Decoding The Science of Ultimate Human Performance With Steven Kotler

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here and you probably at some point in your life have experienced this state called flow, even if you didn't know it was called that. So if you've ever lost an afternoon to a great conversation or you've got so involved in a work project that you just forget about everything else, or you find yourself during a workout just firing on all cylinders, then you've probably kind of tasted this experience. And this flow state is where you're so focused on a task at hand that everything else just kind of falls away and time flies by. And in many cases, your performance, whether that's your mental performance or your physical performance, kind of goes through the roof. Now, my guest today has actually written a book in which he decodes what he calls the science of ultimate human performance. And he's written this book called the Rise of Superman. It's a simply amazing book in terms of how it goes into breaking down the neuroscience of this flow state, what happens to your brainwaves, how you can almost like biohack yourself into this state of flow even if you're not a super athlete, and how you can tap into a lot of the principles that he talks about in the book to achieve some pretty amazing feats of physical and mental performance. And it's a pretty fun read as well. So we're going to be able to delve into a lot of that. And I think you're going to really dig this interview today. So my guest is Steven Kotler and he's a New York Times best selling author. He's got some other really good books too. I've read his other book called Abundance, and I'll link to that book as well as the one we're about to talk about in the show notes for this episode@BenGreenfieldFitness.com But Stephen, thank you so much for coming on the call, man.

Thanks for having me, Ben.

So what's your story? How did you get interested in this whole flow science thing?

It's a little bit of a story, but it started about 17 years ago when I was 30 years old. By the way, I cringe every time I say that. But it started 17 years ago.

You cringe that you were 30.

The fact that 17 years have gone by is amazing to me what happened. But I was 30 years old and I got Lyme disease. Spent the better portion of three years in bed. And if you don't know what Lyme is, it's sort of like the worst flu you've ever had. Crossed with paranoid schizophrenia.

Yeah. Now isn't that something that you get from tics?

Sure is.

Really? Is that what happened to you, or are you out doing some crazy, fun adventure?

I wish it was that sexy. I was actually at a friend's wedding and I went for a walk through an arboretum.

You need to make up a better story than that.

I know. And by the way, it came on the back end of like a year of living dangerously. I'd been in Africa, living by the side of a river, studying monkeys for three months. I'd done all this hardcore stuff, and then, no, I get bit by a tick at a wedding and it sells me. But I spent three years in bed. Doctors pulled me off drugs at the end of it because they had no idea if I was ever going to get better. And my stomach lining started bleeding out, so there was nothing anybody else could do for me. And functionally, I was. I mean, I was gone. I was in so much pain on a daily basis that I couldn't move. I could barely walk across a room. And Lyme really affects mental function. So I lost my ability to write, I lost my ability to read, my short term memory, my long term memory. I was dyslexic. I couldn't count. I was hallucinating. I was 10% of the time, I was actually lucid and coherent. So I had about an hour a day where I was actually alive. And the rest of it was a disaster. And after a while of this, I had made the decision that I was going to kill myself. And it was a practical decision. I was never going to be anything more than a burden to my friends and my family from that point on. And I just. I didn't want to live that way. And in the middle of kind of all this darkness and this decision making, a friend of mine showed up my door and demanded that we go surfing. And it was a totally ridiculous request. I mean, ridiculous because I couldn't walk across a room. And ridiculous because I'd been on a surfboard in five years, and the last time I had been on one, I nearly drowned in a big wave accident in Indonesia and never wanted to go near the ocean again.

So You've been. You've been bedridden when this guy asked you to surf?

Three years. I mean, I hadn't moved off the couch for three years. And it was a woman, and she was a pain in my ass. I mean, would not leave my house, Kept badgering me, kept badgering me. And eventually I was like, you know, what the hell, I can always kill myself tomorrow. Let's just go surfing today so you can shut up. And they literally had to sort of carry me to the car, put me in the car. They drove me to Sunset beach, which is the wimpiest beginner wave in the world. It's in la and the tide was super low, so you could wade out of the lineup. And they literally had to help me out to the lineup. And they gave me a board the size of a Cadillac. The waves were tiny, like 2ft tall. And I was out there, you know, 15, 30 seconds and a wave came and there was nobody else out. So there's no other takers, right? And muscle memory took over for a second, right? And I spun the board around and I paddled once and I popped up, and I popped up into a totally different dimension. I felt like my. First of all, my senses were incredibly heightened. I felt like I was taking in every bit of information in the environment. And my vision felt panoramic. Time had slowed to an absolute crawl. That, like, freeze frame effect you get in the car crash in the Matrix. That's what was going on with time. And the strangest part about the whole thing is I felt great. I mean, not just okay, not just a little bit better. I felt great. And I was actually surfing okay, which was even weirder, but, I mean, I felt better than I had in three years. And it was like realm of life, right? Just life rushed back into me. It was this crazy, all quasi mystical experience. And it felt so good. I caught four more waves, and after those five waves, I was totally done. I was disassembled. They drove me home, they put me into bed, and people had to bring me food for 14 days because I couldn't actually walk like 50ft away to my kitchen to make a meal. And on the 15th day, which was the day I could walk again, I caught another ride out to the ocean and I did it again. And over the course of about six months, when the only thing I was doing differently was going surfing and having these really crazy, powerful, quasi mystical experiences that I didn't understand in the waves, I went from about 10% functionality to about 80% functionality. So, you know, the first question is, what the hell's going on, right? Like, surfing is not a known cure for chronic autoimmune conditions. That was bizarre enough. Second of all, Lyme is only fatal if it gets into your brain. And I. I got a science background. I don't have quasi mystical experiences. I definitely don't have them with surfing, right? So I was absolutely certain. The reason this was happening, because the disease had progressed into my brain. Even though I was feeling better, I was actually dying. So in the beginning, I lit out on a giant quest to figure out what was going wrong with me. What I very quickly discovered is that flow states, these experiences, I was having had a name, we called them flow states. And we knew by then, and we don't have to dive too deep in this, but what had happened to me, health wise? Flow is, as you pointed out in your opening, it's produced by this complicated cocktail of neurobiology, including a dump of five of the most potent neurochemicals the brain can produce. All five of them are immune system boosters. Very, very strong immune system boosters. But more importantly, flow resets the nervous system back to zero. It calms it completely down. It basically, all of the stress hormones and stress chemicals that are in your body that produce that experience drain out and are replaced by these positive neurochemicals. Lyme. Any autoimmune condition is essentially a nervous system going haywire. The fact that I was getting these pauses, everything could reset. My brain was learning new patterns. It was actually learning how to heal along the way. And that was responsible for my health and what was going on with me. But I very quickly discovered, very, very quickly, the exact same state that helped me from seriously subpar back to normal was helping a lot of normal people turn into Superman. And that's where all this started for me.

