We ended our study with what many of us know best these days: social media. What makes these online distractions so sticky is how effectively they prime our brains for reward (mainly the feel-good neurochemical dopamine). Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky calls this priming the “magic of maybe.” When we check our email or Facebook or Twitter, and sometimes we find a response and sometimes we don’t, the next time a friend connects, Sapolsky discovered that we enjoy a 400 percent spike in dopamine. This can become distracting to the point of addicting. In 2016, the business consultancy Deloitte found that Americans are looking at their phones more than eight billion times a day. In a world where 67 percent of us admit to checking our status updates in the middle of the night, during sex, and before attending to basic biological needs like going to the bathroom, sleeping, or eating breakfast, we think it’s safe to assume that a good part of what we’re habitually doing online is more to forget ourselves for a moment than inform ourselves for the long haul.
Category by category, we followed Drucker’s advice, seeing what our calendars and our bank accounts said about how much we really value stepping outside ourselves. And what we found was staggering. (see endnotes for a detailed workup of these numbers and www.stealingfirebook.com/downloads/ for a worksheet where you can calculate your own personal tally).
Added all together, the Altered States Economy totals out to roughly $4 trillion a year. That’s a sizable chunk of our income that we annually tithe to the Church of the Ecstatic. We spend more on this than we do on maternity care, humanitarian aid, and K–12 education combined.” It’s larger than the gross national product of Britain, India, or Russia. And to really put this in perspective, it’s twice as many dollars as there are known galaxies in the entire universe.30 So even though much of our seeking is haphazard and often counterproductive, this $4 trillion total stands as a pretty good metric for how badly we want to get out of our heads, and how much we’re willing to spend for even a shot at relief.
Yet this raises a few additional questions. If we’re already spending a ton of time and money chasing these states, and even elite organizations like the SEALs and Google haven’t definitively cracked the code, could something so elusive and confounding be worth all that trouble? Can these experiences provide benefits we can’t get any other way? Put simply, are they worth it?
Chapter Two
Why It Matters
The Ambassador of Ecstasis
In 2011, an out-of-work television host named Jason Silva1 posted a short, strange video on the internet. Titled “You Are a Receiver,”2 the video was a two-minute barrage of quick-cut sci-fi imagery interspersed with shots of Silva, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, talking directly to the camera. What he was talking about was existential philosophy, evolutionary cosmology, and altered states of consciousness—that is, topics that don’t usually show up in viral videos. In 2011, the Web’s hottest fare were cartoon cats and honey badgers. But Silva’s video struck a nerve, grabbing nearly half a million views in less than a month.
More videos followed. Between 2011 and 2015, Silva put more than a hundred different offerings online, garnering over 70 million views. NASA and Time reposted his work. The Atlantic ran a long profile,3 anointing him “the Timothy Leary of the Viral Video Age.” Then the National Geographic Channel hired him to host “Brain Games,” which became their highest-rated TV show ever and earned him an Emmy nomination. Yet, to Silva, all this attention came as something of a surprise: “When I started making videos, the goal wasn’t celebrity. It was sanity.”
Silva was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1982 and grew up during a turbulent time in the country’s history. While raised in a middle-class family, his parents divorced when he was twelve and his father lost all his money when the Venezuelan economy collapsed in the late 1980s. There was an unsuccessful coup in 1992 and a successful coup in 2000. Crime and corruption skyrocketed. “Every member of my family was held up at gunpoint,” recalls Silva. “My mother, my brother, even my grandmother. My father was kidnapped. I was a target. It was terrifying. It colored everything—my mom’s not home by five p.m., so did she get kidnapped? Did she get killed? It was this constant, gnawing fear that never went away.”
That fear turned Silva into a shut-in. By the time he was a teenager he could barely leave his house. He became paranoid, constantly wondering if all the doors were locked, if the noise he just heard was an intruder. “I was a kid,” he says; “it was supposed to be this carefree time. But I was always battling crazy, neurotic thoughts and it was just crippling.”
In high school, in an effort to recover sanity and a social life, Silva started organizing little gatherings at his house. “I was inspired by Baudelaire’s hashish salons,” he says. “So every Friday night a bunch of us would get together. Some people drank wine, some people smoked pot, but everyone talked philosophy. And those conversations would swallow me whole. I’d go off on a monologue and disappear. Totally out of my head. And it was exactly what I was searching for, a way to shut off my neurotic brain.”
Quickly, Silva found these Friday nights shaping the rest of his week, as if those altered hours were overwriting those fearful years. He discovered a new sense of confidence. “I was always looking for my niche. I wasn’t a great athlete, or the best student, or one of the cool kids. But those states showed me a part of myself I never knew existed. It started to feel like I had a superpower.”
That’s where the videos came in. At first, to ensure he wasn’t just babbling, Silva had his friends record him during his rants. Later, he watched the tapes. “I was stunned. The stuff coming out of my mouth? Jaw-dropping connections between ideas. I had no idea where the insights were coming from. It was me, but it wasn’t me.”
