But Bob Kegan, the Harvard psychologist whom we first met in Chapter 2, upended that assumption by doing something psychologists before him hadn’t done too much of: longitudinal research. Kegan tracked a group of adults as they aged. His goal was simple: understand how they changed and grew over time, and determine if, in fact, there were upper limits to who we can become.
Kegan spent three decades tracking this group,32 seeing what happened to their psychological maturity and capacity along the way. He discovered that while some adults remained frozen in time, a select few achieved meaningful growth. Right around middle age, for example, Kegan noticed that some people moved beyond generally well-adjusted adulthood, or what he called “Self-Authoring,” into a different stage entirely: “Self-Transforming.”
Defined by heightened empathy, an expanded capacity to hold differing and even conflicting perspectives, and a general flexibility in how you think of yourself, self-transforming is the developmental stage we tend to associate with wisdom (and Roger Martin’s Opposable Mind). But not everyone gets to be wise. While it usually takes three to five years for adults to move through a given stage of development, Kegan found that the further you go up that pyramid, the fewer people make it to the next stage. The move from self-authoring to self-transforming for example? Fewer than 5 percent of us ever make that jump.
But in all of this developmental research, buried in the footnotes33 about those self-transcending 5 percenters, lay a curious fact. A disproportionate number of them had dabbled in ecstasis: often beginning with psychedelics and, after that, making meditation, martial arts, and other state-shifting practices a central part of their lives. Many of them described their frequent access to non-ordinary states as the “turbo-button” for their development.
And this isn’t an isolated finding. Fifty years ago, psychologist Abraham Maslow noticed34 that the more peak experiences a person had, the closer they came to self-actualization, his term for the upper stages of adult development. A 2012 study published in Cognitive Processing took it further.35 When examining the relationship between peak experiences and performance in Olympic athletes and corporate managers, researchers found that the highest performers didn’t just have more frequent peak experiences; they also made more ethical and empathetic decisions.
Boston College’s Bill Torbert found that those at the top of the developmental pyramid36 not only were more ethical and empathetic; they performed better in the workplace as well. In a survey of nearly five hundred managers in different industries, he found that 80 percent of those who scored in the upper two stages of development held senior management roles despite only making up 10 percent of the broader population. The most developed leaders, as Torbert noted in the Harvard Business Review, “succeeded in generating one or more organizational transformations over a four-year period, [and] their companies’ profitability, market share, and reputation all improved.” Consciousness, it turns out, goes straight to the bottom line.
If the shift in psychology that led us from Esalen to Eckhart was about greater permission to explore, then Kegan and his colleagues have given us the next piece of that puzzle: a map of where we’re going. By bridging the gap between peak states and personal growth, these discoveries validate ecstasis as a tool not only for self-discovery, but also for self-development. So while ecstatic states (which are brief and transitory) aren’t the same as developmental stages (which are stable and long-lasting), it appears that having more of the former can, under the right conditions, help accelerate the latter. In short, altered states can lead to altered traits.
Chapter Five
Neurobiology
Outside the Jar
There’s a bit of southern folk wisdom that says1 “you can’t read the label while you’re sitting inside the jar.” And that notion, that we can’t always understand what we’re too close to, sums up the relationship between psychology and neurobiology as forces for ecstasis. As substantial as the advances in psychology have been, what they’ve really done is make the inside of the jar bigger—by expanding our sense of what’s possible. But the field of neurobiology is doing something else altogether. By giving us an understanding of the ingredients on the label, it’s providing a view of our lives from outside the jar.
In the past, we might have seen all of our psychological ups and downs as challenges to be solved with our minds. Now we can address them at a more foundational level. With a clearer view of the knobs and levers being tweaked in the body and brain, neurobiology provides us with a more precise tool kit with which to tackle life’s challenges.
To trace these developments, we’ll take a look at how Hollywood movie stars clued us into the link between motion and emotion, how webcams and video game sensors are helping revolutionize mental health, how the U.S. military and top business schools are harnessing biometrics to predict the future, and how maverick scientists are reverse-engineering ancient mystical experiences. Taken together, these examples will show how neurobiology has given us the tools to map and measure what’s happening in our bodies and brains when we’re experiencing both the ordinary and the extraordinary. And the results are changing how we think about how we think.
I Can’t Feel My Face
In February 2011, Nicole Kidman wowed on the Academy Awards’2 red carpet with a silver Dior gown, a 150-carat Fred Leighton diamond choker, and matching Pierre Hardy pumps. Yet, beyond her upscale designer choices, Kidman drew attention that evening for an unexpected reason. Her eyebrows. She couldn’t not arch them. She looked like a porcelain doll who’d just sat on a pinecone.
And while Kidman repeatedly ascribed her timeless beauty to diet, exercise, and sunscreen, in 2013 she finally admitted to Italy’s La Repubblica, “I did try Botox, unfortunately, but I got out of it, and now I can finally move my face again.” Which is kind of critical if you’re an actor who earns a living making faces.
