ways, right? So that stuff starts to happen. But we also start to figure out that religion and really spirituality has a lot of social benefits, right? The social support that comes from going to church, going to worship services is really important. And we also discovered that when people think they're being watched, even by an invisible imaginary sky dad, they tend to lie less and behave better, right? So these explanations start to come into gear. And then spinning off the work of Dean Hamer, we figure out that spirituality is heritable. Like 50% of how you believe is passed down. Interestingly, and this is some of my favorite research, and I built a lot of stuff off of this idea. A guy named Peter Brügger at the University of Zurich is a neuroscientist. And so remember I said earlier that when we're in flow, pattern recognition increases, right? Our ability to find— like, Peter Brügger is the guy who figured it out. And what he figured out is that the more dopamine in our system, the more patterns we notice. Now, What does this mean? Well, this means that the more dopamine in our system, the more we're likely to believe in things like conspiracies and gods and demons and spiritual ideas, right? It codes for what naysayers would call magical thinking and what a lot of people just talk about as basic spirituality. And he discovered this in a really simple way, by the way, it was really kind of fun experiment. He took faces, pictures of faces, and sometimes they were real faces like my face, your face, whatever, one face. And sometimes they were scrambled faces. So my nose, your ears, her mouth and put together, made to look like a real face. And then he gave half of his study— and he showed a big study group these images, and the question was, is it real or is it fake? And then he redid it and gave people L-DOPA, which is a Parkinson's drug. It increases the amount of dopamine in the brain. And with more dopamine in the brain, people saw more real faces, quote unquote, even if they weren't real faces. We detected more patterns where there were none. Now, what we now know is that dopamine and norepinephrine tune signal-to-noise ratios, which is a very fancy way of saying when they're in our system, we notice more signal and less noise. We see more patterns. So when pattern recognition gets turned up in flow, right, we notice more patterns and it's creativity. If this goes up even higher, if you're getting more and more dopamine, now you're starting to get into magical thinking, into conspiracy beliefs. And the higher end, you run into schizophrenia. So it's a continuum. And Peter Bruegger is the first person who sort of unlocks this continuum.

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This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entire entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid, and I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com.

So this sort of gives you the idea for where we are in the '90s, right? There's a little bit of spirituality creeping back into the discussion for the first time. I don't think we're out of the 100-year detour yet, but it's starting to creep back into the discussion, and we're starting to get new ideas, and people are talking about it. And one of the coolest bits of research very controversial, is done by a Laurentian University neuroscientist named Michael Persinger. So Persinger picks up where Wilder Penfield left off, right? Penfield's going through the brain, stimulating different parts of the brain with electrical current, and he's producing out-of-body experiences and sense presences and other sort of mystical experiences. Persinger comes along in the '90s and he builds a helmet. It actually starts out— the first version is literally a converted motorcycle helmet that directs weak electromagnetic pulses towards the right temporal lobe, the same part of the brain that when Penfield stimulated was producing all of these so-called mystical experiences. Well, over 1,000— I think it's over 2,000 people have worn the device. And despite the fact that in the experiment you're always alone in the room when he turns it on, 80% of the people who had this experience reported a sense present. The feeling of someone, something, a god, a ghost, in the room with them. So this earns the device its nickname, which is the God Helmet. And we start getting really interesting, you know, sort of theories for how the God Helmet works. And sometimes it doesn't work, right? There's a very famous— Richard Dawkins, the very famous skeptical neuroscientist, tries it, and he gets no effect. And Persinger claims it's just 'cause Dawkins showed up drunk, and Dawkins claims it's 'cause religion and spirituality is bogus, and it goes back and forth. And this is just one of those arguments that scientists like to have with each other. But you have to understand that already we've got commercial versions of these devices available. There's something called the Shakti Helmet that you can buy online. There are DIY hackers who have built this same equipment out of a 9-volt battery and some wires. And by the way, Don't try this at home. You