Afterthoughts: Flow—The Gateway Drug to Infinite Possibility

Yeah. So welcome to Flow Radio. I'm Ryan Wicks, Chief of Staff at the Flow Research Collective. Today I'm joined by our Executive Director and bestselling author Stephen Kotler and our Chief Science Officer, Dr. Michael Mannino. Today's conversation is a follow-up to a conversation that Stephen had with Chip Conley. Chip Conley is really a He's revolutionized the hospitality industry twice, first as the founder of Joy de Vivre Hospitality, the second largest operator of boutique hotels in the US, and then as the head of global hospitality and strategy at Airbnb, where he played a crucial role in transforming that company into the global leader it is today. And after Chip's experience at Airbnb, he founded the Modern Elder Academy, which is a midlife wisdom school. He has two campuses, one in Baja, Mexico, and the other in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And really, the school's philosophy there just centers on reframing aging from anti-aging to this pro-aging perspective through activities that really encourage their, their students there to become beginners again. So, Stephen, that conversation, you and Chip really kind of got into the founding of the Modern Elder Academy. And you touched upon flow and aging. So I think that's the best place to start. And what I really want to ask both of you is what role has flow played in your own lives and careers, and how's your relationship with it changed?

Over time.

In three-part harmony or what? Like key of F-sharp? I mean, like, I need some steer here. I'll go first because otherwise I'm going to forget what was just in my head. Unless Michael wants to go first, I can take a note.

No, no, take it away.

I think the— how has my relationship changed is what role has it played in my life? Flow has always— it does so many things, but in my mind, the thing that makes it most magnificent is that it unlocks the adjacent possible. It opens a door into a room that has 1,000 more doors. And then it convinces you, and this could be a form of mental illness, that you should go forth into those 1,000 more doors. And behind each door is 1,000 more doors. And it somehow gives you like the motivation and the drive and the joy to keep exploring those more doors. It is like, it's the driver of the adventure and it's the adventure. And that's, that's the impact it's absolutely had in my life. It just throws open these wild-ass doors that I didn't see coming that I never thought I could possibly walk through. And you walk through it and, oh my God, look, more doors. To me, it's the gateway drug to the infinite game. And that's what it's been in my life. But what's interesting and what has changed, and this is sort of the evolution of the collective, I think also as well is something that was rare and really was what Maslow called a peak experience has become reliable and repeatable and daily. That's what's really shifted. And along the way, I've sort of learned certain tactical things like don't ride the highs too high because on the other end, there's a low that's too low if you do. So, Some of flow's deliciousness I've had to sort of learn to steer around too. So, I think flow has taken me on an adventure and I've learned the hard way a bit of wisdom that has shifted how I relate to the phenomenological qualities of the state. And I always say if somebody uses too many big words in a sentence, they're lying.

I don't— coming from you though, I don't know how to follow that. The gateway drug to the infinite game.

Yeah, for real.

I've been listening to Jason Silva recently. Jason Silva sent me a bunch of videos. I've been listening to Jason and like, you listen to Jason for a little while and you come away rhapsodizing about things.

Yeah. So the only way I'll be able to follow that is the scientist in me. So I think for me, As we learn more about flow neuroscience and what flow does to the immune system, to the cardiovascular system, to the central nervous system, as we learn more about that, we can apply it more and more. And so for me, for the past like 5, 7, maybe even 10 years, the more we learn about flow, the more I've sort of incorporated that science to then motivate me more and get more of it. And figure out how I could change up my life internally and externally to get more of it. And that's been very, very helpful from a scientific applied standpoint.

Right on. Yeah, I think that, you know, oh man, the gateway drug to the infinite game is—

oh, that's perfect.

Yeah, that's going to be a social media post.

Closer to the adjacent possible. Yes.

That really takes us into, you know, flow slowing aging, which is really the primary conversation that you had with Chip. And so what I want to know is, how exactly do flow states influence, you know, some of the key biological aging processes like chronic inflammation, cellular, cellular senescence, What's going on under the hood?

High level is sort of straightforward. As we transition to flow, stress hormones are removed from our system, right? Nitrous oxide pushes them out of our system and they're replaced by kind of the performance-enhancing feel-good neurochemistry that underpins flow. Big deal here is depending on whose list you go by, right? It was 9 when Peter and I published the Future is Faster than You Think. There were 9 known causes of aging. There's a new updated list that has shrunk them down to 6. Doesn't really matter what they all have in common, including even senescence that you just mentioned is inflammation, right? So anything that significantly fights stress is an anti-aging technology. So ignoring all the neuroimmunology that Michael's going to speak to in half a second when I shut up, right, that fundamental thing, the flow, the fact that flow kind of resets the nervous system at baseline, and amplifies the kind of immune system and retunes our mental health, is— that's all anti-aging medicine. It's an incredibly powerful anti-aging tool.

