In 2010, IBM’s Institute for Business Value surveyed over 1,500 chief executives about the most important leadership competency for this new millennium. Creativity was the across-the-board’s winner. No surprise, right. But this begs the eternal question: when scaling up your business, where in the heck does one find good creative talent?

There’s lots of advice around, most of which is centered around a watch-and-wait kind of approach. See which people ask creative questions, see who comes up with interesting problem-solving solutions—that sort of thing.

And this is fine if you’re assembling a creative group within your organization to spearhead a project and already have an existing infrastructure and a lot of employees to choose from—but what if you’re starting from scratch? Building your business? How do you identify creative talent in a few quick rounds of interviews?

The short answer—talk to a skateboarder. The long answer… well, it’s long… and it starts with a Swarthmore University psychologist named Solomon Asch.

In the 1950s, Asch performed what has since become on of the classic experiments in social psychology. He was interested in the effects of peer pressure, so designed an experiment to test our willingness to follow the herd.

In Asch’s study, groups of 5-8 people were assembled. Only one subject was an actual subject—the rest were Asch’s co-conspirators. Everyone was seated in pair of rows, with the subject seated towards the back of the second row. They were then told they were participating in a “vision test,” in which they would be shown a card with a line on it, followed by another card with three lines on it (labeled A, B, C). The “goal” of this test was to guess which line (A, B, C) matched (in length) the first line shown.

For the first two round of the test everything proceeds like normal. The experimenter held up a card with, say, a two inch line. Then everyone, including the study subject, guessed the matching line correctly. The same thing happened on the second round. But on the third round, something funny unfolds. The presenter showed a two inch line on the first card. On the second card, line B was obviously the two inch line and both A and C are shorter or longer respectively. But all of the conspirators gave the wrong answer—claiming the shorter line (say a one inch line) actually matched the two-inch line.

The question was what would the study subject do? Will they go along with the herd and give the wrong answer or will they be willing to stand out from the crowd and give the right one?

There were 18 total rounds. In 12 of them conspirators gave the wrong answers. And our study subjects? 75 percent went along with the herd at least once. 32 percent went along every time. A stunning example of conformity.

When asked about their decisions later—none of the subjects had any idea why they made the choices they made. They didn’t realize they were intentionally picking the wrong line.  They thought they had given the correct answer.  Humans were sheep—that’s the moral of this story.

But in the early 2000s, Emory University neuroscientist Dr. Greg Berns decided to rerun Asch’s study, only this time inside an fMRI scanner. Instead of line length, Berms used rotational shapes…(he showed people two abstract 3-D shapes that were rotated with respect to one another. This was the only deviation from Asch’s study. Everything else was the same—including the result.

Again, subjects went along with the crowd. Again, they didn’t quite know why they did so. But when Berns look at the fMRI data, it told a different story.

When subjects studied the shape, there was activation in the visual processing regions of the brain. Simultaneously, both the parietal and temporal lobe showed activity (these were involved in reorganizing the shapes, essentially solving the rotational portion of the problem).  This was baseline data—exactly what we’d expect to see.

But when subjects conformed, something else occurred. The parietal cortex, which before had emitted a faint glow, was now lit up like a Christmas tree—the telltale sign of hard work being done.

“A plausible explanation,” writes Berns in his excellent book Iconoclast, “ is that the group’s wrong answers imposed a “virtual” image in the subjects mind. In the case of conformity, the image beat out the image originating from the subject’s own eyes, causing the subject to disregard her own perception and accept the groups.”

Now, there has always been considerable suspicion that we live in a world entirely constructed by our brain—our own private little Matrix—but Berns had confirmed this to a scary degree. Conformity, up to that point, had been thought of as a fear problem. The terror of standing out from one’s peer group and all that. But Bern’s data showed that conformity was also a perceptual problem—our brain literally showed us “false” data when that terror began to grip us.

Now, humans are social creatures and this neuronal reaction makes a certain amount of survival sense—but if our natural tendency is sheepishness and finding creatives is one of the top goals for any organization—well how exactly do you do that?