And those videos led to film school in Miami, where he made even more videos. These efforts soon garnered attention. Because they saw his work and liked his screen presence, former vice president Al Gore’s network,4 Current TV, hired him as a host. But it was a job he couldn’t keep. “Current was great,” he explains, “but most of what I did was read pop culture stories from a teleprompter. I didn’t get to go off on crazy soliloquies, which meant I was cut off from flow. All that neurosis came flooding back. What I realized at Current was that I couldn’t live without frequent access to these states. So I quit, and started making videos about them.”
In Silva, ecstasis had found an ambassador. Because the conditions of his life and the wiring of his mind made his interior reality so uncomfortable, he got very good at tinkering with his consciousness. In his intuitive pursuit of these moments, Silva cobbled together a remarkably effective way to get outside himself for relief and inspiration. In high school, these states gave him back his life; in adulthood they gave him a career. “Really,” he says, “what I found in altered states was freedom. First they gave me freedom from myself; then they gave me freedom to express myself, then they showed me what was actually possible. But it’s not just me. I think almost every successful person I’ve met—one way or another—has found a way to use these states to propel them to levels they didn’t know were possible.”
And in saying “one way or another,” Silva’s getting at an important point. While the ways people get into these states vary considerably, their lived experiences share remarkable overlap. In fact, a big part of Silva’s appeal hinges on this overlap. “A Buddhist monk experiencing satori while meditating in a cave, or a nuclear physicist having a breakthrough insight in the lab, or a fire spinner at Burning Man,” he says, “look like different experiences from the outside, but they feel similar from the inside. It’s a shared commonality, a bond linking all of us together. The ecstatic is a language without words that we all speak.”
So, in the same way that the biological mechanisms underpinning certain non-ordinary states are remarkably consistent, our experiences of these states are, too. To be sure, the actual content will vary wildly across cultures: a Silicon Valley computer coder may experience a midnight epiphany as being in “the z
one” and see streaming zeros and ones like the code from The Matrix; a French peasant girl might experience divine inspiration and hear the voice of an angel; an Indian farmer might see a vision of Ganesh in a rice paddy. But once we get past the narrative wrapping paper—what researchers call the “phenomenological reporting”—we find four signature characteristics underneath: Selflessness, Timelessness, Effortlessness, and Richness, or STER for short.
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.5 In reviewing the literature, we discovered that almost every previous breakdown of these experiences was weighed down by content. Trying to tease apart the consciousness-altering effects of meditation, for example, means wading through religious interpretations of what those states mean. Examine the academic criteria for flow and you’ll find empirical triggers for how to produce the state mixed in with the subjective experiences of the state. The same goes for many of the psychedelic rating scales, which often presuppose that future subjects will have a similar range of experiences (ranging from nature mysticism, to natal regression, to cosmic union) as the original experimenters.
But the four categories we’ve zeroed in on are content neutral. They’re a strictly phenomenological description (how these states make us feel) rooted in shared neurobiology. This gets us past initial preconceptions about what these experiences are supposed to mean or reveal. While there’s still much work to be done, we’ve now introduced this model to researchers from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and Oxford, and they’ve found it useful. It’s experimental and experiential and we hope it can help simplify and integrate the ongoing conversation around altered states. (And if you’re interested in helping further this research, visit: www.stealingfreebook.com/research/).
Selflessness
Despite all the recent talk about supercomputers and artificial intelligence, the human brain remains the most complex machine on the planet. At the center of this complexity lies the prefrontal cortex, our most sophisticated piece of neuronal hardware. With this relatively recent evolutionary adaptation came a heightened degree of self-awareness, an ability to delay gratification, plan for the long term, reason through complex logic, and think about our thinking. This hopped-up cogitation promoted us from slow, weak, hairless apes into tool-wielding apex predators, turning a life that was once nasty, brutish, and short into something decidedly more civilized.
But all of this ingenuity came at a cost. No one built an off switch for the potent self-awareness that made it all possible. “[T]he self “is not an unmitigated blessing,”6 writes Duke University psychologist Mark Leary in his aptly titled book, The Curse of the Self. “It is single-handedly responsible for many, if not most of the problems that human beings face as individuals and as a species . . . [and] conjures up a great deal of personal suffering in the form of depression, anxiety, anger, jealousy, and other negative emotions.” When you think about the billion-dollar industries that underpin the Altered States Economy, isn’t this what they’re built for? To shut off the self. To give us a few moments of relief from the voice in our heads.
So, when we do experience a non-ordinary state that gives us access to something more, we feel it first as something less—and that something missing is us. Or, more specifically, the inner critic we all come with: our inner Woody Allen, that nagging, defeatist, always-on voice in our heads. You’re too fat. Too skinny. Too smart to be working this job. Too scared to do anything about it. A relentless drumbeat that rings in our ears.
This was Silva’s monologue too, but he stumbled onto a curious fact—altered states can silence the nag. They act as an off switch. In these states, we’re no longer trapped by our neurotic selves because the prefrontal cortex, the very part of the brain generating that self, is no longer open for business.
