In a recent study, Apple and the speaker manufacturer Sonos16 took a deeper look at music’s power to connect. To track how much music people listened to at home (on average, four and a half hours a day) and what happened while they listened, they rigged thirty homes with Sonos speakers, Apple watches, Nest cams and iBeacons. When tunes were playing, the distance between housemates decreased by 12 percent, while chances of cooking together increased by 33 percent, laughing together by 15 percent, inviting other people over by 85 percent, saying “I love you” by 18 percent, and, most tellingly, having sex by 37 percent.
This also explains why the honor of opening the main stage at Portugal’s 2014 Boom Festival—essentially Europe’s version of Burning Man—didn’t go to a movie star or rock star or famous DJ, and instead fell to Tony Andrews, a loudspeaker manufacturer. “About forty-five years ago,”17 Andrews told that audience, “I came to a place where I realized that . . . big sound can facilitate our communal mind moving to a place of . . . unity. I believe this is a really necessary step for humanity to take.”
Some 26,000 people attended Boom. As the entire festival grounds had been—thanks to Andrews and the Funktion-One team—wired for big sound, nearly every one of them could experience that communal mind shift together. “What we’re building in the Dance Temple,”18 explained one of its designers, “is a piece of tech to disintegrate peoples’ egos en masse.”
And this is the biggest change that new technology has afforded. Drums and voices only carry so far. There are only so many people you can cram into a cave or a church. But 26,000 people is somewhere between a large town and a small city. Electronic festivals in Las Vegas and Miami pack in over a quarter of a million. Never before have so many people been able to come together and follow the beat right out of their minds.
The Digital Shaman
One of Tony Andrews’s collaborators at Boom Festival was Android Jones, an unassuming visual artist with a knack for arresting images. A veteran of George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic, as well as the first non-Japanese illustrator at the legendary game maker Nintendo, Jones has established himself19 as one of the most prolific creators in the visionary art scene.
Combining a classical fine arts education with the power of digital software, Jones creates images that defy easy categorization: archetypal deities overlaid with fractal geometries, cosmic lovers projected across giant galaxies, and ornate masks stretched across crystalline hillsides. At Boom fest, he “live-painted” his images onto huge screens as dancers writhed and stomped: creating an animated stained glass window for the Church of Trance. In the same way that Funktion-One is fine-tuning soundscapes, Jones is extending the impact of visual art.
Since 2011, he has partnered with Obscura Digital to project his images onto iconic public buildings around the world. On the Sydney Opera House,20 for instance, he live-painted during a performance by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. He’s also transformed the Empire State Building, the United Nations headquarters, and most recently, St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican. “Digital projection mapping has created unparalleled possibilities,” Jones says. “It takes art out of museums and brings it directly to people going about their daily lives. The scale of access it provides outpaces anything available in the past.”
In the past, sacred art was viewable only in sacred places. If you wanted to look at prehistoric bulls, you’d have to descend into the caves of Lascaux. Only the faithful making the pilgrimage to Rome could view Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel in situ. The fact that Jones’s artwork lives in a computer file and not stretched on canvas offers many more opportunities for display. When the goddess Kali is forty stories high on the side of the Empire State Building or a god’s-eye montage of the planet’s history is projected onto the side of the Vatican—people can encounter the sacred in the midst of the mundane.
And visionary art is not only becoming much more accessible; with the Internet, it’s becoming interactive as well. “It’s impossible to separate the feedback I get, online or in person, from the creative process itself,” says Jones. “It’s no longer just a one-way experience. I get all this nonverbal feedback—likes, shares, etc.—that directly informs the work.”
The feedback isn’t all “likes” and retweets, either. Android frequently reinterprets religious symbols and sacred iconography, riffing on thousands of years of culturally loaded imagery. For this, Jones has been dubbed a “pop shaman,” but not everyone welcomes the impact his high-fidelity visuals can have. Beginning with his Empire State and UN installations, and then spiking after the exhibit at the Vatican, Android has spawned a lively cottage industry of YouTube conspiracies. He stands accused of everything from smuggling pagan idolatry into the Church’s holy sites to programming unsuspecting minds with images from the Illuminati. One particularly cautious whistle-blower considered Jones’s art so psychoactive that he wrote “I cannot even continue to view these images, even for the purposes of alerting others as to their true intent.”
“At first I was laughing it off,” explains Jones, “how funny people are and desperate to make meaning—making random speculations. But it isn’t just speculation. There’s something happening [to viewers] on an objective level.”
Research conducted at Stanford supports Jones’s hunch. A 2012 study found that encounters with perceptual vastness, be it the endless spiral of galaxies in the night sky or Jones’s’ larger-than-life projections, triggers a self-negating, time-dilating sense of awe. And this happens automatically—which means an encounter with Jones’s projections could be enough to drive subjects into a deeply altered state, willingly or not.