Berns asked a similar question. He had started to wonder about iconoclasts—which he defined as people who do something other say couldn’t be done. He was curious about the likes of Walt Disney, Ray Krok, Warren Buffet, Richard Branson and such. What was it about these innovators that allowed them to think differently?

Berns came to a number of conclusions, foremost among them an interesting fact: iconoclast don’t just think differently, they have different brains—literally. They don’t just think differently, they perceive differently.

Here’s how he explains it:

At every step in the process of visual perception, the brain throws out pieces of information and assimilates the remaining ones into increasingly abstract components. Experience plays a major role in this process. The human brain sees things in ways that are most familiar to it. But epiphanies rarely occur in familiar surroundings. They key to seeing like an iconoclast is to look at things that you have never seen before.

But there’s one step farther on this line. Certainly, finding someone who is constantly seeking out new sights, sounds, information—whatever, is a decent marker to look for when trying to hire creative employees. But to go one better, why not seek out someone who looks at the things they see everyday from constantly new angles—someone who sees the old as new again.

Now that’s real creativity, and this bring us  to skateboarding.

In a recent blog, I made the point that skateboarding is an extremely creative activity and that legendary skateboarder Danny Way has managed to stay atop this game for most of the past three decades, a period in which the sport went from a nascent, underground activity to a nearly five billion dollar industry. My point being that Way has had exceptional creative longevity in an arena that emphasizes novelty and youth—and this is no simple feat.

So how did he pull it off? Simple—just like Berns explained—he perceived things differently.

Sports that involve wheels—skateboarding, BMX riding, motocross, etc.—all do something very peculiar to the brain. And it happens fast. Usually around the point a novice begins to acquire their first bit of real skill, the world morphs. An entire new possibility space emerges. Instead of seeing a rock outcropping and thinking: “Oh, look, the majesty of nature.” The mountain bike rider says—“Oh look, the majesty of nature, can I ride my bike down that? Is that even possible? How can I make it possible?”

The same goes for skaters. As Danny Way explains: “I look at everything differently. My first thought is always—how can I skate that. With architecture, or urban planning, I see things no one really notices, subtle differences in materials, the shapes of stairs, tiny ornamental features that might mean interesting possibilities. It’s always can I skate that, how can I skate that, how can I skate that in a way that no one’s ever skated before. That’s the thought process. I just see the whole world as a playground.”

But, for our purposes, the most important point: This talent doesn’t just stay locked up in skating. “This creative way of looking at things impacts every aspect of my life,” continues Way,  “as a skater, as a businessman, a musician, when I’m with my kids—all of it.”

Creativity, then, is the downstream product of a long-term habit in altered perception. This is the only proven work-around for our sheepish tendencies. So if you’re trying to build a creative organization and looking over resumes, pay attention to past experiences. Hobbies and work. Look for those activities that require perceptual shifts for success. Have the potential employees been forced to train their brain to see things anew?

Without this forced training our innate tendency is think similarly. The world is either our playground or our prison, there’s just no other way to see things. So what are you looking for in potential employees?

Why a playground mindset, of course.

For similar content, subscribe to Steven’s email newsletter here.

Barbara Sahakian was curious. It was the middle 2000s and Sahakian, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge in England, got interested in high risk behavior.

Historically, scientists thought of risky behavior as a negative, associated with drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, even mania, but entrepreneurship threw a wrench in those works. Starting a new company requires a healthy tolerance for risk. It means betting resources and reputation on a significant unknown. “Entrepreneurs seem to represent a high-adaptive form of risk-taking behavior,” says Sahakian, “they can turn stressful decision-making into positive outcomes.”

To figure out what was going on, Sahakian assembled a collection of thirty-five businessmen. All were in their early fifties, all scored in similar percentiles on intelligence tests. But half of this group were entrepreneurial: having started at least two companies. The other half had not.

She gave her subjects two psychological assessments. The first measured what is called “cold decision making,” a kind of logical choosing where data is king and feelings play no part. The second measured “hot decision-making,” or decision-making in the face of risk, where emotions always play a significant factor.