So a question about these chemicals that are getting released by the brain. Like, for example, you read this a lot in running literature, how your body somehow has this mechanism to where it literally produces, like, endogenous endocannabinoids, like what you'd get if you were smoking weed. And there's also dopamine and some other neurotransmitters that get released. Are these the kind of chemicals that were talking about, or are these, like, different ones that kind of fly under the radar?

We'll jump right into the thick of some of the science. So when you want to talk about neurobiology of flow, you have to really talk about three things, right? You have to talk about neuroanatomy, which Is where in the brain something happens. And you got to talk about neurochemistry and neuroelectricity for the two ways the brain communicates, right? Send signals both ways. So neurochemically, flow is a cocktail of five of the most potent performance enhancing chemicals the brain can produce. You get norepinephrine and dopamine. Both of these are focusing chemicals, right? They drive focus, they drive attention into the now. They also increase muscle reaction times. And they also, because they lower signal to noise ratios in the brain, they jack up pattern recognition. Our ability to link ideas together. So flow, you know, we can talk about this later if you want. Is known to massively enhance creativity by some studies, 700%. It's a huge boost. And according to research done at Harvard, that added creativity outlasts the flow state by a day sometimes too. Which seems to suggest that flow not only makes you more creative, but it actually, in the moment, it makes you more creative over the long haul, which is really cool. It trains up creativity. So you get that from the norepinephrine, indopamine. You also, you brought up anadamine, which is cannabinoid, right? So you get that in flow as well. That is a pain relieving chemical, which is why it shows up in running. This is evolutionary biology. We used to hunt down our prey by running them down, right? The person who could run farther, faster, got more food, had more kids, and got passed on. So the person who got a little bit of pain relief along the way, and that shows up in both anadamine and endorphins, which are the body's natural opiates also, which show up. And flow got more food, had more kids. So there's an evolutionary advantage and there's research. This is documented research. There's really cool work that's been done at the University of Arizona that kind of backtracks this. So you get norepinephrine and dopamine, you get anadamine, which besides pain relief, it also enhances social bonding. But what do you say? Is it anadamine ananda, which is sanskrit for bliss, Mide ananda mind. So it also boosts lateral thinking, which is our ability to link far flung ideas together, disjointed ideas together. Again, why does creativity go up and flow? Because not only are we taking in more information per second, so there's more novelty, more new things coming in, and more pattern recognition. We're linking those new things to more new things. And then because of anandamine, we're linking those information to either Farther flung things in the brain surrounding basically the process of creativity, among other things. But that's going on. And then you get endorphins. Just so you're clear, these are naturally occurring opiates. But the most commonly produced endorphin in the brain is 100 times more powerful than medical morphine. And of course, on the tail end of a flow state, you get serotonin, which is the common chemical at the heart of the Prozac revolution. So you get this massive, massive, massive neurochemical cocktail in flow. But the other thing that you need to know about this cocktail is besides massively jacking up performance, these are all the most potent pleasure drugs the brain can produce. They're the biggest reward drugs, Right? Dopamine. When you snort cocaine, the most addictive drug on earth, all that happens is dopamine is released into the brain. Norepinephrine is an analog for crystal meth. Serotonin shows up in ecstasy, as you pointed out, anandamide shows up in thc, and endorphins is heroin and morphine. Right, which is why flow is the most addictive state on earth. Scientists hate the word addictive, so they have coined autotelic, which is an end in itself. What it means is once an experience starts producing flow, we'll go exceptionally far out of our way to get more of it. Which is why psychologists talk about flow and neuroscientists talk about flow as the source code of intrinsic motivation.

Yeah, but surely like everything that you've just described, like, you know, people describe the runners high and how they kind of just like get into the zone during running, but everything that you've just described seems a little bit more powerful than that. Are we talking about something that goes above and beyond the runner's high?