Yeah. So I think peak performance and flow in general have direct and indirect effects on, on aging. By the way, let's define I don't know if you guys did this in the pod, but like, let's define cellular senescence. So when cells essentially stop dividing or don't divide in the right way, and then they release all these pro-inflammatory chemicals that have all these downstream processes and effects. But yeah, flow increases.

And then, by the way, it goes— they go by the great name of zombie cells.

Zombies. There you go. That's good. Yes. Zombie cells. So releasing dopamine, releasing the effects on the endocannabinoid system, releasing norepinephrine, all of those can have effects on reducing stress, reducing chronic inflammation, and so on. And so there's a whole field of science called psychoneuroimmunology.

Disco baby.

Which is very, very, which is very, very interesting field. So we all know about the gut-brain axis. Everybody hears a lot about that, that the gut microbiome can have all these effects on your mind, your cognitive processes, and so on. But the psychoneuroimmunology is the brain-immune axis. And so there's a lot of really interesting research out there that shows that your immune system is related to what's going on in your brain and therefore your cognition. Right. And so that affects a lot of different things psychologically, neurobiologically. We think that flow— really interesting research has come out. I think this is a good place to put it. I think it was about a year ago or 6 months ago, they looked at about 9,000 twins.

10,000 twins.

Yeah. Monozygotic twins. And they found that flow proneness is protective and will be less diagnosed. Flow proneness is protective against things like anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression, cardiovascular stress-inducing stress-related cardiovascular conditions, and schizophrenia. And schizophrenia, yeah. And so the more flow proneness you have, the more flow you get into, the less you're going to be like— I think it was 16% or more that you're going to be diagnosed with, like, less with those outcomes. So, which is really—

Yeah. And, you know, in our first few seconds of flow paper, one of the downstream impacts is the fact that, you know, we showed, or theoretically at least, that flow overrides PTSD, or really it overrides the ability for the brain to interpret acute stress as trauma and thus PTSD, right? That's sort of what it does. But if you look at that neurophysiologically, Nothing ages us faster than acute stress. This is like presidents age really fast because of the stress of the White House, et cetera, et cetera. And in a sense, it's allostatic load and overdrive. And it seems like flow is neuroprotective against that as well. Even though even Corinna Pfeiffer's lab stuff on burnout, she showed that flow overrides burnout. Which is again, that's allostatic overload. So that's extreme stress impacting our neurophysiology and flow seems to overwrite that. So at every sort of step in the scale, it seems that stress fights inflammation. Okay, off my soapbox. Over to you, Mark.

Great, awesome. No, it's also neuroprotective in the fact that flow relates to learning, right? So one of the—

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

So this is also really interesting too about flow and novelty. Novelty is a flow trigger. We learn more things and we have to do that as we age to get into flow more often. We'll get into that too, like how we could change our flow activities throughout the aging process. But the relationship between flow and learning is very interesting because as you learn more, you increase what's called cognitive reserve. And cognitive reserve has been shown to be neuroprotective against neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and dementia and so on. So cognitive reserve is a really interesting term. And I know, Stephen, you could talk about this way more, but it's the idea that you build— it's the mind or brain's resilience to neurodegeneration. And they've studied that people who have higher levels of cognitive reserve from like learning in their occupation or their vocation or studying more degrees or more autodidactic personalities about learning and things like that, have higher levels of cognitive reserve. And so you learn, and flow requires that, and flow also builds that. So as you learn, that's my point, right? As you learn more for to get into flow, you're building up your cognitive reserve, which is a neuroprotective effect.

And it's a feedback loop, right? So Yakov Stern, who's the godfather of cognitive reserve at Columbia, I think he did that really crazy study. I read about it in Our Country where he found that you get an 8% increase in cognitive reserve for every new leisure activity, and this was everything from gardening to reading to doing crossword puzzles to blah, blah, blah, you add. And, if you think about flow as the fastest way to learn or if we take it one step further and add in the work of Alkanah Goldberg who we both love and "The Wisdom Paradox," which is one of the great books in neuroscience, I think all three of us would agree. He showed that wisdom is also neuroprotective against dementia and Alzheimer's. Wisdom and expertise, skills, expertise are both underpinned by flow. Flow accelerates learning, builds up cognitive reserve, and you get this feedback loop that starts to get really interesting in that way too. You're right.

That's cool. I think another way that flow Well, that was back to your original question, Ryan, right? About flow and being protective against aging and how it affects the aging process. I think another very interesting effect that flow has and flow proneness has is on time perception, which we were going to get into. I don't talk to that too. So that is very interesting. And I think there's multiple ways that flow actually has an effect on altering perception of time and how that affects psychology.

Yeah, Michael, why don't you speak it? We're going to get to it later, so let's do it now. Yeah, get into it now. Why don't you lay out the paper first? And then I know I've heard you talk a little bit about this. I think your take on this is really fresh. So why don't you take us into this?