can really screw yourself up if you get it wrong. Persinger talked about developing a version for a video game, developing a version for virtual reality. Right. And you got to think about this, right? Like historically, direct access to God, right? I'm seeing a vision. I'm hearing voices. I feel God in the room. These are the most potent experiences known to man. This is religions. Are built on the backs of these experiences. Millions and millions of people have died as a result of these experiences. And suddenly you can have an experience of God through a helmet that you can just flip a switch, right? What used to be the domain of mystics and misfits and madmen has sort of become like an amusement park ride for the 21st century. And you gotta think of it this way, right? 1 out of 5 Americans, that's 80 million of us, we identify as spiritual but not religious. Right? So we've rejected hand-me-down traditions and we instead want direct experience of the numinous. That's really what spiritual but not religious means. I want to know for myself. Well, ready, player one, right? Because direct experience of the numinous is soon coming your way via video game. So in the 1990s, as all this is going on— and to me, this is the huge breakthrough, this is where everything changes— a really incredibly brave researcher named Dr. Andrew Newberg is at the University of Pennsylvania. Today, he is the director of research at the Jefferson Myrna Center for Integrative Medicine, and he's a physician at Jefferson University Hospital. He's also a neuroscientist. He's board-certified in internal medicine and nuclear medicine. And he's a really great guy and a friend of mine and a personal hero. And he is— in the early '90s, he's at the University of Pennsylvania, and he is really interested in hardcore philosophical questions. What is the nature of reality. And he felt that mystical experiences, going all the way back— remember, we go all the way back to James, and James says mystical experiences share these overlapping qualities, one of which is noetic. These experiences feel realer than real, right? And Andrew Newberg says if he wants to know what is the fundamental nature of reality, he will— he's curious about these experiences that are realer than real. What the hell does that mean? What does that mean? Right? And he really wants to figure it out. And so he decides, alongside a man named Eugene Diakouli, who's a psychologist, that they are going to look at the most potent and common and frequent mystical experience in history, cosmic unity. Right? Cosmic unity, the experience of becoming one with everything, shows up in every mystical tradition on Earth. It shows up in every religion on every continent. And as Dr. Neuber pointed out to me a bunch of years ago, it showed up these places long before there was mass communication of any kind, probably long before there were boats, which means it's probably biological. Either everybody on the planet is having the same mass hallucination, or there's some biology there. So he designs an experiment, and what he does is he gets a bunch of nuns, Franciscan nuns, and a bunch of Tibetan Buddhists. Now, the nuns' version of cosmic unity, of oneness with everything, is unio mystica, right? It is oneness with Jesus's love. To Ben Buddhists, this is absolute unitary being. It's oneness with the universe. And he puts them inside a SPECT scanner. So this is an early— right before fMRI shows up. And what happens in SPECT is you inject a radioactive dye into your system, and that dye freezes the brain at a certain moment. So what he did is he basically had these monks and these nuns meditate until they felt cosmic unity, until they felt one with everything, and then hit a button which injected the dye, and they got a picture of their brain. And what he discovered is really, really interesting. So the right temporal lobe, same part of the brain that Penfield was playing with and Persinger was playing with, and getting all kinds of strange experiences, what he found is essentially transient hypofrontality there. So that portion of the brain shuts down at this spot in the right temporal lobe, very close to the temporal-parietal junction. Now, this is a very specific part of the brain. Neuberg calls it the orientation area, 'cause it helps us orient the body in space. So, What it does is this portion of the brain draws a boundary around your body and says, yourself ends here, the rest of the world begins here. Right? This is what allows us to walk through a crowded room without bumping into people. And people who have a stroke or brain damage to this area, they can't sit down on a couch because they don't know, where does my leg end? Where does the couch begin? Right? And it's important to know, by the way, that the boundary of self, we think it's a fixed, rigid, like, this is where I end and the rest of the world begins. Right? Which sort of makes sense. But that's not actually our experience of it. And you know what I'm talking about. Anybody here who's listening who has kids, well, you've held your child and suddenly you can't tell the difference between mommy and kid.