Well, let's, let's, let's. Okay, so good, great question. So first of all, let's back up and start with the fact that there are tons of synonyms for flow. So in the zone, runner's high. If you're a basketball player, being unconscious, if you're a jazz musician, you're in the pocket. If you're a stand up comedian, you're in the forever box. It goes on and on and on. Flow is actually a technical term, and that's the reason we use the term flow and the reason it's a technical term when the original kind of one of the biggest psychological studies ever done, which is what flow emerged out of. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was the chairman of the University of Chicago Psychology department went around the world asking people about the times in their life when they performed their best, they felt their best, and they all described flow as the experience. And they used that term. They would say in this experience, everything is effortless. Everything, every decision, every action flows perfectly, seamlessly, fluidly to the next. It feels flowy. So because the term kept coming up over and over and over, we chose that term. All these other experiences are basically the same. But the thing is, and this is where the confusion reigns. Flow is a spectrum experience. So it's like any emotion. Take anger, you can be a little bit irked and you can be homicidally murderous. Same emotion. Flow works the same way. We know there are 10 characteristics that define the state. And you hit on some of them again in your opening. Intense focus on the task at hand. Time dilation, which means sometimes it slows down. You get that freeze frame effect I described. Sometimes it speeds up in five hours, pass by in five minutes. The disappearance of self and self consciousness, on and on and on. Concentration, the merger of action and awareness. Anyways, when a couple of these things show up, you're in a state of microflow. Runner's high is a state of microflow. It's a low grade flow state, usually actually probably about a medium grade flow state. Okay. This goes all the way up to macro flow, which is when all 10 of these characteristics show up. And then it's sort of the experience I was describing while surfing. Right. It's often confused with mystical experiences or mislabeled because it's that, that powerful. And it's psychologically powerful too. We have Data going back 150 years that shows a number of things. One, it shows that people on the other sides of flow states are my. They're more psychologically complex, which is kind of sort of the technical term. But from Csikszentmihalyi's research and thousands of others, or hundreds of other studies backing this up, we know, for example, that the people who have the most flow in their lives are the people who score off the chart on life satisfaction. They're essentially the happiest, most content people on earth. So there's a direct. There's a massive psychological benefit as well. So you get jacked up motivation, you get amplified creativity, massively increases happiness, accelerates learning. Studies run by the US military with snipers, they found learning accelerated 200 to 500% in flow. And again, by the way, that's because of the neurochemicals. Interestingly, one of the other things neurochemicals do is they tag experience. So a shorthand for learning is the more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, the greater chance that experience has of moving from storage or short term holding into long term storage. Right. Flow is this giant dump of neurochemicals which are big neon signs saying super important, save for later. So, you know, that's why DARPA finds that learning is accelerated 200 to 500%. And there's evidence from pretty much everywhere, from brick and mortar schools to E learning, every learning environment you can imagine on the planet. Flow has been shown to significantly boost positive learning attitudes and positive learning outcomes. So you get, you know, this is accelerated, right? And this, I mean, by the way, and when you look at all this together, you get like now you start to understand, I don't know if you know this not, but McKinsey, the consultancy you study, 10 year study of flow, they found top executives in flow are five times more productive. That's 500% more productive. It means you could go to work on Monday, spend Monday in flow, take Tuesday through Friday off and get as much done as your steady state peers. Which sounds totally ridiculous until you start to understand the neurobiology. This is ultimate human performance, in the title of Rise of Superman is actually defined as performance when life or limb is on the line. But the larger point here is everybody's hardwired for this. We also know flow is ubiquitous. Everybody, anywhere can get into the state provided certain initial conditions are met.

Yeah, and I definitely want to talk about getting into that state. I definitely want to cover like how we can do that, how listeners can tap into this. But there was one thing that we didn't get into that you mentioned because you talked about the neurobiology of flow.

Yeah, just a little bit of it.

You talked about how it's electrical too. What do you mean by that?

A number of things happen in flow. Let's start with. Well, okay, Neuroelectrically, what happens in flow is the brain waves move to the point borderline between alpha and beta. So let me explain. Beta is normal waking consciousness. It's my mind is awake, it's alive. I'm arguing, I'm thinking, I'm doing all that stuff, I'm making conscious decisions, all that stuff. That's normal waking consciousness. Alpha, which is a slower wave right below beta is sort of daydreaming mode. Right. You kind of go from thought to thought without much internal resistance. And you, and you're pretty calm below that is theta. You only get into theta in that hypnagogic gap, right as you're falling asleep and in deep REM sleep. So those are the only times you ever get into theta. And below that, there's a very fast wave called gamma that we'll get into in a second. But what happens in flow is you move down to the alpha theta border, which does a lot of really, really cool things. First of all, there's a lot less internal resistance. This is why one idea leads to the next, leads to the next. It's kind of like a pattern recognition system flung wide open. And, you know, this kind of experience, as you're falling asleep, you see that happening where, you know, you'll think of one thing and it'll lead to something else, right? The brain does that. This is a very focused, high performance version of that. That's what's resulting from the brainwaves where this really shows up and matters a lot also is that. So gamma, which is very fast wave in the brain. It only shows up during what's called binding, which is when you have a new idea. It's literally kind of the brainwave signature of the aha moment. But here's the cool thing. The gamma wave is actually coupled. It's totally tightly linked to the theta wave. So the only time you can get a gamma spike is if the brain is in theta. But the brain is very rarely in theta in normal waking consciousness. But. But flow essentially puts you on the brink of the aha moment. It holds the brain in the space right before the big creative breakthrough. So when they talk about flow as a huge driver of innovation, all the amplified creativity and this that we're talking about is the reason why.

Okay, got it.