Yeah, so I think the biggest way that, well, There's two interesting ways that I think flow has an effect on aging with respect to time perception. One is, so there's a really interesting theory, and I think this comes from mostly David Eagleman and some of his work about how we all have this phenomenological effect that time changes as we age, right? Things move quicker. There's a lot of evidence for that, both anecdotally, of course, and empirically, that time changes as we age. Things a lot— summers go quicker and so on. And one of the interesting explanations that David Eagleman has of that is that a lot of the information that we start collecting as we age is not novel or not new. It's a lot of routine, right? And so what happens is the amygdala— everything comes through the amygdala first, and it's learning, it's processing threats, it's doing all those kinds of things. When you get all this new information, it takes longer for your amygdala to process information and then send it out to the rest of the brain. When you have like a repeat of information, whether that's from habits, from routines, or from anything like that, it takes a lot shorter time for that to happen. So time seems to just move a lot quicker as we age. Same thing for like, you know, why you take the same route to work, or, or so on. There's plenty of examples in our life, right? So when you're younger, summers are new, you're learning everything, so it takes a lot longer to process. The time seems a lot longer, right? Flow— in flow, perception of time changes, right? And a lot of times it slows down. So flow, when you're in flow, you're retraining your neurobiology, right, and your psychophysiology to change, to process time differently. So the more we can learn how to get into flow as we age, that changes our general perception of time. Does that make sense, Stephen? You're—

No, I'm nodding. I was thinking of a friend of mine who has a sort of inverted theory of this. He pointed out, and he sort of lives his life this way, that those moments, those eternal present moments, they last longer in our memory. So, one way to slow down and enrich the meaningfulness of life is to have more of those time-dilated, time-is-elongated moments because when hindsight, when they pass, you actually, you remember them and you remember them as thicker. So, you end up literally with more memories that way. So, it's sort of the, he's, and so, he takes, he has spent his life sort of hunting those high-flow time-dilated moments for exactly that reason.

And we've talked about this before. Like, I like David Eagleman's work. I think like his general theory, maybe not of how time slows down, it being a retroactive thing, it doesn't actually slow down in the moment that you're having this peak experience or something like that, but it's actually retrospective. Maybe that's not totally correct, but I do like the fact that it explains nicely how we change our perception of time as we age over the lifespan.

And I would also like to point out that, like, in our 50s, I, like a lot of, a lot of people I know now identify as a man who lives in a world where the minutes are 50 seconds long. It's a reframing thing, really.

I mean, good. I'm not going to—

Michael, I want to— I want you to speak to the other half of this, which is the really cool study on time and wound healing. Yeah.

So there was a paper that came out last year, really, really interesting paper that does a wonderful job of connecting the mind and the body and some of the evidence for it. So they looked at wound healing and they looked at time perception and how that correlates with wound healing. And what they did was they inflicted wounds upon the subjects, essentially, and they looked at how long it took those wounds to heal. And people— the outcome of the study was that people who perceived time to go by quicker, their wounds healed quicker. And likewise, people who perceived time to go by slower, their wounds healed slow. Uh, sorry, I messed it up. Yeah, did I mess it up? Did I?

Hold on, you did it right. Okay, when time slowed down, the wounds took longer to heal. When time sped up— yeah, correct. Now, one of the things that— one of the things that's weird here is Michael and I are working on a paper— on a paper on time perception in the brain around flow. And because one of the things that's come up out of our research and a lot of other people's research, including David Eagleman's, is there are like 5 or 6 or 7 different things that impact moment-by-moment time perception. Forget like larger time perception, you know, scales, but like moment by moment, the amount of dopamine in your brain will impact time perception. And Neil Sesh showed that the amount of information content in the scene that you're processing will impact time perception. There's a lot of stuff on how the speed of the world and its impact on cognitive load. Also impacts time perception. This is just in the moment. Flow does it too. The paper showed, and this is sort of like, it was, this was like everything Ellen Langer has been saying for 50 years is summed up in that TIME paper, which is the mind-body connection is very, very tight. And there's something, you know, in her, she was talking about aging as predominantly a mental phenomenon, right? And In a sense, aging is a time perception phenomenon among many other things. So that's interesting too here at a meta level.

Yeah, that's really good. No, I mean, I think— yeah, that was excellent. I mean, I think in general, the physiological and the psychological stress that as we accumulate affects our aging processes. The more we get into flow, the more we reduce that psychological stress because of flow's impact on mood and its impact on physiology and its impact on, you know, the immune system and so on can actually reduce a lot of that chronic and reverse probably a lot of that chronic stress and pro-inflammatory pathways over time.

Yeah, two things I got to add to that because as you were talking, there's two other, other factors that really play a role here. In interesting, weird ways. So, one is flow naturally seems to increase openness to experience, right? When you're in flow, you are extremely open to experience, first of all, right? And you can see the old as new again, which is what makes it so remarkable that beginner's mind, that sort of Chip Conley, Ryan spoke about this at the top of the show, managed to bring into his companies and everything else. But we know, we meaning the field of scientists, know that if you look at mortality stats around like Big Five personality traits or whatever, the only one that matters is openness to experience. And there's this really weird thing that happens. Openness to experience declines like precipitously, falls off a fricking cliff about a year before you die. And it is locked in stone. It's there in the data. We talk about it. I looked into it. It's in the footnotes to NART, in the Flow for Longevity training that we did for a while. But it's this really steep cliff that's really weird. So, one, I think flow is doing something interesting by— I was talking about it, the unlocking the adjacent possible, it feeds curiosity and motivation and really it reignites the seeking system. To go all yak pon sap on this shit. And that seems to be somewhat protective against death. Yeah, yeah.

