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think of was education. Now all we have to watch is crap.”
    How will we sort the potential Edisons from the basement tinkerers? Will we all eventually have our lives recorded for posterity? And forget about the big moral issues, what of the more prosaic possibilities? The brother who takes a peek into his sister’s life and finds that she was a thief; the wife who discovers her husband’s betrayal; and the thousands of other secrets we withhold from one another. They call it disruptive technology for a reason. There may be a dark side to our desire for this kind of “soul-to-soul” union. Sometimes the very things meant to bring us closer together can, in fact, drive us farther apart. Sometimes, what the future holds, well, there’s really no telling.

Extreme States
    THE BIOLOGY OF SPIRITUALITY
This is a story about both the science of mystical experience and a tectonic shift in our understanding of ourselves. Before this work had been done, telling a psychologist that you’ve had an out-of-body experience was enough to get you locked in a padded cell. Today, this phenomenon is understood as the product of regular biology.
This alone is shocking, but it also tells us something far more important: That we have misdiagnosed the upper range of human experience. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, we have believed in the hedonic principle — that humans want to avoid pain and increase pleasure. But the experiences described herein are far more potent and peculiar than pleasure. They hint at an entirely different realm of possibility, a whole new universe tucked inside ourselves, a universe we are just beginning to explore.
The other thing worth mentioning is the incredible bravery of the researchers involved. We don’t think about it much today, but back when these efforts were getting going, delving into the “spiritual” was career suicide for scientists. And that’s another testament to these men and women. In less than two decades, their work has been so successful that they turned the taboo into the topical and thus paved the way for all generations to follow.

1.
    I was seventeen years old and terrified. The whole “let’s go jump out of an airplane” concept had been dreamed up at a Friday night party, but now I was Saturday-morning sober and somehow still going skydiving. Making matters worse, this was in 1984. While tandem skydiving was invented in 1977, the concept had yet to make its way to the backwoods airfield in mid-Ohio where I wound up. So my first jump wasn’t done with an instructor tethered to my back handling any difficulties we might encounter on the way down. Instead, I jumped alone, two thousand feet and falling, my only safety net an unwieldy old Army parachute dubbed a “round.”
    Thankfully, nobody expected me to pull my own ripcord. A static line, nothing fancier than a short rope, had been fixed between my ripcord and the floor of the airplane. If everything went according to plan, when I reached the end of my rope, the line would pull taut, and the tug would open the chute. It was just that getting to that point was a little more complicated.
    As the plane zipped along at a hundred miles per hour, I had to clamber out a side door, ignore the vertiginous view, step onto a small metal rung, vise-grip the plane’s wing with both hands, then lift one leg behind me, so that my body formed a giant T. From this awkward position, when my instructor gave the order, I had to jump. If things weren’t bad enough already, the moment I leaped out of the plane — somehow — I also leaped out of my body.
    It happened the second I let go of the wing. My body was already falling through space, but my
consciousness
was hovering about twenty feet away, just taking in the view.
    During training, the instructor had explained that rounds opened, closed, then opened again in the first milliseconds of deployment. He mentioned that this happened too fast for the human eye to see and that I shouldn’t