Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

The Indian philosopher Nisargadatta summed up the dilemma well: “Love tells me I am everything. Wisdom tells me I am nothing.28 And between these two banks, flows the river of my life.”

When neuroscientists at DARPA and Advanced Brain Monitoring43 used a different technique—neurofeedback—to prompt flow, they found that soldiers solved complex problems and mastered new skills up to 490 percent faster than normal.

The phrase “worth his salt” refers to the days of Rome, when soldiers were paid in this essential mineral.

Turns out, we’d rather die than change.

down this sense). After Lilly began using these tanks to explore the effects of LSD and ketamine on consciousness, they fell out of favor with the establishment and devolved into a countercultural curiosity. But here they were again, in the red-hot center of the military-industrial complex, being used to train supersoldiers.

The Rise of Superman, a book about the neuroscience of peak performance and action sports.

“Games are a multi-billion dollar industry that employ the best neuroscientists42 and behavior psychologists to make them as addicting as possible,” Nicholas Kardaras, one of the country’s top addiction specialists, recently explained to Vice. “The developers strap beta-testing teens with galvanic skin responses, EKG, and blood pressure gauges. If

2012, psychologist Michael Mithoefer discovered that even a single dose28 of MDMA can reduce or cure post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in survivors of child abuse, sexual abuse, and combat.

The people really good at finding flow, mostly artists and athletes, were rarely interested in studying it. And the people interested in studying flow, primarily academics, were rarely good at finding it.