Not long after celebrities began showing up at gala events with implausibly blank expressions, researchers started to notice that Botox was doing more than just altering how people looked. It was altering how they felt, too. In study after study, when seriously depressed patients received Botox injections3 in their frown lines, they got significant and sometimes instantaneous relief from depression. But when Botoxed subjects were asked to empathize4 with other people, to feel their joy or share their sorrow, they simply couldn’t.
This struck scientists as strange. Since the time of the Greeks, Western thinkers have considered the mind the engine that drives the bus and the body the passenger that comes along for the ride. It’s the mind-body split, a one-way arrow of causation that insists the head is always in charge (and can be trusted to govern our higher aspirations), while the body is the vessel that houses our animal instincts (and should be strictly controlled). But these Botox studies pointed in the opposite direction. Somehow, changes in the body—freezing the face with a neurotoxin—were producing changes in the mind: the ability to feel sadness or empathy. The horse appeared to be steering the rider.
And we now know why. Our facial expressions are hardwired5 into our emotions: we can’t have one without the other. Botox lessens depression because it prevents us from making sad faces. But it also dampens our connection to those around us because we feel empathy by mimicking each other’s facial expressions. With Botox, mimicry becomes impossible, so we feel almost nothing at all. No wonder Nicole Kidman was relieved to get a few wrinkles back.
But the bigger point is that these studies reflect a sea change in how we think about thinking. They move us from “disembodied cognition,” the idea that our thinking happens only in the three pounds of gray matter tucked between our ears, to “embodied cognition,” where we see thinking for what it really is: an integrated, whole-system experience. “The body, the gut, the senses,6 the immune system, the lymphatic system,” explained embodied cognition expert and University of Winchester emeritus professor Guy Claxton to New York magazine, “are so instantaneously and complicatedly interacting that you c
an’t draw a line across the neck and say ‘above this line it’s smart and below the line it’s menial.’”
In fact, we’re not smart and we have bodies—we’re smart because we have bodies.7 The heart has about 40,000 neurons that play a central role in shaping emotion, perception, and decision making. The stomach and intestines complete this network, containing more than 500 million nerve cells, 100 million neurons, 30 different neurotransmitters, and 90 percent of the body’s supply of serotonin (one of the major neurochemicals responsible for mood and well-being). This “second brain,” as scientists have dubbed it, lends some empirical support to the persistent notion of gut instinct.
And these whole-body perceptions can be easily influenced. If someone gives you a cup of icy cold water8 to hold, then introduces you to a stranger, as researchers at Yale did, you’ll treat this newcomer with suspicion and rate them as colder and more distant on personality scales. But if they give you a cup of hot coffee and make the same introduction, trust comes more easily. The act of feeling physical warmth is enough to trigger a cognitive change: you literally warm up to people, no thinking required.
Or consider Harvard psychologist Amy9 Cuddy’s popular TED talk about the power of body language. Cuddy discovered that spending two minutes in a “power pose”—meaning a posture of dominance (like “Wonder Woman”: hands on hips, elbows cocked wide, legs firmly planted)—changed both psychology and physiology. In her research, subjects who adopted the Wonder Woman posture took greater risks and took them more frequently. And two minutes of the pose was enough to increase levels of the dominance hormone testosterone by 20 percent and decrease the stress hormone cortisol by 15 percent. While the field of embodied cognition is in its infancy, and there is still lots of work to be done replicating studies and integrating insights, these early findings suggest a tighter linkage between our minds and our bodies than most of us would ever suspect.
So what does any of this have to do with ecstasis? For those interested in shifting states, knowing that the body can drive the mind gives us a whole new set of knobs and levers with which to play. Einstein’s quote “you cannot solve a problem at the level at which it was created” is invariably used to encourage higher, more expansive solutions. But the opposite is equally true. Sometimes, lower, more basic solutions can have just as big an impact.
In our work training flow, for example, we’ve found that action and adventure sport athletes deliberately amplify the physical sensations of gravity to help shift their mental state. Whether it’s boosting g-forces by carving hard turns on skis or mountain bikes, or nullifying g-forces with jumps, spins, and airs, these athletes expand the range of normal bodily inputs to push themselves into the zone. “Weightlessness, weightedness and rotation10 are the nectar of gravity games,” explains professional climber and filmmaker Jimmy Chin. “They provide easy access to flow, and that’s what keeps us coming back for more.”
Really, none of this is new. Five thousand years ago, early yoga practitioners were tinkering with embodied cognition to prompt higher states of awareness. If simply standing like Wonder Woman for a few minutes is enough to produce meaningful changes in our hormonal profile, imagine what practicing a full sequence of yoga postures every morning would do. “There’s all this evidence that [movement sequences] have an impact on stress,”11 Peter Strick, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s Brain Institute, writes in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “it has an effect on how you project yourself and how you feel.”