“When a manager  is designing a new company branch,” says Sahakian, “that’s cold decision making. But when a VC has to pull the trigger on a multi-billion dollar investment. When it’s go or no time—that’s a hot, emotional decision.”

While both groups of test subjects scored in the exact same percentile for cold decision making, when it came to hot processes, the results couldn’t be more different. The managers were conservative. It was a betting game, and their wagers were low. But entrepreneurs showed a significant inclination for the big bet. Which, for a group of 51 year-olds, was pretty unusual.

“As we get older,” says Sahakian, “we loose our predilection for risk—this is very well established. But entrepreneurs don’t go this route. They make risky decisions like they were still 17-27 years old.”

In today’s world, where most every businessman needs a bit of the entrepreneurial spirit to thrive (some would say to survive), this raises the question of whether we can train the brain to be less risk adverse in the face of hot decisions.

Essentially, is it possible to turn middle managers into innovators.

“It’s a big question,” says Sahakian, “but no one is yet certain.” Risk taking is most frequently associated with the neurochemical dopamine, so this does suggest pharmacological interventions might be possible. That said,  the Parkinson’s drug L-Dopa (which raises dopamine levels) had the unintended consequence of turning patients into gambling addicts so dopamine alone may be the wrong stimulus.

An even bigger problem is that we don’t just want to take more risk when making hot decision, we want to make better hot decisions as well.

This is where entrepreneurs—or, more specifically, the scientists who study entrepreneurs—might want to investigate the world of action and adventure sports.

Over the past ten years, the level of danger has risen to such an extent in sports like big wave surfing, big mountain skiing, wingsuit flying, etc., that advanced practitioners often have to make very hot—my life depends upon it—decisions with zero margin for error. As action and adventure sports have become ridiculously popular over this same period, the number of people surviving these decisions has sky-rocketed as well. This bespeaks a tantalizing possibility: that training better hot decision-making is within the realm of the possible. So while it’s not yet known if these lessons can be applied to business, the lessons of high adrenaline say that there’s space to learn.

When Trish Herr became pregnant with her first daughter, Alex, she and her husband, Hugh, vowed to instill a bond with nature in their children. By the time Alex was five, her over-the-top energy levels led Trish to believe that her very young daughter might be capable of hiking adult-sized mountains.

Over the course of fifteen months, Alex and Trish embarked on a peakbagging spree, climbing all of New Hampshire’s 48 mountains whose summits rise higher than 4,000 feet. Their story is recounted in Herr’s recently released Up: A Mother and Daughter’s Peakbagging Adventure.

Trish was kind enough to answer a few of my questions via email:

Was there any moment during Alex’s quest when you felt, as a mother, that this was too dangerous an endeavor for a very young child?

Though there were moments of danger, the thought of giving up never occurred to me.  Sometimes it was necessary to turn around and go home, but we never thought any particular peak was unattainable.  Perhaps it wasn’t attainable on that particular day, but it would certainly be attainable later.  Such was my thinking, such is the girls’ thinking.  When you meet an obstacle, you might have to back down…but not permanently.  There will eventually be a way.

What would you say to the skeptics who feel the girls are too young?

Never dismiss someone’s abilities based on age. To do so is to engage in an act of prejudice. If a child says she wants to do something and is showing that she can physically handle it, then there’s no reason to hold her back. Spot and support her; don’t stand in her way.

It’s interesting that one of the first lessons Alex learned on the trail was about how much perspective shapes reality—a fairly heavy lesson for a five year old—how has this impacted her in the years since?

During our first couple years of hiking, when Alex was five and six, she was almost constantly greeted with surprise from adults on the trails.  She listened as hikers asked me questions about her ability and she watched as (thankfully few) people expressed negative assumptions.  Alex quickly learned to ignore those adults who could not see beyond their own limited experiences and expectations.  In short, she learned that attitude has a lot to do with accomplishment.  People who think things can be done generally find a way to do them.  People who think things can’t be done not only fail at the task at hand, but bristle when someone else manages to do it.  Alex now understands, firsthand, that the first step to accomplishment is believing that you’ll succeed.

You talk about “hiker’s high” in Up. Do you think this is the same as a flow state?