Death. Okay.

Got the big hood. I know how to use it. Hopefully, Michael's going to pop his collar once more and get out the guitar again. That's all I'm saying.

I picked the right moment. So wait, we are actually writing to see— Stephen, you made me just think of something else. We're actually conducting some really interesting research right now on the information processing from perception and information processing and flow. So we're actually using, it's a flow and complexity study. And so we took some of our colleagues' data when people were in flow, and we are looking at that data in really interesting ways using all of these new kinds of interesting metrics from complexity theory, complexity science. And the goal there is to look at the rich amount of information that we process while in flow as an altered state of consciousness. So that's been, you know, your work, Stephen, and Csikszentmihalyi's work talks a lot about the nature of information processing and how we process more information.

Yeah, no, I mean—

When we're in flow, right? This, so if that's true—

That's also, by the way, I also have to say credit where credit is due. I suspected of it. It. She set me high suspected. I think the first person who validated it for me when I was on was David Eagleman because it showed up. Yeah, it showed up. He was the first person who really pointed out that, hey, when we're in flow, we're taking in more information per second, we're processing it more quickly and more thoroughly. I think he was the first guy who said that. And I think our research in this study we're about to put out, the one you're speaking about with Dr. Husky, is— bears this out. Like, with, as Michael pointed out, these 12 new super complicated computational neuroscience tools that our friend Fran developed, um, to measure things like information content in the brain during experiences. And we've applied it to flow, and the findings are dope. They're amazing.

It's yet unpublished, uh, but it will be very soon. Very soon. Our audience, but like, things, you know, technical words like entropy increases in the brain, metastability, all of these really like deep concepts.

Dude, you could just take that little blue pill, it solves all those problems for you. Don't worry about it.

No, thank you. How will this have an effect on aging? Well, I— this is the interesting conclusion that I think we can draw from this research that we're doing with Dr. Husky and team is that if we show, we show, right, that, that all of the, the, uh, information capable processing capabilities of the brain goes up, that is a doorway into more neuroprotection. Because again, going back to—

yeah, for sure, exactly.

Going back into cognitive reserve, the brain, you know, gets into this uber state of cognitive control and information processing while in flow, which all— which the neurons need to process information more, right? And so when they do that, they have to work harder, which then becomes more neuroprotective. With neuro—

other— by the way, to add on to that, because I want to— there's something else in that study. One of the other findings in that study, which is wild, is the cerebellum is way more active in flow than anybody suspected. We were, we were sort of mapping kind of the neural anatomy of flow or where it impacted the brain, and the data is overwhelming that the serotonin— or the cerebellum, which is I think everybody sort of suspected this. There's flow as an action state, there's movement involved, of course, but it's overwhelming. What's interesting there is that's essentially a backup brain, right? And you're talking about flow as automatized movement patterns and the cerebellum is where those automatized movement patterns are stored. And one of the things that we saw in the data besides the information processing stuff is, look, it's like this extra memory system for motions in a sense. That is fired up in flow, or at least that's my interpretation of what we were looking at. You might have a different one.

No, I think that's right. I think that's spot on. There's a lot of really interesting results from this research that we're, we're doing, and I think some of them have to do with aging and the cerebellum's involvement in flow, that, that, and information processing, um, has a lot to do with that, I'm sure. So there's a lot of interpretation for these results, but they're super, super interesting. I think they have outcomes for, you know, peak performance aging field in general.

So right on. Yeah, this, this begs the question, I gotta know from the two of you, is because I look to both of you to get some steer about how to kind of evolve my relationship with flow as I get older, uh, because I'm— what I've seen both of you do, you know, in, in the time that I've known you, I just Yeah, it's advice that I like to follow. How should people start thinking about their approach to flow as they get older? You know, I know recovery needs change. Our association, our relationship with risk changes. Flow triggers change. Yeah, let's unpack this a little bit.