Okay. And fine. Let's complete the picture since we've covered neural electricity and neurochemistry, because the coolest thing that goes on is actually what goes on with neuroanatomy. The old idea about ultimate performance and flow was, hey, it's what's now called the 10% brain myth. It's based on a misinterpretation of what psychologist William James once said. But it's the idea that we only use 10% of our brain. So ultimate performance flow has to be the whole brain functioning on all cylinders, right? Everything firing all at once. And turns out that's exactly backwards in flow. What happens is parts of the brain, especially the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that houses a lot of our higher cognitive function, our sense of will, our sense of morality, all that stuff turns off. So this happens because the brain performs an efficiency exchange. It trades conscious processing, which is slow energy, expensive and very limited. It can only hold on to seven ideas at once, basically for subconscious processing, which is lightning fast, extremely energy efficient, and basically infinite in ram. Right. So it's much better to use flow. Happens to be one of the only times we get to actually see our subconscious mind in action. But for that to happen, kind of as the brain's energy needs go up, right. You're paying more attention to the present moment. Attention being driven into the moment that requires more energy. Right. As that, as that energy is used, the brain starts shutting down parts of parts of the prefrontal cortex to save energy and to performance. For example, why does time slow down in a flow state? Right. Why does time have so strengthening?

When you say to save energy, you mean like literally to save on like literally.

So your brain. Yeah, your glucose, the calcium, the sodium. Your brain is roughly 2% of your body mass at rest, when you're not even doing anything hard, uses about 25% of your energy. It is a massive energy hog. So the first, first thing the brain, all fundamental thing the brain tries to do in every situation is conserve energy. Right. Basic evolutionary biology.

I think that's interesting because one of the, you know, I've experienced a state of flow, and the last time I really got into this state, pretty hardcore, was during an Ironman triathlon. And I can tell you for sure that during that race I was in a state of ketosis. So what that means is I was dumping a bunch of ketones into my brain as an extra fuel in addition to glucose. And I have no clue if that somehow allowed me to, from this neuroanatomical perspective that you're talking about, just allow for more activation of more areas of the brain.

But you know, Ben, I'm not going to lie to you. I have no idea, nor have I seen any studies on it. But it's a great, great, great question. It's one that I'm going to make sure the flow genome project takes up.

Yeah, I think it's really interesting because they use these, you know, they use ketosis for like people who have epileptic seizures and folks who want extra ketones for brain fuel. So I think that's interesting. It's not something I know much about either in terms of like the link between flow and ketosis, but it made me think about that when you were talking about.

No, what's interesting about flow. And this is sort of my organization, the Flow Genome Project. This is one of our Missions, you know, the psychology goes back almost 150 years. We've been looking at this stuff for a really long time. The neuropsychology, the neurobiology that followed the imaging revolution, right? We got better brain imaging technology in the 90s because of the decade of the brain and money flooded in neuroscience. So now we started to get some answers. So we've got about 20 years worth of pretty good neurobiological data. We have the outline and we're starting to fill in some of the details. What we don't have is the physiological data. It's a huge gap because the measurement technology, in a functional way, especially in a way that you could use with athletes and whatnot, as you know, exist for about until five years ago. So what we're trying to do is map the psychology onto the neurobiology, onto the physiology, and kind of create a total heat map of flow.

Gotcha. Okay, so cool. In your book, you've got a bunch of stories of some super athletes and some crazy daredevils like ski jumpers and base jumpers and people jumping off skyscrapers and stuff like that. And you talk about how these people are in some ways doing what they're doing because they're in a state of flow. And obviously we've got a lot of listeners who are probably not going to go jump off a building anytime soon. But do you have ways that you found when you were writing the book that were ways that just like the average person, like working at the office or maybe going out for their soccer game on the weekend, were kind of able to tap into this state of flow?

Yeah, absolutely. Let me push it back one level to kind of start answering your question. Let's start with the athletes and then we'll move into everybody else. So the thing. Obviously a lot of your readers aren't going to go jump off buildings, but here's why they should care about action adventure sports anyways. And this is kind of the core idea at the heart of rise. If you look at action adventure sports, surfing, skiing, snowboarding, rock climbing, mountain biking, et cetera, as a data set, what you see over the past 25 years is nearly exponential growth in ultimate human performance. Right? Performance for life or limb on the line. So it makes sense that evolutionarily, this is the slowest growth place.

But what do you mean when you say that? Like, what's an example of.

Let me give you. I'll give you. I'll give you an example. Before we get to the example, you got to understand nothing like this has Ever happened before. Sports progression, it's slow, it's steady, it's governed by the laws of evolution. At no point in history, right. Does it quintuple in a decade. That's exactly what's happening in action adventure sports. And here's the example. Surfing. Here's a thousand year old sport. From 400 AD to 1996, biggest wave anybody's ever surfed is 25ft. Above that, everybody, from scientists to surfers to whatnot believe is impossible. It is biologically defied the laws of physics. Impossible to get into a wave bigger than that. Today we're pushing into waves that are 100ft tall. In 1992, in snowboarding, the biggest gap jump anybody had ever cleared, Baker Road gaps up In Washington, it's 40ft, which is huge. Today people are jumping 250ft.

Is that the one that goes over the road that you would jump over like a snowboard?

Yep, it goes, it's on the road to Mount Baker, which is kind of why it's called the Baker Road Gap. It's like a couple turns down from the resort itself and they jump the highway.

Wow. I think I've actually driven through that gap 250ft.