Fifteen hundred years ago, Shaolin monks in China became the ultimate Buddhist warriors by training their bodies to elevate their minds. They spent years practicing nearly impossible physical feats—smashing bricks with their hands, stopping spears with their necks, balancing all their weight on two fingers—as a way of training their minds. In direct contrast to skin-and-bone ascetics who sought ecstasis by ignoring or denying the body, these monks believed transcendence began with its total mastery.
In the West, though, we inherited a different legacy, that mind-body split. It began with a healthy dose of Judeo-Christian guilt—that our bodies were not to be trusted—and was cemented by an increasingly industrial economy, where our bodies were less and less needed. And today, with so much of our emotional and social lives mediated by screens, we’ve become little more than heads on sticks, the most disembodied generation of humans that has ever lived.
But if we draw upon the insights of embodied cognition research, we can reconnect our bodies and brains. We can shift posture, breathing, facial expressions, flexibility, and balance as a way to tune our states of consciousness, altered or otherwise. We don’t have to process everything first and foremost through our psychology. We can flip the script entirely and change our experience without having to think much at all. Funk master George Clinton once sang, “free your mind and your ass will follow,” but he might have had it backward. Free your ass and your mind will follow.
AI Shrink
In 2014, we traveled to the University of Southern California to meet an entirely new kind of therapist who’s taking the insights of embodied cognition and turning them inside out. Rather than using bodily changes to impact mood, she’s measuring bodily expression to unearth deeper psychological conditions.
Her name is Ellie.12 She’s a professional woman in her early thirties, with olive skin, brown eyes, and brown hair worn in a ponytail. She dresses demurely, in a blue scoop-necked shirt, a brown cardigan sweater, and a teardrop pearl around her neck. In conversation, her questions are straightforward and inquisitive. “Where are you from?” “How are you feeling today?” Occasionally, as when Steven tells her he’s from Chicago, Ellie reveals a bit of personal information. “Oh,” she says, “I’ve never been there. I’m from L.A., myself.”
And while that much is true—Ellie is, technically, from Los Angeles—she was less born there, than built there. She’s the world’s first artificially intelligent (AI) shrink. Created by researchers at DARPA and USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, Ellie’s designed to identify signs of depression, anxiety, and PTSD in soldiers. She’s part of a larger Defense Department initiative to identify mental health concerns earlier and stem the tide of suicide in the military.
Aside from the fact that Ellie appears only on a video monitor, a session with her is about what you’d expect from a traditional therapist. She begins each appointment with rapport-building questions, such as “How are you feeling today?” She asks direct follow-ups—“When was the last time you felt really happy?”—and weaves in clinical inquiries: “How much sleep are you getting?” Sessions close with queries intended to boost patients’ mood: “What are you most proud of?”
Beneath the surface, though, Ellie is anything but a traditional therapist. Her ability to identify, assess, and respond to emotion in real time is the result of a growing body of research into the mechanics of embodied cognition. The neurobiology of emotion shows that our nonverbal cues—our tics, twitches, and tone—reveal much more about our inner experience than words typically do. “People are in a constant state of impression management,”13 explains USC psychologist Albert “Skip” Rizzo, the director of the institute. “They have their true self and the self they want to project to the world. And we know the body displays things that sometimes people try to keep contained.”
While the research that led to Ellie required advanced brain imaging and a DARPA budget, her ability to track a patient’s unconscious tells involves inexpensive, off-the-shelf technology: a Logitech webcam to monitor facial expressions, a Microsoft Kinect movement sensor to follow gesture, and a microphone to capture word choice, modulation, and inflection. Every second, she’s noting and processing more than sixty different data points. She constantly scans vocal tone for signals of sadness, for example, with every word rated on a seven-point “openness” scale (that is, willingness to disclose revealing information). An array of algorithms then analyzes this data and helps provide a clearer picture of a patient’s
overall well-being.
“Ellie’s the third leg of the stool,” explains Rizzo. “For the past century, scientists only had good data about two of the three streams of information we can glean from people. There’s what people say about themselves, self-reporting, and what the body can tell us, biophysical data like heart rate and galvanic skin response. But there’s also behavior—our movements and facial expressions. These have always been hard to assess and, typically, we could only get at them through subjective observations. Ellie gathers objective, high-quality data.”
With her cameras, sensors, and algorithms, she extends our five senses and gets upstream of our umwelts—or reality as we perceive it. She bypasses our relentless storytelling and reflects back to us a little more of what we’re actually thinking and feeling.
And people prefer talking to Ellie14 than to actual humans. Even trained psychologists tend to judge. Ellie never does. In a 2014 study, the USC team discovered that patients were twice as likely to disclose personal information to her than to a human therapist. The researchers’ ultimate goal is to make her available via laptop, to anyone with a Wi-Fi connection.
AI therapists like Ellie are simultaneously more objective and more perceptive than humans and they can help us become the same. She gives us distance from our inner critic and a better understanding of what we’re perceiving in the present moment. In a very real sense, Ellie’s dispassionate reflection of who we are mimics the advantages conferred by ecstasis—the ability to look at ourselves from outside ourselves.
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