I think there's two things that you gotta, two or three things that you really gotta think about more than anything else. First of all, creativity matters, right? Gene Cowan's work, I write about it in Our Country. If we start training creativity actively in our 40s and 50s, we unlock a whole suite of cognitive superpowers that come online in our 40s and 50s, new levels of intelligence, new levels of wisdom, creativity, empathy, perception, cooperation, collaboration, all this stuff that is amazing that really enriches the second half of our lives. But it only becomes ours if we— well, if you agree with the Harvard Development Study, you have to forgive yourself, forgive others. And Gene Cohen says you have to be creative. It's the actual creativity in the brain, the pattern recognition, the lateral thinking that underpin creativity. And by the way, this all seems to take place somewhere in the anterior cingulate cortex. That's what's most impacted by this stuff. And it plays a huge role in our ability to thrive in the second half of our life. And flow triggers creativity and creativity triggers flow. And this is this giant feedback loop. So, if you haven't learned how to utilize creativity as a flow trigger by your 40s, that you double down because otherwise, you're literally just shutting down, closing down the possibility space in the second half of your life is one. Two has got to be the fact that the challenge-skills balance shrinks over time due to allostatic load and overload. So, what we know is that the challenge-skills balance, the ideal ratio, if you talk to Csikszentmihalyi before he passed, it was about 4 to difference between challenge and skills. That's the ideal sweet spot, right? When the challenge of the task is about 4% greater than our skills, that drops us into flow right quick. But because of allostatic load, the impact of stress over time on our physiology, our neurophysiology, that can shrink. So, what ends up happening is, one, if you don't have active recovery protocols, if you're not getting enough sleep, if you're really not taking care of yourself, it's going to be hard to fight back against. It's going to get too tight to even sort of squeeze through. And two, it means in certain categories you want to take— you need to actually go even slower. One of the great flow secrets is, right, you got to go slow to go fast a lot of times. And what this lesson is, as we age, you might have to go a little bit slower to go a lot faster. So those would be my two. Michael, I don't know what you got. That's what I got.

I would say, Ryan, echoing your point, recovery is enormously important. And yeah, back to the flow triggers, like learning how to manage the flow triggers. Look for new ones as we get older. New activities, obviously, I think are good. Things like, for example, take novelty, right? Like, so going back to time perception, right? It might be more important as we age with a quality, you know, healthspan to seek more novelty to get us into flow as a trigger rather than like, you know, I think passion and purpose, Stephen, to your point, are also really important more toward, you know, the— as we get older as well, because you develop more passion, you develop more purpose, you develop more grit, you have a bigger growth mindset. All of those kinds of things matter when you're looking for new flow activities and flow triggers. So I think, but back to novelty, if things get more sort of routine as we get older, then it's probably more important to seek out more novelty as a flow trigger for specific activities that you're doing, right? The other thing is going back to the flow cycle. So take like frustration and before release, before flow, before recovery, right? So frustration, you probably can mitigate that as you get older because you need, so it's sometimes it's harder to, so Stephen, you can speak to more of this, but sometimes it's harder to learn things as you get older, right? Because of, let's go back to like networks.

You mean 'cause I'm old?

As you're getting older. Yeah.

The youthfulness of old.

Stephen, you take this one. This is, by the way, that reminds me of—

You got it. No, no, no.

That reminds me of George Carlin. But no, don't you agree? So if it's harder to learn things, let's say as a meta skill, right? So you develop this meta skill of learning how to learn things, but it's harder to learn things as you get older. That's going to be more frustrating. So how do you, so it possibly, right?

Yeah. So one, I like, let me, let me ask you one question just as a, because this is the one question I have about that statement. I like, I know that statement is true and shows up in the literature and everything else, but I think there's a before and after that is large language models. Because LLMs, one of the reasons I think learning declines as you get older is you know what your likes and dislikes are. And when you're you might still be intensely interested in your thing. Your sources of new information used to dry up over time, and now they're expanding in wildly new ways. So, I don't necessarily know if that statement is a statement about culture and the amount of information in the world and our access to it, or if that's actually a statement about adult development and learning over time. And I'm not, I'm really not sure. So, there, we may see a market shift in that one. That's the only caveat I have to what you just said.

Interesting. Okay. So, a study came out that I want to talk about, about motivational factors because passion, purpose, curiosity, right? All these things that we're talking about are flow triggers that vary across— the study was called Motivational Factors Are Varying Across Age Groups and gender, actually.

And culture, by the way. And culture.

Right.

A couple of interesting things this study found, and it was a pretty recent study a couple of years ago, um, about passion, grit, and mindset and how they vary across gender. And this study was gender less culture. Uh, grit, of course, seems to go up as we age. Passion source seems to decline as we age. Both for men and women, which was kind of expected. But mindset also decreases as we age. Growth mindset decreases as we age, but more so for men than for women. And also for passion, passion actually seems to increase as we age, but more so for men than for women, which is really, really interesting.

So, and then passion goes up in men as we age, but goes down in women. And growth mindset goes up in women and down in men.

Yeah, or the, the both of them go down in, in men and women, but women seem to retain growth longer.

One thing we haven't touched on yet that I think we need to get to is social connection and group flow, uh, intergenerational relationships I would include in that. Um, how might collective flow experience experiences help develop intergenerational relationships?