In March 2015, Jones upped the impact of his work even further. Joining forces with a group of Russian monks living in Thailand (who, improbably, happened to be tech whizzes), he moved from projecting his art onto flat 2-D surfaces into fully immersive 3D experiences. The coder-monks crafted Jones’s original media files into a string of modular scenes. When stitched together and projected onto the smooth 360-degree canvas of an enclosed geodesic dome, the screen seems to extend far beyond the physical space. Rather than looking up at the curved vault of the Sistine Chapel to view a singular mural, you can now walk through an immersive and infinitely changeable landscape, a dream state filled with gods and demons, stardust and galaxies, and anything else Jones can dream up.
“After working in this 3D immersive space,” he admits, “it’s really challenging to go back to creating images that are on a rectangle hanging on a wall. I never realized how limiting the frames were.” And he’s not the only one exploring these possibilities.
Virtual and augmented reality companies like Oculus and Magic Leap are attracting outsize media and investor attention as everyone rushes into the landscape beyond frames and screens. They are early indicators of a new way of consuming content that increasingly blurs the boundaries between what is real and what is simulated. But perhaps more than any other artist, Jones is taking advantage of this technology to knock people out of their normal frames of reference, and give them a glimpse of ecstasis.
His most recent project, appropriately named MicroDoseVR, is an immersive VR game offering an atom’s-eye tour through many of Shulgin’s alphabetamine compounds. Zooming through that digital world, surrounded by deep trance music and the actual “molecules of desire,” the simulation is more than enough to knock you out of regular awareness. “That’s probably the real value of these experiences,” explains Jones. “They take us out of our conditioned world. They open a realm of everything else we might never have experienced and only dreamed of. You think you know where the boundaries are, but you see this stuff and think, if this thing I’m looking at is possible, what else might be possible?”
Enlightenment Engineering
In 2011, Mikey Siegel,21 an MIT- and NASA-trained roboticist, was living in Silicon Valley and working his dream job. “It was engineering heaven. I got to build robots, design systems, code software, create my own experiments, and they paid me really well. I had a long li
st of everything I thought I wanted and everything on that list was ticked off.” But “everything” wasn’t cutting it.
Siegel felt anxious and unfulfilled, like his life had little substance, like, as he explains, “his soul was bankrupt.” So he did what the unfulfilled have often done: went on a quest. He trekked through the jungles of South America and visited ashrams in India. His perspective shifted, but the vision he’d been questing for never arrived.
That changed on a ten-day meditation retreat in the California desert. It was day seven and participants were seventy minutes into a focus exercise, trying to pay attention to bodily sensations without passing judgment. But Siegel was overwhelmed by sensations. After a week of cross-legged meditation, his back ached, his neck throbbed, and his thighs were numb. “It was an all-consuming pain,” he explains, “and all I was doing was judging.”
And then he wasn’t. Something inside him shifted. The part of his brain that had been judging suddenly turned off. “It felt like freedom,” he explains. “If pure freedom feels like anything, that’s what I was feeling. It was the most clear, present, and aware I had ever been. And if I could be in extreme pain and still remain peaceful and clear, then I thought maybe other people could do this, too. In that instant, everything I believed about human potential shifted.”
It felt like a life-changing realization. But when Siegel got home from that retreat and returned to his normal routine, he couldn’t integrate what he’d learned. It didn’t matter how dedicated he was: the meditation practices he was trying to use were designed in a different time and for a different world. “In the world I lived in,” he says, “I was surrounded by technology and information that seemed to be pulling me in a very different direction.”
That’s when Siegel realized that meditation was simply a tool meant to provoke a very specific reaction in the brain, but it wasn’t the only tool available. In fact, considering all the recent advances in brain science and wearable sensors, meditation was pretty low-tech. So Siegel decided to build better tools, birthing the field that has come to be called “enlightenment engineering.”
One of his early prototypes converted heart rate into audio tone. He was building on older research that showed prayer, yoga, and meditation could produce clear changes in heart rate. ’“I wore the thing for three days straight,” recounts Siegel, “even when I slept. It was annoying. Beep, beep, boo, beep—and on and on. But, at the end of that period, just by working with this very thin slice of audio feedback, I learned to control my heartbeat. I could move it from forty beats per minute up to eighty and back again. It wasn’t much more than a novelty toy, but it showed me what might be possible.”
Since then, research has exploded. “Scientists all over the world are exploring contemplative practices,” Siegel explains. “They’re mapping a territory. And a whole slew of researchers, myself included, have begun using that map to create what you could call ‘tech-assisted self-awareness devices,’ or devices that can help us tune our internal environments.”
In his work with heart rate variability, Siegel’s found that by upgrading the tone to include a visual display, and adding in an EEG layer—so there’s neurofeedback to go along with the biofeedback—he can get whole groups of people to synchronize their heart rates and brainwaves and drive them into group flow. His new challenge is to take this same technology and make an affordable version that’s available to everyone.
He’s also been moving beyond heart rate investigating ultrasound, transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct stimulation. These devices shoot pulses into the brain, and can turn on and off cortical regions with relative precision. “Right now,” he says, “it’s early days. So we have stuff that can make you feel like you’ve drunk a glass of wine. It’s not quite what decades of meditation training can produce, but it’s legitimate, reliable, and repeatable state change.”