Why?

It's 'cause the boundary of self extends around the child. This serves an evolutionary function. It helps you protect your children, right? If you sleep with dogs, right? If you have pets and you sleep with dogs, sometimes in the middle of the night, you'll wake up and you'll not be able to tell, is that my leg or my dog, right? It blurs together, right? Same thing happens, by the way, in sports. Tennis players can extend their sense of touch to feel the ball through their racket. Race car drivers talk about feeling the track through their pedals. These are more than metaphors. It's literally because the boundary of self is a flexible boundary. We move it back and forth based on what our needs are. Blind people feel sidewalks through the tips of their cane, right? Well, when this portion of the brain shuts down, becomes becomes— not hypofrontal because that refers to the prefrontal cortex, obviously— but when it becomes hypo, no information moves in or out, right? And if you can no longer tell where does self end and the rest of the world begin, your brain concludes— it has to conclude at this particular moment— you are one with everything. Now, before this experiment, if you would have walked into your shrink's office and I've been on a spiritual path and I had this experience. I feel one with everything. You would be sent to a nuthouse. You would be locked up, right? You were crazy. And because of Andy Newberg and this incredibly brave work, it's standard biology. We now know where it comes from. Now, this is also right where I come back into this story. Right? I told you earlier that I had this experience with these action adventure sport athletes, and then I took my question of how does the impossible happen into other domains. Now, I had not yet, when I started doing that, lit onto flow as my answer, because I didn't really know the term. Athletes didn't really know the term. What happened to me and where this all came back and where I sort of come into the story that I'm I'm now telling about Dr. Newberg, when I was 30 years old, I got Lyme disease and I spent the better portion of 3 years in bed. Now, if you don't know what Lyme is like, it's sort of like the worst flu you've ever had crossed with paranoid schizophrenia. And this is, I'm not just joking, paranoid schizophrenia is the most common misdiagnosis for Lyme. And I was messed up. The disease had gotten into my body, it had gotten into my brain, Physically, I was so sick I literally couldn't walk across a room. Cognitively, it was a lot worse. My short-term memory was gone. My long-term memory was gone. I was hallucinating. I was dyslexic. I would forget things. I'd come to a stoplight and it would be red and it would turn green, and I couldn't remember what the hell a green light meant. What do I do? And I'm standing there, rush hour traffic, etc., etc. I lost my ability to read because I couldn't remember what was the beginning of the sentence by the I got to the end of a sentence. And after about 3 years of this, I just decided I was gonna end my life, 'cause it was the only thing that made any sense. I was only gonna be— doctors had already pulled me off medicine. My stomach lining started bleeding out in a reaction to the antibiotics that I was on. I had bankrupted myself already trying to find a cure. And all I was gonna be was a burden to my friends and my family. I was literally lucid and functional 10 to 20 minutes a day. And that's where I was. And at this really dark, bleak time, a friend of mine showed up. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, and she demanded that we go surfing. And it was the most ridiculous request I'd ever— I couldn't walk across a room, let alone go surfing. And she kept badgering me, and she wouldn't leave and wouldn't leave and wouldn't leave and wouldn't leave. And finally, after hours of this, I was like, "What the hell? Let's just go surfing. I can always kill myself tomorrow." "Jesus, anything to shut her up." And they literally had to, like— They carried me to the car, loaded me into her car, and when they got me to the beach, they gave me a board the size of a Cadillac. And the bigger the board, the easier it is to surf. And they literally took me by the elbows and walked me out to the break. Now, Sunset Beach, which is where we were, wimpiest beginner break in the world. And it was a tiny day. Waves were like a foot, 2 feet. 3 feet most. No one was out and it was really warm. And I remember sitting out there and 30 seconds later a wave came, just a little 2-footer. And I don't know what happened. Muscle memory, divine intervention, take your pick, whatever. I spun my board around, I paddled a couple of times and I popped up to my feet and I popped up into a dimension I didn't even know existed. Remember, I had spent years chasing a mystical