Let me top level. Yeah, top level, you got to come in. My backstory around this question is that one of the big problems as we age is if most of your friends tend to be in your peer group, if you happen to be particularly long-lived, people die off. So, I always say make replacement friends. First of all, friends in other generations. Second of all, all the blue zone research into long-lived communities show intergenerational friendships, right? That 20-year-olds are friends with the 90-year-olds and vice versa. And there's a lot of that in long-lived communities. And one of the questions that we've been asking a lot and really kind of an argument made in our country and elsewhere is that one of the best ways to maintain robust friendships as we age, get lots of the pro-social neurochemistry that seems to have such a prophylactic effect against death and aging fast is group flow. Group flow activities, really, they seem to— we know what if you have robust social networks, it adds 7 additional years to your life. And what is meant by robust social networks is an open question. But I think what we've learned, and certainly Michael, a lot of your new research and our new side project kind of speaks into this, is that whatever we mean by robust social networks, we mean time spent in synchrony, time spent with brain entrainment, time spent with the pro-social neurochemistry that underpins flow in our system. That's got to be the mechanism here that we're interested in.

100%. I mean, you write about this in The Art of Impossible about oxytocin doing double duty when you're actually in group flow and having those effects. So, yeah, so there's a lot in general. We know across the board for with overwhelming evidence that if you ask any neuroscientist, what's one of the top 3 things you could do for brain aging and protection and longevity? It's have quality social relationships. And you could say, Stephen, you said we can argue about like sort of what's, you know, social relationships meet robust social relationships mean, but it seems to be more quality over quantity. Um, and having that repeatable, having conversations, having good conversations, having, you know, sharing— Steven, you mentioned about gratitude and forgiveness and those kinds of things— all have neurobiological effects. We know group flow or collective flow just significantly amplifies those effects, right? So the more you can get out of that, the better you can for for brain neuroprotection and brain aging and healthspan and all those kinds of things. Yes to mechanism. So what's the mechanism at play here? The research is still looking at that. But one of the overwhelming, at least recent conclusions is, Stephen, you mentioned it, is synchrony and brainwave entrainment. So it seems what happens is when people get into group flow or collective flow or team flow, their biology literally synchronizes. So heart rates synchronize, um, brain waves between brains synchronize, galvanic skin response, breathing rates, all of these.

Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You're telling me I sweat at the same rate as other people? Like, we can sync up our sweating?

We can actually—

the whole level, new level of togetherness.

100% thinking of sweating. Yes.

That's so bizarre. I didn't actually— I've heard you say you literally said we sweat and think. I don't even know what that means.

It's called sink sweating, actually.

No, thanks, buddy. Oh, so that Olympic sport, it's right after breakdancing.

Yeah, so it's actually something called skin conductance, which is like— no, but for our audience, It's something called skin conductance, and that actually synchronizes because that's an interesting indicator of arousal and like how much you're paying attention, right? How calm you are, and also valence, which is a psychological term for your sort of your mood or your emotional state, right? So galvanic skin response is indicative of those kinds of things, and those things do actually synchronize. Very tightly, very tightly. Um, really interesting research has shown that, um, people listening in an audience to a concert, to an orchestra, they move the same, their breathing rates actually synchronize, and people with similar personality traits— and Stephen, maybe you could speak to this about the relationship with group flow and how people get into group flow maybe with different personality traits— but interestingly, a correlation between personality traits in these quality relationships is a predictor of how much you synchronize with those people when you're in group flow. Now, how does—

Is it a like attracts like? Is there a mix and match? And when you say personality traits, like, have they been measured by the Big Five, which nobody— which shouldn't even be a real test anyways. But like, I'm sorry, what did I say?

Well, in this particular research, I, they used, I forget what they, the assessment that they used for actually assessing personality traits, but the, the, uh, we don't know if it's the Big Five is a weird, I mean, you know what I mean?

Like Big Five measures incidences of adjectives and language as a way to like get us at the human personality, which is super interesting. It's probably proof of something, but it may not be for proof of personality.

It's interesting, but here it's sort of there are effects about personality traits and predicting your ability to sync up with other people. But when you do, you have, you know, more psychological safety. It's like it's more interpersonal synchrony, more trust, more psychological safety, more collaboration, more engagement, more enjoyment, more cooperation, more team performance, all of these things.

So let me— I got— this is so far from longevity and flow. But I got to ask you this question. Explain this to me. That would mean that if it's a like attract likes phenomenon, that would mean like me and my like 7 friends who are all super high on neuroticism hang out together. We're going to feel safer, right? Higher trust, more psychological safety. But are you kidding? You get 7 people as crazy as me together at once. Like bad things happen. There's no way that makes us feel more safe. Like what? This doesn't make any sense to me.

Well, no, no. First of all, not within group. Yes, within your group, quite.

It would seem like within a group, you'd want like somebody who's really high in neuroticism being balanced by somebody who's really low in neuroticism so that they would feel safer overall. Am I wrong?

No, but I don't think—

would you answer that question like Al Pacino again for me?