Based on my layperson’s interpretation of the literature, it certainly seems that ”hiker’s high” could be a flow state.

There is a myth (of sorts) that both animals and children live in a perpetual now—essentially a low-grade flow state—but the fact that Alex occasionally got a hiker’s high seems to disprove this notion?

Not necessarily.  Hypothetically, one could live in a “perpetual now” but still have one’s senses and emotions heightened after a lengthy period of exercise.

Since completing the 48, what’s next on Alex’s climbing agenda?

Alex recently finished hiking another round of the NH48, this time during calendar winters.  Next on the agenda are two long-term goals: highpointing and the “50 in 50.”  Highpointing is standing on the highest point of every state; as of right now, we’ve done 39 out of 50.  The “50 in 50″ is hiking and/or biking 50 miles in each of the 50 states.

In light of your experience, how much does society hamstring our children’s development by trying to keep them safe at all costs? What are the downstream impacts of this attitude?

It’s a mistake to try to keep children “safe at all costs.”  A child can’t learn how well she can balance, climb, jump, or run unless she’s given the freedom and opportunity to explore such movements on her own.  I’m not a child development expert, but I’m of the opinion that bubble wrapping a kid leads to a significant delay in that kid’s maturation and independence.  If you’re constantly hovering, then you’re constantly giving your child the message that you have no faith in her abilities.

What lessons do you feel your daughters have learned from their time hiking?

Many, so many!  Here’s a small handful: We live in a beautiful world; nature is worth preserving. Respect and admire wildlife. Different altitudes have different ecological niches. With hard work and sweat, one can achieve any goal. They (the girls) are strong, tough, and capable individuals. Ignore people who underestimate you. Listen to your instincts

Would you be disappointed if Alex or Sage told you she no longer wanted to hike?

Though I’d be disappointed to lose her/their very good company on the trails, I’d do my best not to let that show.  It’s important they pursue their passions.  If their passion becomes skiing, bike riding, swimming, etc., then so be it.  It’s my job to support them in whatever it is they want to do, as long as what they want to do is healthy.

On WallStreetJournal.com, the science writer Matt Ridley has penned a very interesting article on some of the ideas discussed in Abundance. Here are a few additional thoughts.

Ridley examines deflation, which he describes as a form of economic growth created, at least in part, by dematerialization. Here’s his example: “If the cost of, say, computing power goes down, then the users of computing power acquire more of it for less—and thus attain a higher standard of living.”

Of course, these days, dematerialization has shown up in dozens and dozens of industries—banking, cameras, stereos, encyclopedias, music, books, etc. Yet despite such progress, Ridley feels there are limits: “[C]ertain growing problems—such as caring for children and the elderly, or policing, or repairing freeways—won’t experience much dematerialization or deflation. And as dematerialized goods and services like communication get cheaper, these problems will increasingly dominate budgets, damping the acceleration.”

This may turn out to be the case, but there are certainly indicators that say otherwise. Take the DIY biology movement. The rapid acceleration in biotechnology has dropped the cost of a state of the art lab from over a million dollars just ten year ago, to less than ten thousand today. Taking advantage of this fact, DIY biologists are now beginning to solve real world problems. The winner of the 2008 IGEM competition (an MIT sponsored synthetic biology competition) built a vaccine against the virus that cause the most common form of ulcers. This type of syn bio DIY innovation is certain to have serious impact on the health and welfare of both the young and the old.

There’s also the recently announced Qualcomm “Tricorder” X Prize, which bestows $10 million dollars on the first team able to design a handheld device able to diagnose disease better than a board certified doctor. This will certainly help slash healthcare costs here at home, but in parts of the world where doctors are in short supply, this will bring a revolution in quality of care to children, the elderly, and everyone in between.

Then there’s robotics, where open source initiatives are already dematerializing costs. With a rapidly aging baby boomer population and nursing home price tags averaging between $40,000 and $85,000 annually, elderly care could easily bankrupt the nation. But many experts feel that robotic nurses are a fantastic solution (check out this Reuter’s video; or this article).