Right. It's, it's five plus times the size of that. That's unheard of. And the question is, of course, what the heck is going on? Why is this happening now? And the answer, as you pointed out, is that for a variety of reasons, these athletes have gotten better at hacking the state of flow than anybody else in the history of the world. Which is great because what gave was researchers suddenly had a hard data set with which to work. We didn't have to wonder if our subjects were in flow, if they lived through the experience we knew for sure. And working from that, working backwards from that information and from all the neurobiology, what we've discovered, and this is there's 40 years of work and a lot of different researchers. So when I say what we've discovered, I'm not just talking about the flow genome project, I'm talking about a lot of researchers. But what's been discovered is that there are 17 flow triggers. These are preconditions that bring on more of the state. What did the action adventure sports athletes do? Honestly, they packed their lives with these triggers. It happened a lot of it in the beginning was inadvertent. It happened for a lot of different reasons. We can go into why it happened, to care. But the real point is they packed their lives with these flow triggers. And as a Result, they started generating more of the state than anybody else.

When you pack your life with a flow trigger, what would be an example of like a flow trigger?

Well, the good news is anybody can do this. So let's just, just talk about these flow triggers, right? What can anybody do to get into flow? They can pull more of these flow triggers. Let's start with the three triggers these athletes relied on the most. And we'll talk about what they did, why they worked for them, and how it works in everyday life. We'll give examples. There are, just to give you an overview, there are three external or environmental triggers, three internal or psychological triggers. There's one creative trigger, and then there's a shared version of the flow state. What we're here talking about, those previous triggers were all about individual flow, but there's group flow, which is literally a collective version of a flow state. So if you've ever taken part in a great brainstorming session, or played in a band, or seen a fourth comeback in football, where it looks like ballet more than football because everybody's in the right place at the right time, and it looks amazing, that's group flow in action. And there are 10 social triggers that bring on more group flow.

Okay, got it.

But the triggers that the action sport athletes. And before I actually dive in, let's clarify, flow follows focus. Right? So all these triggers are literally ways evolution shaped our brain to pay the most attention to the present moment. All of these triggers drive attention into the now, right? The three triggers the action sport athletes rely on the most. The first one is obvious. It's high consequences. Flow follows focus. Consequences catch our attention, right? The cool thing here is it turns out it doesn't just have to be physical consequences. You can replace physical risk with mental risk, emotional risk, creative risk, intellectual risk. And it's also totally independent, right? Big wave surfer Laird Hamilton, he's got to paddle into a 50 foot wave at Jaws to pull this trigger. But a shy guy needs only to raise his hand at an important business meeting and speak up to pull this trigger. So it's totally independent of individuals. And as I said, you hear action sport athletes, you think physical risk. But until about 400 years ago, banishment, right? You socially screwed up and the tribe kicked you out. It was a death sentence. The brain does not differentiate between social fears and physical risk. Same thing. Which is why public speaking is the number one fear in the world, right? So you can pull this tree. Risk is necessary for flow. You have to take risks. And there are a bunch of reasons for this. But you don't have to take physical risks. You can take emotional risks, social risks, intellectual, creative. You can hack this. And this tells us something really interesting about business, for example, tells us that those Fortune 5 or those Silicon Valley companies with a fail forward, fail faster kind of motto, Facebook, who's got a sign hanging in their main stairwell that says, move fast, break things. They are giving their employees the space to take risks. There's no fear of failure. They're giving their employees space to take risks. And as a result, they're getting more flow. They are maximizing flow. So this rapid experimentation idea that's kind of running through Silicon Valley and has kind of been at the heart of Skunk Works for, you know, half a century is one of the main reasons it works, is because it gives employees space to take risks, gives people the space to fail, ups the amount of flow. So it ups the amount of creativity and ups the amount of innovation, and you get this kind of glorious feedback loop. So that's the first high consequences, Right. The second one that the action sport athletes rely on a lot is called deep embodiment. Deep embodiment is a really fancy way of saying, hey, I'm paying attention to multiple sensory streams of once. So this doesn't just include, by the way, the five senses. There's also balance and proprioception, which is where your body is positioned in space. These also count.

What were the five senses, though? Like, in addition to balance, you're talking about like taste and smell and touch.

Our five senses. Yeah, taste, touch, feel. Right, but on top of those five, on top of our five basic, there's prior perception and vestibular awareness. They also count. Right. But what happens in action sports is obvious. These athletes are constantly pulling zero GS, multiple GS, and experiencing polyaxial rotation, which is rotation around your middle or gravity bound creatures. These are very unusual sensations when they come up, when they show up, when you sense them, drives attention to the now because something crazy and unusual is going on. But you don't obviously have to be an action sport athlete for this. In fact, when researchers went looking for the highest flow environments on earth besides action sports, what they found was Montessori education. And one of the. Yeah, and the reason is Montessori education is often called embodied education. They radically emphasize learning through doing. Don't just read about the windmill, go out and build one. As a result, paying attention drives attention into the present because you're igniting kind of multiple sensory streams. We're more focused in the now. Get more flow as a result, flow goes up. There's a couple other things going on in Montessori, but. But the embodiment seems to be the major contributing factor.

That is so cool. I don't think I told you this. I homeschool my kids and we do a ton of unschooling, meaning we just go out into nature and learn. I took them to Thailand a few months ago and we just spent time in Thailand learning how to speak Thai and cook Thai and all this jazz. And it's amazing to see their little brains firing. I had no clue about the link between flow, but it sounds like that type of learning for kids. You're actually allowing your kids to kind of get close to some of these flow mechanisms.

