# Stealing Fire  ## Metadata - Author: [[Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal]] - Full Title: Stealing Fire - Category: #books ## Highlights - “The alternative is unconsciousness,1 the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.” —David Foster Wallace ([Location 131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=131)) - Plato described ecstasis as an altered state where our normal waking consciousness vanishes completely, replaced by an intense euphoria and a powerful connection to a greater intelligence. Contemporary scientists have slightly different terms and descriptions. They call the experience “group flow.” “[It’s] a peak state,” explains psychologist Keith Sawyer in his book Group Genius,4 “a group performing at its top level of ability. . . . In situations of rapid change, it’s more important than ever for a group to be able to merge action and awareness, to adjust immediately by improvising.” ([Location 168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=168)) - “More than any other skill,” he explains, “SEALs rely on this merger of consciousness. Being able to flip that switch—that’s the real secret to being a SEAL.” ([Location 181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=181)) - The technical term SEALs use to describe these conditions is VUCA—Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. ([Location 200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=200)) - “At every step of the training,” says Davis, “from the first day of BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALs) through their last day in DEVGRU, we are weeding out candidates who cannot shift their consciousness and merge with the team.” ([Location 210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=210)) - When someone steps up to become the new leader, everyone, immediately, automatically, moves with him. It’s the only way we win.” ([Location 224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=224)) - This “dynamic subordination,” where leadership is fluid and defined by conditions on the ground, is the foundation of flipping the switch. ([Location 225](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=225)) - He also employed a time-tested bonding technique: getting drunk. Before deployment, he’d take his team out to a local Virginia Beach bar for one final bender. If there were any simmering tensions between members, they’d invariably come out after a few drinks. By morning, the men might be nursing headaches, but they’d be straight with each other and ready to function as a seamless unit. ([Location 231](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=231)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Someone who could, in the New York Times’ John Markoff’s assessment,13 “discipline Google’s flamboyant, self-indulgent culture, without wringing out the genius.” ([Location 295](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=295)) - Made from two commas set back to back, ([Location 314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=314)) - And like the SEALs flipping the switch, the Googler’s “communal vocational ecstasy” relies on changes in brain function. “Attending festivals like Burning Man,”17 explains Oxford professor of neuropsychology Molly Crockett, “practicing meditation, being in flow, or taking psychedelic drugs rely on shared neural substrates. What many of these routes have in common is activation of the serotonin system.” ([Location 325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=325)) - we lose ourselves in a state of physiological arousal and neurochemical saturation. Put bluntly, we watch porn to get high, not to get laid. ([Location 498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=498)) - “Current was great,” he explains, “but most of what I did was read pop culture stories from a teleprompter. I didn’t get to go off on crazy soliloquies, which meant I was cut off from flow. All that neurosis came flooding back. ([Location 554](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=554)) - “[T]he self “is not an unmitigated blessing,”6 writes Duke University psychologist Mark Leary in his aptly titled book, The Curse of the Self. “It is single-handedly responsible for many, if not most of the problems that human beings face as individuals and as a species . . . [and] conjures up a great deal of personal suffering in the form of depression, anxiety, anger, jealousy, and other negative emotions.” ([Location 591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=591)) - “This peacefulness may result from the fact,” continues Leary, that “without self-talk to stir up negative emotions, the mystical experience is free of tension.” And with tension out of the way, we often discover a better version of ourselves, more confident and clear. ([Location 607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=607)) - That’s the paradox of selflessness—by periodically losing our minds we stand a better chance of finding ourselves. ([Location 627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=627)) - People who see my videos often ask how I can find all those connections between ideas. But the reason I can find them is simple: without time in the picture, I have all the time I need.” ([Location 670](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=670)) - When John Hagel,22 the cofounder of Deloitte consulting’s Center for the Edge, made a global study of the world’s most innovative, high-performing business teams—meaning the most motivated teams on the planet—he too found that “the individuals and organizations who went the farthest the fastest were always the ones tapping into passion and finding flow.” ([Location 706](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=706)) - The Greeks called that sudden understanding anamnesis. Literally, “the forgetting of the forgetting.” A powerful sense of remembering. Nineteenth century psychologist William James experienced this during his Harvard experiments24 with nitrous oxide and mescaline, noting it’s “the extremely frequent phenomenon, that sudden feeling . . . which sometimes sweeps over us, having “been here before” as if at some indefinite past time, in just this place . . . we were already saying just these things.” And that feeling, of waking up to some ineffable truth that’s been in us all along, can feel deeply significant. In non-ordinary states, ([Location 718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=718)) - Note: white rabbit matrix, deja experiences, etc - 29 We experience the selflessness, timelessness, and effortlessness of transient hypofrontality. ([Location 736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=736)) - In these states, we get upstream of our umwelt. We get access to increased data, heightened perception, and amplified connection. And this lets us see ecstasis for what it actually is: an information technology. Big Data for our minds. ([Location 759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=759)) - We experience binding as “Ah-Ha insight,” that eureka moment, the telltale signature of sudden inspiration. This meant that meditation could amplify complex problem solving, but, since the monks needed to put in more than 34,000 hours (roughly thirty years) to develop this skill, it was a finding with limited application. ([Location 793](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=793)) - 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. ([Location 811](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=811)) - billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogens on a regular basis. These are people who are trying to be very disruptive. They look at problems in the world and they try to ask entirely new questions.” ([Location 836](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=836)) - But there is now seven decades of research, conducted by hundreds of scientists on thousands of participants, showing that when it comes to complex problem solving, ecstasis could be the “wicked solution” we’ve been looking for. ([Location 844](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=844)) - state-sanctioned states of consciousness. ([Location 1058](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1058)) - Or consider three substances that sit squarely inside the state’s pale: caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. The coffee break, smoke break, and happy hour are the most culturally enshrined drug rituals of the modern era, ([Location 1070](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1070)) - And that fence is the real reason Nutt lost his job. Even though the information he presented was considered, medical, and factual, it went against established norms and policies. It threatened approved channels of awareness and the substances that support them. Nutt ventured beyond the Pale of the State and ended up, professionally, burned at the stake. ([Location 1082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1082)) - When we lose ourselves and merge with the group, we are in danger of losing too much of ourselves. Our cherished rational individualism risks being overrun by the power of irrational collectivism. ([Location 1143](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1143)) - As Nietzsche said: “madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, political parties, nations and eras, it’s the rule.” And in ecstatic groups, it’s practically unavoidable. ([Location 1158](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1158)) - “No one dances sober, unless he is insane.” —Cicero ([Location 1166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1166)) - What Tolle is preaching is nothing less than the Gospel of STER. His core argument is that through the experience of selflessness, timelessness, and effortlessness—his so-called “Power of Now”—we can dwell in a place of unlimited richness. ([Location 1218](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1218)) - A tightly circumscribed, almost ritualized practice, OMing involves stroking the upper left quadrant of a woman’s clitoris for exactly fifteen minutes without attachment to outcome or expectation of reciprocity. Their goal is to create a “turned on” woman—one who is neurochemically saturated, physically open, and emotionally empowered. ([Location 1317](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1317)) - Generally happy people head in the opposite direction, dropping into REM at around 100 minutes. Britton discovered that NDEers delayed entry until 110 minutes—which meant that they were off the charts for happiness and life satisfaction. ([Location 1408](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1408)) - As Buddhist scholar Alan Watts put it, ‘Western scientists have an underlying assumption that normal is absolutely as good as it gets and that the exceptional is only for saints, that it is something that cannot be cultivated.’” ([Location 1456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1456)) - Right around middle age, for example, Kegan noticed that some people moved beyond generally well-adjusted adulthood, or what he called “Self-Authoring,” into a different stage entirely: “Self-Transforming.” Defined by heightened empathy, an expanded capacity to hold differing and even conflicting perspectives, and a general flexibility in how you think of yourself, self-transforming is the developmental stage we tend to associate with wisdom (and Roger Martin’s Opposable Mind). But not everyone gets to be wise. While it usually takes three to five years for adults to move through a given stage of development, Kegan found that the further you go up that pyramid, the fewer people make it to the next stage. ([Location 1487](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1487)) - In short, altered states can lead to altered traits. ([Location 1513](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1513)) - In a very real sense, Ellie’s dispassionate reflection of who we are mimics the advantages conferred by ecstasis—the ability to look at ourselves from outside ourselves. ([Location 1640](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1640)) - In the same way that