experience and never had any of them. I had done tons of psychedelics. And nothing really super interesting had happened to me. And suddenly I pop up into this dimension where I feel like I can see out of the back of my head, and I'm having an out-of-body experience, and I'm one with everything, and I'm one with the ocean, and etc., etc. And the craziest part is I feel amazing. I feel great. I feel better than I have in years. I feel so good that I caught 4 more waves that day. And on the 5th wave, I'm not just like I'm like tired, I'm disassembled, I'm gone. They drive me home, they carry me into bed, and they have, people have to bring me food for the next 14 days 'cause I am so weak, I can't get out of my bed and walk 50 feet away to my kitchen to make a meal. But on the 15th day, I had a neighbor who was a surfer, and I went and knocked on his door, and I caught a ride back to the ocean, and I did it again. And over the course of about 6 to 8 months, when the only thing I was doing differently in my life was surfing, I went from zero functionality up to about 80 to 90% functionality. And I wanted to know what the hell was going on, right? Surfing is not a known cure for chronic autoimmune conditions. And on top of that, I wasn't just surfing. I was having these crazy quasi-mystical experiences. Now, Lyme is only fatal if it gets into your brain. By this point, I'm a science writer. I'm a hardcore rational materialist. I am done with anything spiritual, and I am absolutely certain But the reason I'm having these experiences is because even though I feel better, the disease is clearly in my brain and I'm dying. And I'm literally on like my last month, my last 2 months, my last 3 months. And so I light out on a giant quest to figure out what the hell is going on with me. So to just wrap up that health portion of this, because it doesn't come into our story, but you might be wondering, one of the things that happens as you move into flow to zero, which is obviously what I was experiencing in those waves, is there's a global release of nitric oxide. This is what flushes all those stress hormones out of your system. So an autoimmune condition, which is Lyme, is a nervous system gone haywire, right? And one of the problems is even after the disease has left you, you can't find normal. You don't know where normal is. Where is baseline? So by resetting your nervous system back to zero, you're getting to baseline, and suddenly you can start carving new pathways. The other thing is All of the neurochemicals that show up in flow are huge immune system boosters. So all of this is so powerful that Herb Benson, who's at Harvard, did a lot of fundamental work on both the neuroscience of meditation and flow, has said that this mechanism that I'm talking about seems to underpin most so-called cases of spontaneous healing. So all of that is to come. I don't know any of this at the time. All I know is I'm having these weird-ass mystical experiences in the waves, and part of them is I'm becoming one with the ocean. I feel like I'm one with the ocean, and I'm trying to figure out what the hell's going on. And Dr. Newberg publishes his study, and so I call him up and I say, Dr. Newberg, Andy, do you think that the amount of focus a Tibetan Buddhist uses to meditate is the same same as a surfer trying to ride a big wave? Could we be looking at the same mechanism? Is the same— and he suspected yes. And this led us into a kind of a long partnership and a lot of research. And the answer is yes, we are looking at the exact same thing. In fact, we now know that whatever it is that you are focusing on at the time— so surfers are becoming one with the waves, skiers become one with the mountain, right? Go up and stare at the night sky and have an awe experience, you become one with the night Whatever you're focusing on, you tend to become one with. So this is sort of where flow comes into this mystical experience story back then. At the same time I was meeting Dr. Newberg, I actually started a second line of research, which was into something else that was happening to me in the waves, which was the out-of-body experience. Is in that first wave, I popped up, I floated way above my body, and I was looking down. And the interesting thing is that was not the first time that had happened to me. So I said I had never had a mystical experience while I was actually hunting them. I had had an out-of-body experience when I was 17 years old. I was in high school, I was at a party, it was a Friday night, we got drunk, me and my friends, and I had the brilliant idea of going skydiving the next day. We're all gonna go skydiving. And I get, you know, 30 people to agree to go skydiving with me because we're all drunk. And when morning comes, there's like 4 people left who actually still want to go. And suddenly the idea