Well, the other thing is kids are already close to some of these flow mechanisms. Their brains are naturally more in alpha. And more than that, the shutting down of the prefrontal cortex is called transient hypofrontality. Transient, meaning temporary hypo is hypo. It's the opposite of hyper. It means to slow down, to deactivate. And frontality is obviously the prefrontal cortex. Kids are developmentally hypofrontal. Their prefrontal cortex doesn't finish developing until they're 25, so they're naturally inclined towards flow, which is astounding because if you build flow based education, we know flow jacks up learning 200 to 500%, right? Imagine what's possible and we don't actually have to imagine. The Wall Street Journal wrote an article not too long ago about the so called Montessori mafia, which are all the Montessori trained kids, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, etc etc who are now running Silicon Valley. There's an over preponderance of Montessori educated kids running extremely successful, extremely cutting edge tech ventures. And there's, you know, there's a tight link between the two. And lastly, the last kind of environmental trigger to just kind of round this out is what we call a rich environment. Which is a really fancy way of saying lots of novelty, complexity and unpredictability in the environment. All these three things do is they focus our attention to the now. And everybody has this experience, right? If you've ever felt awe, right where you see a night sky or that kind of. You get a hit of geologic time when you look at the Grand Canyon, something like that, right? The brain can't process that information. Too much novelty, it's too much complexity. And reality seems to pause for a second, right? You get sucked into the moment. The front end of a flow state. That's the beginning of the time dilation. Time slowing down and stretching out and getting strange in a flow state. So everybody's had that experience, right? The action sport athletes pull this trigger all the time because they perform in living environments, right? No two waves are the same. The snowpack morphs on a moment by moment basis in the big mountains. Constantly changing. Lots of novelty, unpredictability and complexity. What does that look like in the real world? If you're an organization, you want to rely on this more. Pixar is what it looks like. Steve Jobs, when he was designing Pixar, had this big problem. Employees were staying balkanized, right? They weren't. The marketing, wasn't talking to animation, wasn't talking to engineering, blah, blah, blah. And he was hampering progress. There wasn't enough novelty, complexity and unpredictability in the environment to kind of amp up creativity because they were just staying balkanized. So he built a giant atrium in the center of the building and he put the meeting rooms, the cafeteria, the mailboxes, and most insidiously, the only bathrooms in the whole building right off the atrium. Everybody had to walk through from every department, no matter what. And you had massive uptick in novelty, complexity and unpredictability, which led to more flow, which led to heightened creativity, which is why we're talking about Pixon in the first place.

Wow, interesting. So basically when we're trying to hack ourselves into a state of flow, we want a complex environment, we want consequences. And then the. What was the last one again?

Consequences and deep embodiment. You want to be deep embodied, physically involved in what you're doing. Okay, now let's be clear. Those are only the three environmental triggers, right? There are three psychological triggers that were kind of the same there, the 10 social triggers. And then there's a creative trigger. So there's lots of. And lots of on ramps into flow. Your job, if you want more flow, you don't have to pull all these triggers at once, right? There are certain ones that work good in combination and there's basic ones that seem to show up across the board. But three or four or five of them in a situation is enough to kind of radically move you towards more flow and the job of individuals, because it's totally individual, right there. There's genetic components, there's environmental components. It's how you're raised, it's what you're interested in. There's a lot of other stuff going on. Passion matters in flow. Not for any big fancy reason, but because we simply pay more attention to those things we believe in that we're passionate about. So passion is another flow trigger because it's a focusing mechanism. Right. It's nothing fancy, it's not mystical, it's not spiritual. It's literally we pay more attention to things that we're passionate about and get more flow as a result. Yeah. So you've got. And by the way, you can give this link at the end. I have a slideshare where I break down. You don't even have to buy the book. Right. I have a free SlideShare, it's got 17 flow triggers and they're broken down. I can give you the link.

Is that on your Flow Genome Project.

Website or it's not on the Flow Genome Project website, but it's all over the Internet. It's actually hosted on SlideShare.

Okay, cool. I'll put a link to that in the show. Notes for folks because obviously we can't get into all the different mechanisms today, but I did want to ask you, can you quantify flow? And the reason I ask that is because personally I do heart rate variability testing. So I look at the strength of my sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system and some feedback from the vagus nerve into the heart. And so I try and figure out basically how high my heart rate variability is, how emotionally tuned I am, et cetera. Do you have or are there pieces of technology or self quant tools out there to where you could say, okay, I'm getting this close to a state of flow.

So the answer is of right now, no. There are phenomenally robust psychological questionnaires. There are extremely well validated, three or four of them that have been developed over 30 years. Extremely well validated. So the psychological stuff is there. What we are doing right now with the Flow Genome project is we are in heart rate variabilities in the mix. We are now running the first of a long series of research projects that is going to attempt to get multicorrelate hints of flow. In the end, it will be an iflow app, right. That like you'll be able to tell, it'll be a bunch of different metrics. But right now, you know, even the order of the cascade, what comes first? Neurochemistry changes, neural anatomy changes, brain waves. We don't, we don't quite know. So that's another thing we're trying to determine. What role does heart rate variability? What role does respiration play? There's a bunch of other factors we're looking at. But that research, we're starting that research right now.

Okay, got it. Interesting. Now the other question. Because people are lazy and people are also into biohacking. Have you noticed that as this movement has picked up that people are using anything from supplements to these. There's light sound devices that you can wear on your head, any of these type of things to get themselves close to a state of flow before they say go for a day of work or go hop into a big workout or a race or something like that. Like, have you noticed things that seem to be working for people to almost hack their way into a state of flow?

Well, there is, and we work with a number of these companies, but there are a number of different home training EEG devices that can help you train that kind of, that alpha theta borderline. Right. The technology is getting very, very robust. We're starting to be able to kind of.