multiple clocks on a wall end up synchronizing to the one with the biggest pendulum, emergent leaders can entrain their entire teams and create a powerful group flow experience. ([Location 1692](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1692)) - In nature, animals often get stuck in ruts, repeating the same actions over and over with diminishing returns. But interrupting this behavior is not easy. “The principle of conservation6 tends to rigidly preserve established schemes and patterns,” ([Location 1872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1872)) - “but modification (the search for new pathways) requires a depatterning instrument . . . capable of opposing—at least at certain determined moments—the principle of conservation. It is my impression that drug-seeking and drug-taking behavior, on the part of both humans and animals, enjoys an intimate connection with . . . depatterning.” ([Location 1875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1875)) - Even before PiHKAL, Sasha had that open-source impulse. ([Location 1974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1974)) - One of Grof’s main arguments was that during psychedelic states, our ego defenses are so diminished that we gain nearly direct access to the unconscious. That’s when it clicked. With tools like fMRI, Carhart-Harris could exploit this access—he could take pictures of the unconscious in real time. ([Location 1997](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=1997)) - “They were more correct than they knew. The ego is really just a network, and things like psychedelics, flow, and meditation compromise those connections. They literally dis-integrate the network.” ([Location 2021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2021)) - It’s a development that upends the closely guarded and often reactionary world of revealed truth and religious insight. ([Location 2071](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2071)) - It disempowers anyone tempted to escalate his position and privilege, and empowers everyone else to make sense of their own experiences. ([Location 2112](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2112)) - In August 2014, researchers at Stanford32 announced they had genetically engineered yeast to produce the painkiller hydrocodone. ([Location 2146](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2146)) - Pharmacology is such a potent force for ecstasis because it changes the nature of this game. With chemical cookbooks, rigorous neuroscience, crowdsourced lexicons, and now, democratized means of production, we’re freed from the geographic and cultural limitations we inherited. By giving us access to not just the botany of desire but the molecules of desire, we can continue to shape these compounds even as they inevitably shape us. It’s coevolution compressed from millennia into minutes. ([Location 2158](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2158)) - Today, iFly6 is in fourteen countries with over fifty-four tunnels and revenue nudging ten figures. Thousands and thousands of people who would never have considered jumping out of a perfectly good airplane or leaping off a cliff in a wingsuit have realized that dream, and done so safely. ([Location 2213](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2213)) - 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.” ([Location 2323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2323)) - 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.” ([Location 2358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2358)) - 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.” ([Location 2361](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2361)) - 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.” ([Location 2392](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2392)) - down to two things: the right triggers and gravity. ([Location 2420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2420)) - 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, ([Location 2427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2427)) - It’s why the SEALs say “you don’t ever rise to the occasion, you sink to your level of training” and then proceed to overtrain for every scenario possible. ([Location 2447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2447)) - “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” —William Blake ([Location 2476](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2476)) - By realizing that non-ordinary states are more than just a recreational diversion and can, in fact, heighten trust, amplify cooperation, and accelerate breakthroughs, a new generation of entrepreneurs, philanthropists and activists is fundamentally disrupting business as usual. ([Location 2765](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2765)) - One of Bob Kegan’s graduate students recently determined that by college, many Millennials have reached stages of adult development43 (with all their associated increases in capacity) that took their parents until middle age to attain. ([Location 2793](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2793)) - He disavowed experimenting on animal or human test subjects, concluding that self-experimentation was the only ethical way to explore the boundaries of the mind. ([Location 2934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2934)) - W. B. Yeats put it,14 “The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” ([Location 2962](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=2962)) - He penned The First Earth Battalion Operations Manual,26 making the case that deliberately cultivating nonordinary states, including the ability to experience universal love, to perceive auras, to have out of body experiences, ([Location 3032](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3032)) - Timelessness, devoid of reference points, can feel a lot like paranoid schizophrenia and has been a linchpin of solitary confinement for centuries. ([Location 3086](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3086)) - Alvin Toffler called