is not looking, you know, as really as good as it looked like the night before. Now, you see, everybody jumps with square chutes that are very controllable. This was back in the day when you had— when you went skydiving, you were on a static line. You jumped with a round, and a static line means literally They tied a rope between your parachute and the plane, so when you jumped out of the plane, that would pull your chute open. And a round is what the Army used to use. It's a big, giant, round parachute. Interesting thing that's gonna come into play in a second is when a round opens, it actually opens, then closes, then opens again, and that open-close-open action happens too fast for the human eye to see, so you never notice it, but it actually happens. So we go skydiving and I jump out of the plane and I jump right out of my body. I fly right out of my body. In fact, I'm watching my body through space and I'm thinking to myself, when you jump out of a plane, they tell you to arch your back and check your canopy. That's what first thing you do. And I overarched and I realized, first of all, I saw the chute open, close and open, which was impossible, supposedly, for me to see. So what the hell? A and B, I saw I was about to snap, pull me, and that my body was at a terrible angle. And if I didn't relax and get my legs under me, it was going to really mess my back up. And so I got my legs under me. The chute caught. I popped back into my body and floated to the ground. And turns out, by the way, this is not that rare of an experience, right? It's not even that rare in sports. For example, In her essay, "The Voice," American track and field star Grace Butcher wrote, "In her first major race," and she held by the 880 record from 1958 to 1961. And she says, "In her first major race, the starter gave us instructions and the gun went off. I ran a few steps into a dimension I didn't know existed. Suddenly, I seemed to be up in the rafters of the arena, looking down at my race bar below." I could see the black framework of the high catwalks vaguely around me, the cables, the great spotlights, the brazen brilliance of the tiny tracks so far beneath me, and myself running in the midst of others in my race that was clearly going on both with me and without me. Now, it turns out, right, that out-of-body experiences don't always take place within the confines of such extreme environments. In fact, most of the time they're just woven into our workaday lives. And they really are woven into our workaday lives. A 1990 poll by Gallup found that 30 million Americans have had some sort of near-death or out-of-body experience in their life. 10% of the planet's population has had some kind of adventure here. And right around the time that Andy Newberg was doing his work, Another Swiss researcher named Olaf Blanke started studying out-of-body experiences, and he started thinking of them as sort of like phantom limb syndrome for the body, right? In phantom limb syndrome, amputees, they'll lose an arm or a leg, and they'll feel the limb is there even though it's not. Olaf Blanke thought this was sort of like you feeling your whole body someplace where it's not. And so, using the same techniques that Newberg uses, a lot of brain scanning stuff, he backtracked out-of-body experiences, and he backtracked out-of-body experiences to a portion, no surprise, of the right temporal lobe, right? He pinpointed it more at the temporal-parietal junction, what's known as the TPJ. The right superior temporal gyrus, the angular gyrus. All of these are parts of the brain that locate consciousness in the body, and they're all linked to our vestibular system, our balance system. So for example, if I stimulate your TPJ with a low-grade electrical current, you'll get that sliding feeling. So if you've ever been in your bed and you felt like you— maybe you're like floating backwards through the wall be slipping in and out of your body just a tiny little bit. That's a low-grade current. If I crank it up a little bit more, you will dislocate from your body. Here's the crazy part. Not only have they figured out where out-of-body experiences come from in this way, but Olaf Blanke has built virtual reality experiments where they can produce in as little as like 2 minutes with a research subject, they can produce this out-of-body experience. And one thing that is really weird science, unexplained science, is when we are out of our bodies, our physiology starts cooling down. The real body starts cooling down. So, A, the brain seems to know that consciousness is out of the body, and it may be the brain trying to save resources. Nobody knows. But just to give you an idea of how far this has now gone, So my friend Shahar Ozi, who's at Hebrew University, he got interested in a version of the out-of-body experience that shows up in