No, but as a caveat, as a scientific Gaviat. That's my Robert De Niro. Sorry, I don't do Al Pacino. It is. Um, I think, I think, I think that there's the mechanism at play, and no, it goes back to aging, right? Because I think there's a very— there's some very interesting research that discusses, um, this idea of collective flow, um, and having to do with healing having to do with lowering inflammation and increasing your immune system. So there's a— I mentioned at the beginning of this call, psychoneuroimmunology, right? The brain-immune system axis. There's a— that extends into social. So there's a whole field called social psychoneuroimmunology.

And it's disco baby.

Hey, disco baby. More than one disco babies, right? So you have the ability to get into collective flow or group flow amplifies, I would say, and this is more than speculation, I would say based on the evidence, it amplifies your ability to age better, have lower inflammation, extend telomeres, extending telomeres, and so on. I think there's probably a lot of effects of group flow on aging, and the mechanism is this, this ability to synchronize.

The cool thing is we're sort of at the front end of a line of research that's going to be able to look at that too. It's probably 3 or 4 lines coming together in that. But what's great about a lot of the stuff that Michael's been talking about, at least one of the things that really excites me is this has been somewhere between speculation and theory for 25 years now, these different components of this. But we're at the point right now where these things are testable. Hypotheses or they're already proven and we're getting more and more data about why, how, how big is the effect. And that's super cool. The other one that we haven't really talked about, this was Csikszentmihalyi's work up to the time he died. He wrote extensively about this. We've done some work on it as flow is an engine for adult development, makes us more complex over the time, makes us more fulfilled as individuals over time. We know we talked about flow's impact on the downside, right? Neuroprotective against X, Y, and Z. That's all bad for us. But the flip side is it's now baked into the definition of happiness. It underpins meaning and overall life satisfaction and well-being and all these factors that are known, blue zone research and otherwise, to significantly extend life. Where I think stuff gets really sort of extra cool and neat right now is I would say if you say the forefront of consciousness research is sort of combinatory approaches, right? We've known this for a while that the best approach to healing certain things might be like two-thirds flow, one-third psychedelic therapy with this meditative strategy and this recovery strategy. So we're starting to get that information. The next step in that chain to me is its impact on aging, right? Like, that's, that's one of the clearest because over time, a lifetime is sort of a combinatory approach to aging, right? And so you— one of the questions, Ryan, you asked earlier, incidentally, and this is, you know, is what should you do earlier on to prepare? What are the biggest, you know, what are the biggest aspects? And we've got lots of interesting answers about nutrition and health and different points of time in your life and all this stuff. But one of the things that we don't have that we will have is there's probably just like for all the other things, if you get into a tremendous amount of flow at certain periods in your life, it probably has the biggest impact against certain factors of aging at certain times. And that's a very speculative sort of statement, but, uh, I can back it up in part, so I can just like try to get us out of this cul-de-sac that I just drove us into.

Oh no, no, because you made me think of a couple things actually. Um, yes to all of the above. Um, I think, um, kind of lost my train of thought now. Um, okay, well, one of the things I wanted to say was— ah, yes, okay, your combination, your combinatory That's very interesting. So I think you're absolutely right that like as we age, there's more of like learning about what are the appropriate combinations to optimize our aging, right? And optimize our ability to get into flow. And you mentioned large language models and AI earlier in this conversation. I think that, you know, like, so as an analogy, take something like AlphaFold from Google. So AlphaFold is a huge, you know, like, they're just drug design.

Talking about fighting aging, right? Just a different front, right?

So now, now AI is figuring out all of these protein folding combinations that will pinpoint all of these things, these ailments that humans have, and that humans could have never thought of because just like our imagination is limited in that way. Now AI can find all of these combinations and do it in 2 weeks, whereas it would take a PhD student like, right, 5 or 6 years. And what's really interesting, so it hyper-personalizes those, those, those solutions to your biology, right? So now we know that AI can figure out, okay, you need to— and these are like, you can, you can just go to your CVS, right? And figure out, oh, I need this much theanine, right? All these things you could buy off the shelf on CNN. I need— see it in CVS. I need this much theanine. I need this much bromine and I did and whatever. And this combination tailored to my biology can reduce like cancer rates 86%. Crazy, crazy stuff like that. The same thing I think will be with when we use artificial intelligence to understand our biology, to optimize how we age, behaviorally, not molecularly, right, to prevent things, but also to optimize our aging and how we get into flow. So you're going to need to like do this kind of activity with these kinds of flow triggers, then meditate, then, you know, do this thing, then do X, Y, and Z. And you do those things in this combination and it's going to be the most optimal solution tailored to your own biology and the way you are aging. Versus the way this other person is aging, for example.

Yeah.

Yes. This is that. So that, that is very interesting. The other thing I wanted to say, what you made me think of is, is about flow triggers as we age is curiosity. And so I think curiosity, we know, is a huge flow trigger, right? And we can cultivate and train curiosity. And we now know neurobiologically what curiosity is. In fact, one interesting study showed that people who are more curious— they put them in brain scanners and they gave them assessments on, you know, their curiosity levels— and it showed that tighter functional connectivity, tighter connections between the hippocampus and the reward systems of the brain. So the hippocampus, where we're learning, where we're memorizing things, where we're paying attention to where we are in time and space, was tight, more tightly connected with reward areas of the brain. And those are people who are more curious. So that's the applied neuroscience. So it is trainable. And so that's one of the biggest recommendations, is to develop that curiosity as we age, because that's your gateway into learning more activities and, and flow triggers and changing your flow activities as we age.

