thirty-eight points in a row. He was mindless.” His executive network
was not in the house. He performed better, flying on pure intuition.
We’ve known for a long time that athletes and artists can easily
access flow states; the idea that the rest of us can touch that zone
through nature is tantalizing.
“Down with the frontal lobe!” said Atchley, bounding back down
the trail after lunch, his hydration-pack tube trailing behind his neck.
“Up with the cerebellum!”
LATER THAT NIGHT, Gazzaley mixed martinis by the rooftop fire pit. If
Kramer is the senior member of Team Moab, Gazzaley is its boy
wonder. At forty-six, his premature bright white hair belies his
youthful face. It’s so incongruous that people sometimes ask him if
he dyes his hair.
“Dye it this color?” he pointed to his head, barking a laugh.
Extroverted and optimistic, Gazzaley is refreshingly unapologetic
about his affection for technology. He believes it is not our curse but
very possibly our salvation. He employs his gadgets with ease and
fluency, from his cameras to the brain-wave monitoring machines and
85-inch high definition screens in his multimillion-dollar laboratory
at the University of California, San Francisco. There, he is designing
and testing “neurological” video games built specifically to increase
cognitive performance in adults. The games, he believes, can help
prevent dementia, treat ADHD, and even make us all better
multitaskers, and he has data to back it up. This is the world we live
in. We might as well get better at it.
Still, as a nature photographer and adventurer, he is loving the
desert. He had his vertical-panorama revelation yesterday, and he had
another spark of insight today in Hunter Canyon. “I had such a rich
experience of flow today,” he told us around the fake campfire. “I was
walking in the sandy canyon. Dave took off in front of me, and I
found myself alone taking pictures of desert flowers. I made myself