Kabbalistic Judaism known as the doppelganger effect, the projection of one's double. So there's— in Kabbalistic Judaism, there's a bunch of formulas, usually from the 13th century in Spain, for ways to produce your own double, another version of yourself that you can treat as an oracle. So you can produce this vision of your double, and then you can ask your double questions about the future or truth or whatever. And to produce this, the Kabbalistic ritual is really complicated. It doesn't just involve a lot of breathwork and meditation, but there's a lot of body movement, rocking back and forth in particular directions. And what Arzy has done is building off of Olaf Flanke's work and Peter Bruegger's work, and he actually trained under these people. Before he went to Hebrew University, is he decodes the doppelganger effect. He figures out the part of the temporal-parietal junction— no surprise, right? Right, temporal lobe, same spot— the exact part that produces the doppelganger effect. And if you think of the out-of-body experience as like the feeling of being outside your body, all this adds in is the image, right? We'll talk about where the information and why you can ask the doppelganger questions and We're going to talk about that later, but right now I just want you to understand that we've taken out-of-body experiences, one of these really powerful ancient mystical experiences, right? One of the strangest things that we can have on Earth. And suddenly, not only do we know where it comes from in the brain, right? We know why certain spiritual practices that are designed to produce this experience produce this experience. We can also produce it in a laboratory. Human research subjects. This is really cool. What we also figure out is that out-of-body and near-death experiences, right, the other really big mystical experiences, are related. And the way we figure this out is really crazy and really weird. In the 1970s, the Navy and the Air Force, they introduced a new generation of high-performance fighter planes, right? They can go so fast, they produce so much G-forces, right? The pull of gravity which pulls blood out of the pilot's brains, and it's causing them to black out. It's producing what's known as G-LOC, for gravity-induced loss of consciousness. And so pilots are crashing these billion-dollar planes, and the Air Force and the Navy are panicked. So the Navy and the Air Force, they hire a guy named James Winery. He's a specialist in aerospace medicine, and they charge him with solving the problem of G-LOC. So over the course of about 16 years, from mid-'70s all the way into the late '80s, working with this massive centrifuge at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, Winery spins over 500 fighter pilots into G-LOC, right? And what he's trying to do is figure out at what point does tunnel vision start to occur, and how long does it take the pilots to lose consciousness under acceleration, and how long how long they remain unconscious if acceleration continues or if it ceases, etc., etc., etc. And so what he discovers is that it takes about 5 to 6 seconds to induce G-LOC and that the average blackout lasts 12 to 24 seconds and that a surprising large number of the pilots report out-of-body experiences along the way. And then he notices something interesting. If the pilots had an out-of-body experience and he kept spinning them after that, that out-of-body experience became a near-death experience. And it showed up in like 10 to 15% of the pilots, right? These are Navy pilots. We don't have the terms out-of-body or near-death experiences, and definitely not in science at this point. So he writes them up as dreamlets, right? And he starts to realize that there's something interesting going on. For example, classic near-death experience: I am moving down a long, dark tunnel going towards the light, right? This is the classic near-death experience. Well, it turns out that the last structure in the brain to stay active is the occipital lobe. And as it turns off, Winery suspects it produces this tunnel of light experience. So interestingly, about a decade after Winery does this, maybe a little bit longer, I know about this research and I'm living in San Francisco, and Stolichnaya decides that as a promotional stunt, 'cause the wall has come down and communism is no more, and so they don't need all of those MiG fighter jets in the Soviet Army. So, Stolichnaya buys a bunch for air show purposes. And a friend of mine becomes their publicist. So, I get a phone call one day. "Hey, Steven, you wanna go for a ride in a MiG?" Holy crap, yes I do! So, I drive to Livermore, outside of San Francisco, and I get there. And so, it's a MiG trainer. And a MiG trainer means I sit in the nose, and there's a pilot who sits right behind me. I get in the seat and, you know, I'm putting in my seatbelts and whatever, and the pilot sort of comes over to me. He's like trying to teach me how the rudder moves and how to fly the plane. I'm like, dude, you do know I've never flown a plane before. Like, I have no idea what I'm doing. Like, he's like, oh no, no, no, I'm just showing you, you know, just so you know, don't worry about it. Well, we take off and literally like 200 feet off the deck, he's like, all right, man, you got the stick. And I was like, "Well, what can I do?" He's like, "Do whatever you want." And I remembered James Whitter, his work, and I was like, "Well, can I do barrel rolls and flip myself and try to lose consciousness? 