Quotes from Steven Kotler

With the prefrontal cortex down-regulated, most impulse control mechanisms go offline too. For people who aren't used to this combination, the results can be expensive.

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.

Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs most is more people who have come alive.

His em-tracking machinery is driven by words more than images, but that's only his make and model. Empathy is related to intuition, and intuition is individually customized, tuned to dominant talents. Chefs need tastes, painters images. His experience is biblical: It starts with logos.

No one wants distortion, but choosing itself is the distortion.

Motivation is what gets you into this game; learning is what helps you continue to play; creativity is how you steer; and flow is how you turbo-boost the results beyond all rational standards and reasonable expectations. That, my friends, is the real art of impossible.

Lion was the one who pointed out that naming hotels after Millennial values -- the Truth, the Purpose, the Community -- now that his generation had reached the age where the luxury of billboard ethics had been derailed by the verities of life, might be lucrative. Aspirational nostalgia, he dubbed it.

Howard Thurman once said, "Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs most is more people who have come alive.

animals are often fed mechanically, so their only human contact comes, and this is only in the case of breeder dogs, in the form of artificial insemination and, nine weeks later, a pair of hands snatching babies away. If Dante

what is genuine emotion and what is business strategy. The modern condition.

the upper echelon of adventure sport athletes are grappling with the fundamental properties of the universe: gravity, velocity and sanity. They're toying with them, cheating death, refusing to accept there might be limits to what they can accomplish.

Words are too recent an imprinting. Animals, though, are part of our ancient grammar, prehistorically embedded in the brain.

Fully alive and deeply committed is a risky business.

Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code.

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.

Abraham Maslow once famously said,22 "When all you've got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." What he meant was, when it comes to problem-solving, we tend to get locked into using familiar tools in expected ways.

All you can do is your inch. We grab everyone we can carry, put each other onto our backs, and crawl toward the future. Inch by inch—it's all we can do.

Perhaps you will live along some distant day into the answer

Experiencing the selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness of nonordinary states of consciousness can accelerate learning, facilitate healing, and provide measurable impact in our lives and work. But we have to revise or tactics and upend convention to make the most of those advantages.

Nothing's too gnarly.

Most of our fears and most of our anxieties don't exist in the present

We all see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness

transient hypofrontality removes our sense of self. With parts of the prefrontal cortex deactivated, there's no risk assessor, future predictor, or inner critic around to monitor the situation. The normal safety measures kept in place by the conscious mind are no longer. This is another reason why flow states significantly enhance performance: when the "self" disappears, it takes many of our limits along for the ride.