the “experience economy.” This is why retail shops started to look like theme parks. Why, instead of stocking ammo on their shelves like Wal-Mart, the outdoor retailer Cabela’s turns their stores into a hunter’s paradise of big-game mounts, faux mountainsides, and giant aquariums. It’s how Starbuck’s can charge four dollars for a fifty-cent cup37 of coffee: because they’re providing that cozy “third place” between work and home. But we were at the Advertising Research Foundation38 to discuss the next step: the move from an experience economy to what author Joe Pine calls the “transformation economy.” In this marketplace, what we’re being sold is who we might become—or as, Pine explains: “In the transformation economy, the customer IS the product!” ([Location 3122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3122)) - In the same way that Google tailors searches based on our past histories and targeted ads follow us around the internet until we buy, we are entering an era where our cravings for transcendence can be used to co-opt our decision making. ([Location 3155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3155)) - why OneTaste has built an Orgasmic Meditation app ([Location 3207](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3207)) - In short, all the ingredients required for a rational mysticism. ([Location 3211](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3211)) - apophenia, “the tendency to be overwhelmed by meaningful coincidence,” and detecting patterns where others see none. ([Location 3255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3255)) - Contemporary psychonauts have even coined a term10 for this persistent distortion: eschatothesia—the perception of the Eschaton, or the end of the world. ([Location 3276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3276)) - And it’s not just would-be prophets who suffer from this distortion. Anyone who experiences the clarity and immediacy of ecstasis and tries to bring those insights back to reality has to account for the time lag. A surfer who in a flow state drops into a wave and strings together a series of moves he’s never pulled off before may need months of hard training to be able to reproduce them in a contest. ([Location 3280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3280)) - Note: superconsciousness - A musician who hears a fully formed symphony in her head during a meditation retreat could take the rest of her life to become skilled enough to actually play it. Which is fine if we anticipate it, ([Location 3284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3284)) - “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year,”11 Bill Gates once said, “and underestimate what they can do in ten.” ([Location 3286](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3286)) - And this is certainly true of the ecstatic way. All that “effortless effort” takes a lot of work. So do the hard thing and the rest becomes much easier: Enjoy the state, but be sure to do the work. And no matter how tempting it is: Don’t become a Bliss Junkie. ([Location 3304](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3304)) - For those exploring nonordinary states, there’s a similar danger. You can stay down too long, amazed at what you’re discovering. You also can become enraptured by the deep. ([Location 3326](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3326)) - “What one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits.” ([Location 3345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3345)) - Note: pshaw - This leaves us with four rules of thumb to carry into our exploration of these states. It’s not about you and it’s not about now help us balance ego inflation and time distortion. While don’t become a bliss junky and don’t dive too deep ensure that we don’t get seduced by the sensations and information that arise in altered states. ([Location 3350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3350)) - “I care not a whit for a man’s religion,” Abraham Lincoln once quipped, “unless his dog is the better for it.” ([Location 3410](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3410)) - For virtually all of evolutionary history, salts, sugars and fats were rare and precious. ([Location 3423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3423)) - Altered states are an information technology and what you’re after is quality data. If you spend all of your time blissed out, zenned out, drunk, stoned, sexed up, or anything else, then you’ve lost all the contrast that initially made those experiences so rich—what made them “altered” in the first place. By balancing inebriated abandon with monklike sobriety, ribald sexuality with introspective celibacy, and extreme risk-taking with cozy domesticity, you’ll create more contrast and spot patterns sooner. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,”24 William Blake once wrote. ([Location 3468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3468)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - There Is a Crack in Everything ([Location 3476](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3476)) - 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.” ([Location 3494](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3494)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Ecstasis doesn’t absolve us of our humanity. It connects us to it. It’s in our brokenness, not in spite of our brokenness, that we discover what’s possible. The Japanese get at this same idea with the concept of wabi sabi30—or the ability to find beauty in imperfection. ([Location 3506](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3506)) - In June 2016, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a paper pointing out serious flaws in the most widely used software algorithms that decode fMRI data, and that these algorithms might have resulted in false positives up to 70 percent of the time. If true, this would largely invalidate most studies conducted before 2015 ([Location 3605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GCCT3G6&location=3605))