'Cause I've got this experiment I wanna run, and I wanna see if it's gonna be like a near-death experience." And he says, "Go for it." And I will tell you two things. One, I have a very high tolerance for gravity. Actually, I'm gonna tell you 3 things. 2, excessive G-forces will make you sick as a dog. I felt like I had the flu for a month afterwards. 3, if you do a giant loop in a plane, you can knock yourself out, and in my experience, it was exactly like moving down a long, dark tunnel. First, sound funneled away, right? This is the sound, the blood moving away from my ears, so it gets very, very quiet, and then you see this light in the distance, and you move down a long tunnel to the light. And then I lost consciousness and woke up, which is where, by the way, we, one, learned that out-of-body and near-death experiences are related. And two, I have a line on my resume that says, "Has flown a MiG-17." And the more interesting part of this is it's not just that near-death experiences are biological or neurobiological. Remember, let's go all the way back to William James. William James said, hey, wait a minute. It, you come out on the other side psychologically different. Well, if you are psychologically different, you should be neurobiologically different too, right? If you're going to change your psychology, you got to change your brain that's underneath your psychology. And so Willoughby Britton, who was then a clinical psychology doctoral student at the University of Arizona, decided she wanted to look at what happens in brains after near-death experiences. And Willoughby didn't get interested in near-death experiences— she didn't come in through spirituality— she was trauma expert, and she thought, wow, there's something really strange going on, right? Most people who get up close to dying, almost die, they come back and they have something called post-traumatic stress disorder. They're messed up, right? But people who have near-death experiences come back and they're happier, they're more contented, they're more consumed. And as you know, the literature supporting this idea goes all the way back to James. And she was like, well, What the hell is going on? This is a really strange reaction to trauma. I want to figure it out, right? So she knew about Penfield's research, right? She knew about the right temporal lobe. She knew about Winery's research and the dreamlets. And that Winery had pointed out, by the way, that those dreamlets seem to show up at a point that blood flow to the right temporal lobe was compromised. So the blood flow being compromised might have screwed up the ability for the body to locate itself in its proper perspective. One final thing— right temporal lobe activity. One of the things that we know is people who have right temporal lobe epilepsy also have these experiences. They have out-of-body experiences, they have near-death experiences. In fact, one of of right temporal lobe epilepsy is excessive religiosity, possibly too much dopamine from Peter Berger's research, but very, very, very common. So what she figured is, ah, I'll bet people who have had near-death experiences maybe have the same brain firing patterns as right temporal lobe epileptics, right? Maybe this would explain what was going on. Let me take a look at it, right? So she recruits 23 people people who have had a near-death experience and 23 people who have not a near-death experience, no life-threatening traumatic event. And the easiest way to detect epilepsy is in EEG sleep data, right? So using EEG to measure brain activity when people are sleeping. This is really interesting, by the way. One of the things we can tell by EEG data matter when people sleep is what point you go into REM sleep. Do you go in quickly, right? Average people go in about 70, 75 minutes, right? People who go in too soon, really high indicator of depression, right? They can look at a brain scan, an epileptic brain scan, an EEG of you sleeping, and with incredible accuracy predict whether or not you're going to become depressed. Over the coming year. The later you enter REM sleep, the happier you are, right? So 90 minutes to 100 minutes, and you are