Or consider Matternet, a Singularity University spin-off attacking both of Ridley’s aforementioned problems—healthcare and freeway repair—simultaneously. Taking advantage of the fact that military-grade autonomous drones have dropped in price by nearly 99 percent over the past decade (radical demonetization), without much loss in functionality, Matternet is planning an AI-enabled network of UAVs and recharging stations housed in shipping containers scattered throughout roadless parts of Africa. Orders are placed via smart phone. For villages disconnected from the global transportation network, this means that everything from replacement parts for farm machinery to medical supplies can now be shipped in via a drone—for less than six cents per kilogram-kilometer.

There are other examples, of course, and ones that speak to Ridley’s other concerns. Dematerialization in autonomous drones has already impacted policing (as has dematerialization in video surveillance technology). Autonomous cars, meanwhile, threaten to dematerialize much of the transportation industry (taxi cabs and buses for starters). While these vehicles won’t banish the need for freeway repairs, they can be made several tons lighter than existing gas models, so will vastly reduce roadway wear and tear (and the need for freeway repairs).

None of this is to say that there won’t be issues ahead that will bog budgets and decelerate “official” progress, but with the newfound power of the DIY innovator we no longer have to wait for ”official progress,” for governments or large corporations to solve our problems. We can start to solve them ourselves. Which is, after all, the point.

Beyond the anecdotal, researchers have late begun trying to understand the science behind the states. In the 1980s, the consensus was that flow (or runner’s high as it was then known) was a byproduct of endogenous—meaning internal to the body—opioids called endorphins (Morgan 1985; Carr et al. 1981; Gambert et al. 1981; Farrell et al. 1982; Janal et al. 1984; Wildmann et al. 1986). These chemicals kill pain and produce happiness much like exogenous—meaning external to the body—opiates like morphine, opium, and heroin. There are at least twenty different endogenous opiods and most are not completely understood, but we do know that the analgesic power of the principle endorphins released during times of stress can be a hundred times stronger than morphine (Pert 1997).

But endorphins are only one small piece of a much larger puzzle. Extreme stress also causes the release of enkephalins, a neurotransmitter similar to endorphins in analgesic ability, but also responsible for modulating mood-enhancing and performance-enhancing chemicals like serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine (Rhawn 1999; Bortz 1981; Howlett 1984). While the relationship between these chemicals and runner’s high has often been presented as concrete and absolute, there are still plenty of unanswered questions. So many in fact that in May of 2002, University of Michigan endorphin researcher and then president-elect of the Society of Neuroscience, Dr. Huda Akil, told New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata that “this endorphin-in-runners is a total fantasy in the pop culture.” It was a statement which, for many, became the last word on the subject. Though Kolata herself hedged a bit in her book Ultimate Fitness, deciding that running makes people high, some people think this may have something to do with endorphins, while others do not. Put simply: something’s happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.

Other scientists haven’t been as quick to dismiss the anecdotal evidence, instead beginning to look into the purported effects of runner’s high and their similarity to so-called spiritual experiences (Cooper 1998, Schultheis 1984, Kotler 2006). When moving in this direction, much attention has been paid to those chemicals downstream from the enkephalins. Serotonin, for example, the chemical which jumpstarted our Prozac Nation, has been much touted for its mood enhancing abilities, but lately more attention has been paid to its psychedelic past.  LSD, and other psychotropics like psilocybin, mescaline and DMT, all bond to the same receptor sites as serotonin. Since these drugs have been anecdotally famous for their abilities to produce quasi-mystical experiences, scientists have recently begun looking in this idea with newfound interest (Borg 2003, Griffith 2006) . In 2003, the American Journal of Psychiatry reported a team of Swedish researchers working with brain scans discovered that the presence of serotonin-regulating receptors in the brain correlate with a person’s capacity for self-transcendent experience.

