Steven Kotler Quotes

Pitch black again. Like someone extinguished an angel.

A “rich environment” is a combination platter of novelty, unpredictability, and complexity — three elements that catch and hold our attention much like risk. Novelty means both danger and opportunity. To our forbearers, a strange scent in the wind could be prey or predator, but either way it paid to pay attention. Unpredictability means we don’t know what happens next, thus we pay extra attention to what happens next. Complexity, when there’s lots of salient information coming at us at once, does more of the same.

I rap for the trees...for the trees have no tongues.

As journalist Nancy Gibbs once quipped in Time magazine, “IQ gets you hired, but EQ gets you promoted.

When deeply religious subjects view sacred iconography or reflect on their notion of God, brain scans reveal hyperactivity in the caudate nucleus, a part of the pleasure system that correlates with feelings of joy, love, and serenity. But Lindstrom and Calvert found that this same brain region lights up when subjects view images associated with strong brands like Ferrari or Apple.

While we've painted the guardians of the pale in a somewhat reactionary light, let's give the gatekeepers their due. What lies beyond the pale isn't always safe and secure. Outside the fence of state-sanctioned consciousness, there are, to be sure, peaks of profound insight and inspiration. But there are also the swamps of addiction, superstition, and groupthink, where the unprepared can get stuck.

The Greeks called that sudden understanding anamnesis. Literally, “the forgetting of the forgetting.

Flow is more than an optimal state of consciousness — one where we feel our best and perform our best — it also appears to be the only practical answer to the question: What is the meaning of life? Flow is what makes life worth living. “There are moments that stand out from the chaos of the everyday as shining beacons,” wrote Csikszentmihalyi, alongside psychologist Susan Jackson, in Flow in Sports. “In many ways, one might say that the whole effort of humankind through millennia of history has been to capture these fleeting moments of fulfillment and make them part of everyday existence.