incredibly happy. A lot of life satisfaction, right? Depressed people tend to enter REM at about 60 minutes or sooner. Normal people, as I said, 90 minutes. So she analyzes it, and what does she discover? That people who had near-death experiences go into REM at 110 minutes. Right? It is a neurological signature of incredible happiness and overall life satisfaction. Here's the weird part. She finds that 22% of her near-death group shows temporal lobe synchronization, which is the exact same kind of thing you see in temporal lobe epilepsy. And 22% may not sound like much. It's incredibly abnormal. It's well beyond the realm of chance. But here's the weird part. She didn't find it in the right temporal lobe. She found it in the left temporal lobe, and we have no idea still to this day why. So we know near-death experiences change the brain. There's still a mystery though in some of what we've discovered. And Britton was just sort of the beginning for this stuff, and it was really my friend Dr. Andrew Newberg who I think has probably taken it farther than anybody else. He never really stopped, and he was also much more willing to examine some of the stranger mystical experiences— mediums and trance or people speaking in tongues. And one of the things he actually discovered is, so this is interesting, right? When you look at trance states, people speaking in tongues, possessions, right? In flow, we get this heightened sense of control, right? In these other states, we lose control completely and it feels like a force has taken over. And it's interesting, what you see in that is you see the part of the prefrontal cortex the prefrontal cortex that controls our sense of agency goes really, really, really quiet, and you get a hyperactivation in the thalamus in these states. That's the brain switching network. It's sort of like the relay station, this keyboard. And what it suggests to Neuberg is that when we feel like something else has taken over, some other version of ourself is doing the talking. And I don't know if you've ever had possession experiences, speaking in tongues. Very weird states of consciousness. I've had one experience here whatsoever, and I broke my collarbone and I had surgery and a huge plate was put in, and I don't like opiates very much, so I took edible marijuana. And back before this was a legal thing in certain states, it was hard to get the dosage right. So it was not unusual to overdose yourself on edible marijuana. It was fairly common. And I overdosed on edible marijuana. And I remember, I was so clear that I was sitting in my office, I was in my office in New Mexico, and I started stretching my shoulder, like my shoulder started rolling backwards, like I was moving it in circles, but I wasn't really moving it. And over the next 25 minutes, while my body, just after that surgery, was all crunched up in horrible pain, I was really thinking at the time, I was like, holy crap, after I sort of recover from the surgery, I'm gonna need so much back work and body work because everything is mangled up. And suddenly my body starts moving. For the next 20 minutes, I lost total control of the upper portion of my body, and it went through this whole series of spontaneous stretches and movements. And in my head, I'm thinking to myself, what the hell is going on? And this is gonna totally mess me up. Like, my back was already I'm gonna be messed up and now I'm going to be destroyed. And I woke up the next morning and it was as if my body went through every perfect motion it needed to unkink itself after that surgery and I was perfectly fine. Still this almost no scar tissue and stretching from having a 10-inch steel plate in my shoulder, which is really strange. But it gave me a lot more sort of sympathy or empathy or compassion to, you know, that side of the experience where you totally lose yourself and feel like you're taken over. I had thought— I always had a hard time with those experiences, believing that they were even real to people. Then I had my own taste and Dr. Newberg did his work and suddenly it started to make sense. We have now done the science of high performance, Nietzsche to now. We have now done the science of spirituality, Nietzsche to now. What we've learned is that pretty much every spiritual experience you can think of, there's biology underneath it. And we've learned that it's the same biology utilized through high performance. So the spiritual path and the path of high performance, very, very similar paths neurobiologically, which is why, as I said at the start of this, if you've got a spiritual problem, you might want a high performance solution. If you've got a high performance problem, you might want a spiritual natural solution. Hopefully that is starting to make a little more sense.

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