Researchers have also found that the same endogenous opioids released during runner’s high are also present during moments of important social bonding, parental love and, apparently, during the chills—those transcendental emotional experiences that occur while listening to music. Jaak Panksepp, head of affective neuroscience research at the Chicago Institute for Neurosurgery and Neuroresearch, has spent much of the past decade studying the chills and has found the mechanism in humans and a host of other animals. “In one widely cited study,” writes Stephen Johnson in his book about the neuroscience of everyday experience Mind Open Wide, “he (Panksepp) played dozens of records to chickens attached to equipment designed to record their shivers of pleasure. The chickens turned out to have the strongest positive response to the late-era Pink Floyd record The Final Cut.” This is important information since, from an evolutionary perspective, if spirituality really is biological than that biology shouldn’t just be found in human beings, but in lower orders as well.

More recently, neuroscientist Arne Dietrich reopened the runner’s high debate when he found high levels of anandamide in young men during exercise. (Dietrich 2004) Anandamide, from the Sanskrit word for bliss, is a cannabinoid, a tiny fatty acid naturally occurring in the body and known to produce sensations of pain relief and happiness similar to those of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana (when people smoke pot the THC binds to the anandamide receptor in the same way that heroin binds to the endorphin receptors).

Because marijuana features so prominently in a number of major religions, in the 1970s scientists began looking into its relationship to the feelings we most often describe as spiritual. Psychologist Charles Tart found that 65 percent of his extensive pot smoking study group reported feeling more open to experience, childlike and filled with wonder than his controls (Tart 1970). Twenty-five percent felt joyous, peaceful, in touch with the divine, and connected to the universe. In other words, the chemistry that brought us the Age of Aquarius is the same chemistry that brought us runner’s high.

The most recent major breakthrough occurred in February 2008, when Henning Boecker and a team at the Technical University of Munchen, Germany used positron emission topography to prove—finally—that endogenous opioids are present in the brain during for flow states. But the new thinking is they may not be acting alone. Instead, flow states appear to a cascade of endogenous opioids, dopamine, and endocannabinoids (Boecker 2004).

And this is as far as the neurochemical approach has taken us, but that’s not the end of the line. Psychologists have developed instruments to measure flow (Jackson and Marsh 1996; Retti 2001) and produced a list of initial conditions required to produce the state. One must be involved in an activity with a clear set of goals; there must be a balance between perceived challenges and perceived skills, a perfect balance between levels of boredom and anxiety; the task at hand must have clear and immediate feedback (Csikszentmihalyi 1975; Seligman 2002). These conditions might appear flimsy, but they have been reconfirmed in dozens of studies and have lately become the de-facto gold standard for good video game design (Chan and Ahern 1999).

Because flow has been shown to significantly enhance both learning and memory, researchers interested in education are also turning their attention to flow (Cantar, Rivers, Storrs, 1985; Chan & Ahern 1999; Konradt  2003). Paula Tallal, for example, co-director of Rutgers’s Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, believes that harnessing the power of flow will allow us to design educational video games that are inherently autotelic. Psychologists who study technology, meanwhile, are interested in flow experiences among web users and gamers (Retti 2001; Novak et al. 1997).

Furthermore, Csikszentmihalyi also discovered that flow states are occasionally “contagious,” and uses the term “group flow” to describe the potent co-joining of consciousness and extremely heightened awareness that results from a bunch of individuals finding themselves in a flow state together (Csikszentmihalyi 1975). Basketball great Bill Russell, in his 1979 autobiography Second Wind[i], described it this way: “During those spells I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken…My premonitions would be consistently correct, and I always felt that I not only knew all the Celtics by heart, but also all the opposing players, and that they all knew me.”

This can happen when a band plays a great show or an orchestra a great concert. When sports announcers talk about a team “coming together” or “momentum shifting” in a game, group flow is often responsible. And ever since Jimmy Johnson credited Csikszentmihalyi for the Dallas Cowboy’s 1993 Superbowl victory, this state has become one of the most sought after on earth. Both President Bill Clinton and Prime Minster Tony Blair have sung its praises. In 2007, Fast Company pointed out: “In the past few years…many major companies, including Microsoft, Ericsson, Patagonia and Toyota have realized that being able to control and harness this feeling is the holy grail for any manager.”