Since Siegel was living in Silicon Valley, he was obliged to form a company, Consciousness Hacking,22 around these ideas. He, alongside Nichol Bradford and Jeffery Martin, also cofounded the Transformative Technology Conference23 and started organizing consciousness-hacking meet-ups. In about nine months, with exactly zero spent on marketing, what began with a handful of people in one Northern California location has become a network of more than ten thousand people in twenty-three locations worldwide. In June 2015, his efforts scored him a feature in The New Yorker.24 Stanford University has taken notice, too—Siegel is now teaching courses on this emerging field to undergraduates.
“For the past three hundred years,” Siegel explains, “there has been a split between science and religion. But now we have the ability to investigate this domain and innovate around spirituality. And whether you’re judging by the growth of our meet-ups, the millions of dollars hitting this market, or the technology that’s already available, lots of us are really interested in spiritual innovation.
And, if Siegel’s predictions are correct, we’ve barely scratched the surface. “Consciousness-hacking technology is going to become as dynamic, available, and ubiquitous as cell phones. Imagine what happens if we can use personal technology to shift these experiences on demand, to support and catalyze the most important changes we can make at scale. More and more it’s looking like we can retune the nervous system of the entire planet.”
The Flow Dojo
Across the board, we’re seeing an explosion in technologies that provide more people with more access to ecstasis than before. We now have sports equipment that gives mere mortals the chance to cheat death and chase flow, sound systems that entrance and entrain hundreds of thousands of people at once, immersive art that transforms waking reality into an interactive dream state, and biohacking tools that steer us towards tech-enabled transcendence. Each of these breakthroughs makes stepping outside of ourselves, easier, safer, and more scalable than ever.
Despite these developments, there’s still a lot of untapped potential. Part of the trouble is that all of these disciplines—sport, music, art and biotech—have distinct subcultures and favored applications. While it’s fairly common to see a couple of these combined—music and visuals are an obvious pairing, as are athletics and wearable sensors—putting them all together into one deliberately designed experience isn’t typically done.
But it can be. As powerful as these advancements are independently, when blended together, their impact is amplified considerably. It’s why, over the past several years, we’ve been collaborating with some of the top experience designers, biohackers, and performance specialists to help develop the Flow Dojo— a training and research center25 explicitly designed to merge these technologies in one place. Equal parts Cirque du Soleil, X Games, and hands-on science museum, it’s a learning lab dedicated to mapping the core building blocks of optimum performance.
In the fall of 2015, we had the opportunity to bring a prototype of the Dojo to Google’s26 Silicon Valley headquarters and engage in a joint-learning project. For six weeks, a handpicked team of engineers, developers, and managers committed to a flow training program, and then capped that off with two weeks in a beta version of the training center.
The premise was simple: if you train your body and brain, and manage your energy and attention, you’ll be able to get into flow more frequently and perform better at work and at home. Each day, participants engaged in a range of activities, from sleep tracking, to diet and hydration, to functional movement (designed to undo the imbalances of deskbound lives), to brain entraining audio and respiration exercises. With just those basic practices, subjects reported a 35 to 80 percent increase in incidents of flow during their workdays. The bigger surprise for the engineers was that they also experienced more flow at home, where family dynamics were frequently less rational and predictable than the algorithms they played with at work. ’
Once that foundation was in place, we got to the interesting part—the Dojo itself. In our research for The Rise of Superman, we had interviewed more than two hundred professional and elite a
dventure athletes to figure out their secret to getting into flow so readily. Time after time, they told us it came down to two things: the right triggers and gravity.
And that’s where the team began the design of the Flow Dojo. Was it possible to use technology to simulate those conditions in a safer and more accessible way? Could we take a page out of Alan Metni’s iFly book and re-create the embodiment, and consequences that the world’s best flow hackers relied on, to give regular folks a taste of the state? By combining Tony Andrew’s sound design, Android Jones’ digital imagery and Mikey Siegel’s brain tech, could we construct a novel and interactive environment? If so, we could guide users into peak states, and researchers could capture invaluable data along the way. This would provide a unique opportunity to study the impact of wearables, experience design, and user biometrics, all in the same place. We could literally start reverse-engineering the genome of peak performance states.
So, we brought together a team of engineers to develop kinetic training gear that could deliver those experiences—think extreme playground equipment built for grown-ups. Giant looping swings that send you upside down and twenty feet off the ground, and pull more than three g’s when you push through the arc’s bottom. Momentum-powered gyroscopes and surf swings, complete with Doppler sound effects and LED cues, that let you flip, spin, and twist without risking a hospital visit.
The designers also integrated sensors and audio-visual feedback into the gear, so users get real-time data on physics (like g-force, RPM, and amplitude) and personalized biometrics (like EEG, HRV, and respiration). Taking that kind of data off smart watches and laptops—and away from the conscious mental processing of the prefrontal cortex—gets users out of themselves and into the zone with less distraction.
Even so, when Sergey Brin, one of Google’s cofounders, stepped up to the looping swing, we were unsure how it was going to go. Brin is an action sports enthusiast, pursuing everything from BASE jumping to kitesurfing. At the TED conference a few years ago, he also topped the leaderboard on an EEG mindfulness training demo. So, while he already had some experience in both the physical and mental elements of this training, he had never put the two together.
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