These are like the electrodes that you'd wear on your head.

Yeah, but I mean. And there's only a couple of companies that are making really, there's a lot of other. There's a lot of stuff on the market. We feel there's only a handful of companies who are making stuff that's really robust that we really like.

Are you allowed to give me an example?

Yeah, I mean, Advanced Brain Monitoring in Carlsbad, California, they're the ones who worked with DARPA on that flow sniper study I talked about with accelerated learning. And Chris Burka has a great TED talk that she gave about that work. You can find it. But so they make, they make a device. Neurotropia makes another device that's really, really good.

Advanced brainmonitoring.com.

Yeah, so, so we, yeah, we love, we, we work with those, we work with those guys. So those.

And you can use like a, they have like a sleep device too, it looks like here.

They do. And I mean, I have to tell you that, you know, at the flow genome project, you know, we do sleep when we in, in our trainings. Right. Sleep is a part of what we do. We definitely practice sleep hygiene and talk about it. But our whole real point there is get more high quality sleep. Right? There's all kinds of fancy tech you can get. But here's the point. Go to bed at the same time, get up at the same time, get more high quality sleep. That's, I mean, end of story, right? You can get all hot, as techy as you want, but that's really what's going on.

I know it's funny actually, because I Have all these sleep hacks that I use, like infrared light and sleep masks and a biomat device and everything. And it's kind of funny because my wife just kind of plops into bed next to me and just goes to sleep and I have all these hacks I use to get this deep sleep.

You only give you the funniest tip I can give you sleep with dogs.

Oh, it's so true.

We co evolve with dogs. So a lot of our brain is taken up at, at all times with safety and security. Right. We're always constantly monitoring the environment. Is there something new here? Is there a danger? We do it awake, we do it asleep, we pay attention to survival. The first order of business, we co evolve the dogs. And when they're around in the bed actually sleeping with us, the way that we co evolved with them, we start to outsource some of the safety and security functions so that part of the brain calms down fast.

Interesting. I found the slideshare that you've got with your 17 different flow triggers and you talked, and I'm going to link to it in the show notes for folks, but you talked about, you talked about three environmental triggers and there's obviously 17 triggers in total. But just in the time that we have left, do you think you could give folks maybe one or two additional triggers that you found to be big wins for achieving a state of flow?

Absolutely. Absolutely. So let's talk the psychological triggers. The most famous of all psychological triggers, and this has been exceptionally well validated now performance theory, and lots of people have written about it, is what's known as the challenge skills ratio. So flow follows focus. Right. So the question is, when do we pay most attention to what we're doing? We pay most attention to what we're doing when the challenge of the task at hand slightly exceeds the skills we bring to bear. Right. Or to put it emotionally, we pay the most attention when we are sort of not on, but near the midpoint between boredom, not enough stimulation, I'm not paying attention, and anxiety, too much stimulation, too much coming at me, I'm starting to freak out right in that sweet spot. It's called the flow channel or the Yerkes Dobson curve, depending on whether you're in cognitive neuroscience or in flow psychology. But the point is, if you want to chase flow, if you want to walk the flow path, you have to constantly, constantly, constantly be scaling up the challenge. You want to stretch but not snap. So here's where things get tricky. Underperformers have a difficult time finding this sweet spot because this sweet spot is after the point of uncomfortability, right? You want to push yourself hard enough that you are past your comfort zone. You are uncomfortable. So you have to get very good at being uncomfortable. The thing is, it's only a little bit uncomfortable. So super top performers, high performers, they blow by this sweet spot without even knowing, right? They bite up the challenge that's 25% bigger, 50% bigger, they don't care. And by doing that, they are locking themselves out of flow. The very thing they need to tackle a challenge that big. So it's really slow and steady wins this race. It's a little bit at a time, but it takes. This is why there's studies by Janet Duckworth and others. It takes a lot of grit to constantly be walking the flow path. Because when I said earlier that flow correlates really, really well with life satisfaction, what I mean is it doesn't exactly correlate with happiness because you are constantly rising to new challenges and you're getting very uncomfortable. And you're uncomfortable a lot, right? Not all wine and roses all the time. It's not always fun at all. If you're a bliss junkie, this is not for you, right? You have to really be up for the challenge because you're going to be in that struggle state a lot on the way. The rewards are huge. They're bigger than anything else available to us. But you know, you're uncomfortable most of the time because you are constantly pushing. But it's the constantly pushing day in and day out that keeps attention focused in the now and keeps driving into flow. So you can't chase flow without understanding that. Now let's talk about.

And by the way, I gotta say, I think that's going to strike a chord with a lot of our listeners because, you know, for example, we've got a lot of folks with a who do like Ironman triathlons and these big cycling events and spartan races and stuff like that. One question that I get a lot from people who see me going out and doing something like an 8 mile Spartan race full of all these obstacles that are bringing you close to the brink of getting injured or just seriously uncomfortable. They ask me, why the hell would you actually do that? And a big, big or one of the big big reasons that I give people is the way that you feel at the finish line. Like you feel so freaking alive when you finish something like that, even though it's uncomfortable. And you know, it sounds to me like what you talk about with the state of flow Is what. When people are going out and doing something, some of these events we're really tapping into, whether we know it or not.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, without question. That's, you know, that's why people are doing these events. Look, I mean, I'm not saying flow is a cure all as a panacea. And there's a big dark side and downside. This isn't self help. You have to understand that these neurochemicals you're playing with with flow, they're addictive. And if you find yourself getting into flow fairly frequently and then are suddenly cut off from the source, you've been surfing a lot and you move or you get married and have kids, something along those lines. It is a hard and harsh comedown, and it is not something to be toyed with or played with lightly. You have to know what you're doing with this stuff. You're playing with really fundamental neurochemistry and really fundamental human motivations.