Of course, because of the similarity between flow states, mystical experiences and psychedelic drugs, there’s also a crossover with work being done in psychopharmacology (Tart 1971; Hamer 2004; Griffith 2006). Meanwhile, neuroscientists interested in the neuronal underpinnings of those mystical experience have been prodding the intense feeling of oneness, what’s often called “cosmic unity” or just “unity,” that also turns up during flow (Newberg and D’Aquili 2002; Newberg 2010).

But the truth of the matter is we are but at the nascent edge of flow discovery. Even ignoring the quasi-mystical component, the state is now widely acknowledged to be the basis of ultimate human performance. This fact alone begs for more research. But when you consider the full range of potential impacts, it isn’t too hyperbolic to argue that unraveling flow could be one of the greatest scientific undertakings of the 21^stCentury.

Sam:

Is the world really getting better?

Peter and Steven:

If you pull back a little bit from the sea of bad news that’s assaulting us these days, what you actually see is a preponderance of trends that are moving in a fantastic direction. Take health care: over the past century, child-mortality rates have dropped by 90 percent, while the human lifespan has doubled. Or poverty, which has dropped more in the past 50 years than it did in the previous 500.

At a global level, the gap between wealthy nations and poorer nations continues to close. Across the board, we are living longer, wealthier, healthier lives. Certainly, there are still millions of people living in dire, back-breaking poverty, but using almost every quality-of-life metric available—access to goods and services, access to transportation, access to information, access to education, access to lifesaving medicines and procedures, means of communication, value of human rights, importance of democratic institutions, durable shelter, available calories, available employment, affordable energy, even affordable beer—our day-to-day experience has improved massively over the past two centuries.

Why aren’t we more aware of these positive trends?

The simple answer is, because we’re hard-wired not to notice. As the first order of business for any organism is survival, our brain privileges information that appears to threaten us. As a result, we tend to focus too much on the bad news even as the good news struggles to get through. The media are so saturated with bad news—if it bleeds, it leads—because they’re vying for the amygdala’s attention.

Furthermore, to handle the massive influx of information we process on a moment-by-moment basis, the brain relies on heuristics. Most of the time these work. Sometimes they fail. When they fail we call them cognitive biases. As it turns out, a lot of our cognitive biases keep us pessimistic as well. The negativity bias is a tendency to give more weight to negative information and experiences than positive ones. Confirmation bias is our tendency to search for or interpret information in ways that confirms our preconceptions—which might not be so bad on its own, but when you add the media’s focus on negative news, you have a recipe for psychological disaster. This list goes on. The result is a brain that believes the end is near and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.

What do you mean by “abundance”?

We believe that over the next two to three decades it will be possible to significantly raise global standards of living. Abundance is not about providing everyone on this planet with a life of luxury—rather, it’s about providing everyone with a life of possibility. To be able to live such a life requires having the basics covered and then some. It also means stanching some fairly ridiculous bleeding: feeding the hungry, providing access to clean water, ending indoor air pollution, and wiping out malaria—four entirely preventable conditions that kill, respectively, seven, three, three, and two people per minute worldwide. But ultimately, abundance is about creating a world of possibility: a world where everyone’s days are spent dreaming and doing, not scrapping and scraping.

What makes you think that this is possible?

The data, for starters. We combed through decades of research, reams of hard facts, and interviewed dozens of scientists, innovators, engineers, and philanthropists. We also see four emerging forces that are beginning to really make their presence felt in the world, but together should enable us to make the equivalent of 200 years of progress over the next 20 years.

What are these forces?

Exponential technologies: Over the past few decades, researchers have come to conclude that any information-based technology is advancing along exponential growth curves. This is why the cellphone in your pocket is as powerful as a mid-’70s-era supercomputer for a minute fraction of the cost. Besides communication technology, exponential forces are at work in computational and network systems, artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, bio-informatics, nanotechnology, human-machine interfaces, and many more. These technologies will soon enable the vast majority of human beings to experience what only the affluent have had access to thus far. In Abundance, we examine how exponential technologies are being used (and can be used) to provide 7 billion people with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-tier medical care, nonpolluting and ubiquitous energy.

