Self-described epiphany addict

"I often describe myself as an epiphany addict and what I mean by that is that I feel that I am most alive, and I think most people can relate to this feeling, I feel like I am at my most alive when I have these profound moments of revelation and understanding, these moments when the gestalt is revealed, when I see something in a new way, when a pattern is revealed."

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JasonSilva @JasonSilva and @notthisbody Special thanks to filmmaker/photographer Rob Whitworth for allowing a clip from his video (https://vimeo.com/32958521) to be featured. Check out his website: www.robwhitworth.co.uk My videos: Beginning of Infinity - http://vimeo.com/29938326 Imagination - http://vimeo.com/34902950 INSPIRATION: The Imaginary Foundation says "To Understand Is To Perceive Patterns"... Albert-László Barabási, think about NETWORKS: “Networks are everywhere. The brain is a network of nerve cells connected by axons, and cells themselves are networks of molecules connected by biochemical reactions. Societies, too, are networks of people linked by friendships, familial relationships and professional ties. On a larger scale, food webs and ecosystems can be represented as networks of species. 'For decades, we assumed that the components of such complex systems as the cell, the society, or the Internet are randomly wired together. Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, writes about recurring patterns and networks: “Coral reefs are sometimes called “the cities of the sea”, and we need to take the metaphor seriously: the reef ecosystem is so innovative because it shares some defining characteristics with actual cities. These patterns of innovation and creativity are fractal: they reappear in recognizable form as you zoom in and out, from molecule to neuron to pixel to sidewalk. Whether you’re looking at original innovations of carbon-based life, or the explosion of news tools on the web, the same shapes keep turning up... when life gets creative, it has a tendency to gravitate toward certain recurring patterns, whether those patterns are self-organizing, or whether they are deliberately crafted by human agents” “Put simply: cities are like ant colonies are like software is like slime molds are like evolution is like disease is like sewage systems are like poetry is like the neural pathways in our brain. Everything is connected. "...Johnson uses ‘The Long Zoom’ to define the way he looks at the world—if you concentrate on any one level, there are patterns that you miss. When you step back and simultaneously consider, say, the sentience of a slime mold, the cultural life of downtown Manhattan and the behavior of artificially intelligent computer code, new patterns emerge.” Geoffrey West, from The Santa Fe Institute, "...Network systems can sustain life at all scales, whether intracellularly or within you and me or in ecosystems or within a city.... If you have a million citizens in a city or if you have 1014 cells in your body, they have to be networked together in some optimal way for that system to function, to adapt, to grow, to mitigate, and to be long term resilient." Author Paul Stammetts writes about The Mycelial Archetype: He compares the mushroom mycelium with the overlapping information-sharing systems that comprise the Internet, with the networked neurons in the brain, and with a computer model of dark matter in the universe. "Adrian Bejan takes the recurring patterns in nature—trees, tributaries, air passages, neural networks, and lightning bolts—and reveals how a single principle of physics, the Constructal Law, accounts for the evolution of these and all other designs in our world. Everything—from biological life to inanimate systems—generates shape and structure and evolves in a sequence of ever-improving designs in order to facilitate flow. River basins, cardiovascular systems, and bolts of lightning are very efficient flow systems to move a current—of water, blood, or electricity. Geoffrey WEST on The sameness of organisms, cities, and corporations: http://blog.ted.com/2011/07/26/qa-with-geoffrey-west/ Stephen Johnson’s LONG VIEW http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08games.html?pagewanted=all http://dumbofeather.com/blog/post/on-slime-molds-and-sewage-steven-johnson-s-origin-of-the-idea/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/oct/19/steven-johnson-good-ideas?cat=science&type=article A collaboration of /Jason Silva and /Notthisbody incorporating: /Aaron Koblin /entpm /Andrea Tseng /Genki Ito /ItoWorld /Dominic /Cheryl Colan /TheNightElfik /Paulskiart /Grant Kayl /blyon /resonance /gtAlumniMag /Katie Armstrong /Page Stephenson /Jesse Kanda /Jared Raab /Angela Palmer /elliottsellers /flight404 /Pedro Miguel Cruz /Takuya Hosogane /kimpimmel /Rob Whitworth **and some original animations from Tiffany Shlain's film CONNECTED: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology // music is Clint Mansell's "We're going home" from Moon Soundtrack. Buy it on iTunes!

And when dopamine floods our system, from what I understand, we come alive because it immediately arrests our attention and our senses are heightened and all of a sudden that which is of the everyday, which is stale and invisible, is pushed aside and everything becomes as if seen for the first time. And there is a kind of rhapsody to that.

There’s something kind of amazing when we can transcend what Michael Pollan calls the “been there’s and done that’s of the adult mind” - in other words, jaded. To me being jaded is almost like being dead. Like, oh my god, nothing impresses you because you feel like you’ve seen it all before, and you go through life with basically dark lens on, the curtains closed, no light gets in, no rhapsody gets in, and to me that’s death.

"The same way that a pilot has longitude coordinates when he is in the sky to orient him as he is in flight, so too does the psychedelic tripper needs to have signals, set and setting, to control the orientation of his trip. And what I thought was fascinating is that you could take those tools and techniques and apply them to non-tripping minds too. Normal consciousness is still affected by set and setting. Stephen Johnson says our thoughts shape our spaces and our spaces return the favor”. So I think a lot of it has to do with the environments you put yourself in, the people you surround yourself with, the routines, the songs that you listen to, all of these artful aesthetic choices you make about your surroundings work to induce the subjective spaces that we desire. And those that don’t incorporate those elements I think miss out on the power that they have to basically control their experience."

Advice to younger self
"I would encourage my younger self to just not be afraid, to realize that a lot of things that were - I don’t want to say crippling anxieties, but definitely ever-pervasive fears in my life growing up, a lot of them were unnecessary. A lot of time was wasted, a lot of energy was wasted being worried and I wish I could just let go of that and encourage myself to let go a little more."