And, and maybe the most important thing, we think we're going to end on, because what was supposed to be a 20-minute conversation, an hour later, an hour and 10 minutes later, But you remind me of the most important thing, which is we thought forever that brains didn't develop more neurons. You were born with a fixed number and they died off. And we now know there's new neurogenesis over time. But really what we do know is the hippocampus will, even in the very elderly who are about to die tomorrow, your hippocampus is going to produce about 795 new neurons every day. But what Michael's point just was, with these tight hippocampal connections around curiosity, if you really want those neurons to live, to thrive, to form neural networks, it's literally the curiosity that does it. So this is the openness to experience thing. Openness to experience thing goes away, curiosity goes away. Even though we're getting those new neurons in the brain, we're not using them. So they're not helping us out. Right. So we're not taking advantage of our actual biology by not doing those things. All right. That's my— that's my final comment. Michael, your final comment. Ryan, yours.

Oh, man. Okay.

My—

this is my penumbral final comment, and then I'll get to my final comment. So my penumbral— I think that's the right word, Stephen. You correct me if I'm wrong.

Penumbral is the lighted portion of the shadow. I think you mean the other one.

Oh, okay. All right.

The way you penultimate— penultimate. No, maybe you were right. I don't know. You might be right and I may be wrong on this one.

First of all, there's no— we— there's, there's no good way we can end this podcast based on how you started us off with your amazing ways of putting things. So let's just— it's a fail. It's a fail. How are we going to end this podcast?

Why?

Okay, this is for you, Stephen. Why is it harder to learn languages as we age? Or is it? Right? This is a well-known sort of like psychological and neuroscientific fact. It's harder to learn languages, maybe less so with AI now, as we age. But the question is, is it? And can we use some of these techniques like flow to be able to increase our learning and sort of, you know, stave off that difficulty as we age. But that—

because the answer, you know, the answer to this, because this is one of the things that we found in our country, and I think it's got to apply to language. So one of the things we found in our country is that it's not so much that the— one of the reasons language is harder is because that that super pliable neuroplastic window, people think it shuts down in our early 20s for certain motor skills. So, one of the potential reasons why where language is and language also requires a lot of fine motor movements, your tongue, your mouth, there's a lot of motor stuff in there. But, what we found at least with physical skills like park skiing and park snowboarding is that it's not that the motor weren't motor learning window shuts in the same way we think. It's that the way we learn changes. We learn playfully without curiosity and self, what's the word I'm looking for? Embarrassment, right? As kids, we don't mind being bad. As adults, we're not as playful when we learn at all. It's work. We're trying to learn. And I think that is gonna— I think that's probably true with language is my point. Like, if it's true with physical skills, it's probably true with language too.

Yeah, I mean, like, this is like, you know, the smartphones that they have for elderly people, um, the Jitterbug that my mom has. Um, anyway, this is very interesting. Okay, my final comment—

wait, hold on, Ryan, you have a final comment, and then Michael, I'd like you to bring us out with a song.

All right.

Yeah, you got to pull out the guitar. My final comment.

I just—

just all this starts young. Yeah. I mean, when you're at a point in your life and you say you're too old for that shit, that's when you know you really got to start double down on this work.

Yeah, true that.

Yeah.

All right.

Michael, you owe us a tune.

Yeah. All right, everybody. Take requests, but since we're in a podcast, I will. Stephen, you want me to do something a little bit lighter, a little bit harder?

I really want you to speak into your soul and share with us Okay, okay, you got it.

This is gonna be it right here. It's a little, little ditty I like to call Lose Yourself.

Did we do this already? You're gonna do it again? Yeah, twice, to open us and close us.

I got it.

Full fucking circle, man.

Hold on. No more rage, I'mma change what you call— oh no. No more games, I'mma change what you call rage. Tear this motherfucking roof off like 2 dogs caged. I was playing in the beginning, but the mood all changed. I've been chewed up and spit out and booed off stage, but I kept rhyming. Next cypher, best believe somebody's paying the Pied Piper. All the pain inside amplified by the fact that I can't get by with my 9 to 5 and I can't provide the right type of Life for my family, because man, these goddamn food stamps don't buy diapers. And there's no movie, there's no Macaulay Culkin. This is my life, and I'm, uh, these times are so hard. It's getting even harder trying to feed and water my C+ teeter-totter. But me, Madonna, trying to be a father, it's so hard. Okay, Michael, ladies and gentlemen, Michael Menino, lose yourself. You better lose yourself in the moment. You want it, you better never let it go. Ho!

If we don't get more, more views—

hey, thanks for watching, folks.

I don't know what to do.

Sorry about that.

See you next time.

See you next time.

Bye.