DIY innovators: These are individuals and small groups empowered by exponential technologies and driven by the desire to take on humanity’s grand challenges. As we explore in the book, these groups now have the ability to tackle problems that were once the sole domain of governments and major corporations and NGOs. As a result, we are at the front end of a DIY revolution unlike anything the world has yet seen.

Technophilanthropists: Today there are more than 1,400 billionaires and 93,000 “ultrahigh net worth” individuals in the world. Many of these are young, very socially conscious entrepreneurs who made their money in technology and are now interested in using it to slay some of the world’s grandest challenges. Bill Gates fighting against malaria, Jeff Skoll crusading against pandemics, Pierre Omidyar’s democracy-spreading efforts. There are many, many more. We call these individuals Technophilanthropists.

Rising billion: These are the poorest people on Earth, the so-called bottom billion. We have renamed this group the “Rising Billion” because, thanks to the exponential spread of communication and information technologies (like the smartphone), these people are coming online for the very first time. Their voices, which have never before been heard, are suddenly joining the global conversation. Aided by these technologies, the Rising Billion are beginning to pull themselves out of poverty. They are already on their way to becoming a powerful and significant consuming segment of humanity, and many companies are rushing to develop ultralow-cost products to meet their needs. This effort will drive down the price of basic goods and services in a fashion that will benefit everyone. But the Rising Billion have also become a producing and consuming segment of humanity, generating new ideas, insights, products, and services that add to the overall wealth of Earth.

It seems to me that all of this can sound a little quixotic and out of touch with some of the challenges that humanity now faces. Can you give me a concrete example of a trend toward abundance that is unlikely to ever be reversed?

Over the past 20 years wireless technologies and the Internet have become ubiquitous, affordable, and available to almost everyone. Africa has skipped a technological generation, bypassing the landlines that stripe our Western skies for the wireless way. Today, a Masai warrior with a cellphone has better telecom capabilities than the president of the United States did 25 years ago. If he’s a Masai warrior on a smartphone with access to Google, then he has access to more information than the president did just 15 years ago. By the end of 2013, over 70 percent of humanity will have access to instantaneous, low-cost communications and information. In other words, we are now living in a world of information and communication abundance.

And to your exact point—poverty has been reduced more in the past 50 years than in the previous 500. One major reason is the abundance of information-and-communication technology. According to research done at the London School of Business, adding 10 cellphones per 100 people raises GDP by 0.6 percent. To quote technology writer Nicholas Sullivan on this matter, “extrapolating from UN figures on poverty reduction (1 percent GDP growth results in a 2 percent poverty reduction), that 0.6 percent growth would cut poverty by roughly 1.2 percent. Given 4 billion people in poverty, that means with every 10 new phones per 100 people, 48 million people graduate from poverty.”

So do you believe that the future is guaranteed to be better than most people think?

We are not so naive as to think that there won’t be bumps along the way. Some of those will be big bumps: economic meltdowns, natural disasters, terrorist attacks. During these times, the concept of abundance will seem far-off, alien, even nonsensical, but if history is our guide, then progress continues through the good times and the bad.

The 20th century, for example, witnessed both incredible advancement and unspeakable tragedy. The 1918 influenza epidemic killed 50 million people; World War II killed another 60 million. There were tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, floods, even plagues of locusts. Despite such problems, this period also saw infant mortality decrease by 90 percent, maternal mortality decrease by 99 percent, and, overall, human lifespan increase by more than 100 percent.

So while there are likely to be plenty of rude, heartbreaking interruptions between here and there, we do feel that with the proper application of resources and capital, global living standards can continue to improve regardless of the horrors that dominate the headlines.

What do you hope people will get from reading your book?

The first is hope. You can’t change the world if you don’t believe it’s changeable.

The second is a vision and road map: a way to take bigger risks, create an innovation culture, and focus on solving problems rather than complaining about them.

Most importantly, we want people to understand that, more than ever before in history, individuals can now band together to solve grand challenges. We don’t believe abundance happens automatically. It’s up to each of us. That’s what makes today so different. We face enormous problems, but we—as individuals—have enormous power to solve them. It really is a magical time.