Scientists call this shutdown7 “transient hypofrontality.” Transient means temporary. “Hypo,” the opposite of “hyper,” means “less than normal.” And frontality refers to the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that generates our sense of self. During transient hypofrontality, because large swatches of the prefrontal cortex turn off, that inner critic comes offline. Woody goes quiet.
Without all the badgering, we get a real sense of peace. “This peacefulness may result from the fact,” continues Leary, that “without self-talk to stir up negative emotions, the mystical experience is free of tension.” And with tension out of the way, we often discover a better version of ourselves, more confident and clear.
“For me,” explains Silva, “it’s a simple equation. If I hadn’t learned to shut off the self, I’d be the same mess I was back in Venezuela. Too fearful to do much of anything. But once the voice in my head disappears, I get out of my own way.”
And the benefits of selflessness go beyond silencing our inner critic. When free from the confines of our normal identity, we are able to look at life, and the often repetitive stories we tell about it, with fresh eyes. Come Monday morning, we may still clamber back into the monkey suits of our everyday roles—parent, spouse, employee, boss, neighbor—but, by then, we know they’re just costumes with zippers.
Psychologist Robert Kegan,8 chair of adult development at Harvard, has a term for unzipping those costumes. He calls it “the subject-object shift” and argues that it’s the single most important move we can make to accelerate personal growth. For Kegan, our subjective selves are, quite simply, who we think we are. On the other hand, the “objects” are things we can look at, name, and talk about with some degree of objective distance. And when we can move from being subject to our identity to having some objective distance from it, we gain flexibility in how we respond to life and its challenges.
In time, Silva noticed exactly this change. “Whenever I get out of my head, I get a little more perspective. And every time I return, my world is a little bit wider and I’m a little bit less neurotic. Over the years, it’s made a real difference.”
That’s Kegan’s point. When we are reliably able to make the subject-object shift, as he points out in his book In Over Our Heads, “You start . . . constructing a world that is much more friendly to contradiction, to oppositeness, to being able to hold onto multiple systems of thinking. . . . This means that the self is more about movement through different forms of consciousness than about defending and identifying with any one form.”
By stepping outside ourselves, we gain perspective. We become objectively aware of our costumes rather than subjectively fused with them. We realize we can take them off, discard those that are worn out or no longer fit, and even create new ones. That’s the paradox of selflessness—by periodically losing our minds we stand a better chance of finding ourselves.
Timelessness
A quick search on Google yields over 11.5 billion hits for the word “time.” In comparison, more obvious topics of interest like sex and money rank a paltry 2.75 billion and 2 billion, respectively. Time and how to make the most of it, appears to be about five times more important to us than making love or money.
And there’s good reason for this obsession. According to a 2015 Gallup survey,9 48 percent of working adults feel rushed for time, and 52 percent report significant stress as a result. Bosses, colleagues, kids, and spouses all expect instant response to emails and texts. We never really get free of our digital leashes, even in bed or on vacation. Americans are now working longer hours with less vacations than any industrialized country in the world.
“Time poverty,”10 as this shortage is known, comes with consequences. “When [you] are juggling time,” Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan recently told the New York Times, “. . . you borrow from tomorrow, and tomorrow you have less time than you have today. . . . It’s a very costly loan.”
Non-ordinary states provide some relief from this rising debt, and they do it in much the same way as they quiet our inner critic. Our sense of time isn’t localized11 in the brain. It’s not like vision, which is the sole responsib
ility of the occipital lobes. Instead, time is a distributed perception, calculated all over the brain, calculated, more specifically, all over the prefrontal cortex. During transient hypofrontality, when the prefrontal cortex goes offline, we can no longer perform this calculation.
Without the ability to separate past from present from future, we’re plunged into an elongated present, what researchers describe as “the deep now.” Energy normally used for temporal processing gets reallocated for focus and attention. We take in more data per second, and process it more quickly. When we’re processing more information faster, the moment seems to last longer—which explains why the “now” often elongates in altered states.
When our attention is focused on the present, we stop scanning yesterday for painful experiences we want to avoid repeating. We quit daydreaming about a tomorrow that’s better than today. With our prefrontal cortex offline, we can’t run those scenarios. We lose access to the most complex and neurotic part of our brains, and the most primitive and reactive part of our brains, the amygdala, the seat of that fight-or-flight response, calms down, too.
In his book The Time Paradox,12 Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, one of the pioneers in the field of time perception, describes it this way: “When you are . . . fully aware of your surroundings and of yourself in the present, [this] increases the time that you swim with your head above water, when you can see both potential dangers and pleasures. . . . You are aware of your position and your destination. You can make corrections to your path.”
In a recent study published in Psychological Science,13 Zimbardo’s Stanford colleagues Jennifer Aaker and Melanie Rudd found that an experience of timelessness is so powerful it shapes behavior. In a series of experiments, subjects who tasted even a brief moment of timelessness “felt they had more time available, were less impatient, more willing to volunteer to help others, more strongly preferred experiences over material products, and experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction.”
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