I didn’t come from a religious background. Growing up, everything was proof-driven. If you couldn’t see it, couldn’t experience it, it didn’t exist. … - Steven Kotler

He’d uncovered one of the early subcult melds, the first internet generation to carve their identity from a global menu of counterculture. Style-wise, they borrowed saggy hip-hop gear from West Coast rappers, cartoonish Gyaru makeup from the Japanese cosplay scene, and angular Emo hairstyles from the Washington, DC, post-hard-core crowd. Their attitudes crossed anything-goes California bisexuality with edgy Brit-punk sneer, a combination that led to a completely novel form of rebellion: wet-kissing strangers on the street.

In an environment of turbulent change, as de Geus famously wrote: “The ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage.

Theodore Berger, for example, a neural engineer at the University of Southern California, is working on an artificial hippocampus, one of the core neuronal structures implicated in this process. Berger’s device records the electrical activity that arises whenever we encode short-term memories — for example, learning to play scales — then translates them into digital signals.