Interesting. So there were a couple of things, a couple other things you were just about to get into when I interrupted you.

Oh. So on the flow hacking tip, let's talk about one other trigger. Just because it's so fundamental and it's the creative trigger. And what that really means kind of what actually triggers flow is that whenever there's pattern recognition in the brain, as I said earlier, the brain releases dopamine. And everybody's had this experience. You filled out a crossword puzzle. That little rush of pleasure you get when you get NASA, right, that's dopamine coming from pattern recognition. That acts as a flow trigger. So what you. Creativity is one of the strongest flow triggers possible. And this is actually, if you want to know what started In Action Sports 25 years ago, what changed? What changed is they wouldn't let snowboarders onto resorts. The snowboarders went into the back country, and they started, quote, unquote, free riding. And when you were free riding in the backcountry, because you had to hike for everything, right. It didn't make sense to race down as fast as you can. So fastest guy to the bottom no longer won. And they started to judge runs based on creative interpretation of the terrain. And there was never only one winner, Right. You were a winner as long as you creatively threw down a great line. Right. And creativity became this fundamental value in action sports. Shane McConkey borrowed it to describe skiing. He was sick of the term extreme skiing because it didn't describe what he was doing. He said, well, free skiing is what I'm doing. And then it became free surfing and free riding, which was mountain biking, and on and on and on. Suddenly, creativity became the fundamental value in action sports. They started pulling the creative trigger on top of all the others. Right. There was deep embodiment, there was wrist, there was all that other stuff. But they added in the creative trigger and, and that's what started the cascade.

Wow, interesting. So it's creativity basically being able to step into new things.

Yeah, creativity is being able. And the other thing is, you know, I talk to a lot of people, say, God, I want more flow in my life, but I'm stuck in a dead end job, right. I got a mortgage, I got kids, I got a wife, and I don't love my job, but I need the money. What do I do? And what I always say is, you got to get a hobby that creates. Whether it's sport, whether it's, you know, learning to play guitar, paint, watercolors, it doesn't matter. Because one of the things that happens in flow, besides this hugely amplified performance and you know, this, you had this experience. You get what I call the high perch experience. You're kind of lifted up above your life, first of all, because you're free of yourself. We talked about the prefrontal cortex. It shuts off. Part of what shuts off is your inner critic, your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which houses your inner critic, that nagging, defeatist, always on voice in your head, shuts off in flow. Right. We feel this as liberation. Creativity goes up, risk taking goes up, our willingness to explore new ideas go up. We have this hype. We can see farther over our life and new things start to come together. So even if you're just getting in the flow, you know, by painting watercolors in the half hour free that you have every day, right? Between the job that you like, dislike and everything else, over time it's going to lead someplace because it's, it's basically moving the brain into the position where it can lead someplace. So it, you know, sometimes the clue to the, you know, to the dead end job is simply find something in your life that starts producing more flow and just give it, let it unfold. It'll lead someplace new.

Yeah. So there's so much more you could do than just like going for a 45 minute lunchtime run to tap into that runner's high, whether it be maybe making your run a little bit more risky, heading out to the trails, trying to figure out creative ways to tap into new environments. Engaging.

Yeah. I mean, you want to laugh, go. If you search online for something called the five Dog Workout. My wife and I co run an animal sanctuary in the mountains in northern New Mexico. And Flo is part of our healing methodology which is very, very successful. We work very sick and old animals here and they live forever. But part of it is taking them on these amazingly crazy runs up and down the cliff faces in the mountains. And it's really fun. It's really, really fun. And it's definitely the kind of run that produces incredible, incredible, incredible amounts of flow, especially group flow. You get into a group flow state with a dog and suddenly you stop tripping all over them. It's great. But you can see what that looks like online. Looks totally silly and ridiculous, but it's a lot of fun.

Yeah. Well, we've really only tapped into a few things that you talk about in the book, so I really recommend that folks go out and grab this. It's called the Rise of Superman Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance. And by the way, like I mentioned, Steven's other book, Abundance the Future Is Better Than youn Think is actually a really good book too. In the show notes for this episode which are going to be over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com I'm also going to put a link to Steven's flow genome project which we didn't have a lot of time to tap into today, but it's super cool. Basically you're just collecting a ton of information about achieving the flow state over there, right, Stephen?

We're doing a lot of different things from there's trainings and courseworks and events to doing kind of research projects and things along those lines. And we're actually building flow dojos, which are dedicated flow training and research facilities. That's awesome.

So I'll link to that if you want to go over there. There's even like a questionnaire and stuff over there that's kind of fun.

Yeah, no, check it out. There's the flow profile which is, you know, as I said, there's lots of different on ramps in the flow. And this is just a free 10 question profile that kind of gives you a look at the areas in your life where you're the most flow prone. So if you're looking to up the up the flow in your life, this is the direction to head.

Gotcha. Cool. And then of course I'll link over to his free slideshow where you can read about the 17 flow triggers and also this advanced brain monitoring EEG stuff he was talking about which looks pretty cool. So, Stephen, thank you so much for coming on the call, man, this is really fascinating stuff.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Alright, folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Steven Kotler from the Rise of Superman.

Signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

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