Can altered states of consciousness boost creativity, problem solving, and performance?
Getting poor sleep can badly damage your health, career, and relationships. Sleep specialist Dan Pardi explores the lesser known causes and solutions for poor sleep.
The Collective Insights Podcast is a voyage through the topics and technologies revolutionizing our individual and collective wellbeing.
Time. It’s the one thing in life you can never get back. And while it seems that people everywhere in today’s world are working harder and longer than ever, are they using their time as effectively as they could?
Neurohacking is the deliberate use of technology to upgrade the functioning of our brain and nervous system in every way to affects our conscious experience.
At Neurohacker Collective, we’re mapping the landscape of all the tools and technologies that radically improve mental wellbeing and performance.
Learning to control the breath is one of the most powerful (and free!) neurohacks we have for improving concentration, managing stress, developing optimal health, and guiding our spiritual advancement.
We are in the midst of an educational crisis, the scope of which professionals do not have measures or words to address. And so, they wring their hands about our kids’ math scores and the state of our schools. Understanding that our schools are in trouble is a start (and you don’t need the PISA to tell you that). Yet the intensity of the current educational crisis extends far beyond what most people have considered.
We live in remarkable times. We really do. We often don’t pause and reflect upon the amazing things we have created. We have self driving cars, and we carry computers in our pockets. It’s all pretty awesome, but it comes with a price. The price of this ubiquity of technology and convenience is distraction. We are more digitally distracted today than at any other time in our history, it’s all happened quite recently, and we haven’t had the time to adapt and evolve yet.
It is an imperative of both morality and self-preservation to improve our circumstances. British philosopher David Pearce’s 1995 work The Hedonistic Imperative speaks to this outrageous scope of suffering not so much being a condition of modernity, but more so a condition of being human.
To my mind neurohacking means using the best of what is known about how the brain and mind work from all fields and disciplines in the service of realizing humanity’s deepest potentials, starting with self-realization and moving outward.
Just about every civilization throughout history has practiced some form of neurohacking - deliberately upgrading their physiologies to positively affect their mind and psyche. The consumption of probiotic rich and fermented foods, for example, goes back over 10,000 years.
Today, the emerging field of human microbiome research has indicated that gut microbiota may play an important role in influencing brain development, behavior, and mood in humans.
If neurohacking is about upgrading the hardware our consciousness runs on, we would be remiss not to mention these technologies of altered states.
The world is more complex, more interconnected, the problems are bigger, they’re harder, and that means the people doing the problem-solving have to have capabilities that are commensurate with the scope and magnitude of the problems.
We may not immediately think of influencing the microbes in the gut when looking to improve brain function and mental health, but we should.
Nootropics. You might have heard of them. The “limitless pill” that keeps Billionaires rich. The ‘smart drugs’ that students are taking to help boost their hyperfocus. The cognitive enhancers that give corporate executives an advantage. All very exciting. But as always, the media are way behind the curve.
Whereas biohacking concentrates on the body, and consciousness hacking explores the inner experience, neurohacking is somewhere in the middle, focusing on the mind-brain interface - the intersection of neurology and consciousness. Specifically, neurohacking involves applying science and technology to influence the brain and body in order to optimize subjective experience.
