Flow State Onset: Unraveling the First Few Seconds of Flow with Steven Kotler & Dr. Michael Mannino

You're basically teeing up the field of flow science for a whole new frontier.

Flow starts when you say yes to the fight. Getting into a flow state versus a trauma, getting into a flow state is associated with a proactive willingness to approach the situation, to approach the challenge, to face it.

The fight response is localized in the thalamus, whereas freeze and flee were in the amygdala. It's a sense of, I got this versus, oh my God, I'm going to get my ass kicked. Our argument is essentially that flow is the flip side. It's this learned powerfulness.

We know flow helps with burnout. We know flow helps with depression. Flow increases psychological wellbeing and subjective wellbeing and so on and so forth. If flow is associated with overcoming these challenges, and then when you achieve that, that's a felt sense of, oh, better than expected results. The influence flow can have on PTSD and alleviating and just improving mental health. We've proposed a theoretical model that, that allows us to explore that empirically.

It's not just about peak performance and productivity, it's about wellbeing. And resilience as well.

What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Doris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

Welcome everyone. My name is Dr. Tori Higgins. I'm the head coach at the Flow Research Collective, and I'm being joined for a very special episode of FRC Radio today by our executive director, Stephen Kotler, and our chief science officer, Dr. Michael Mannino. And this is an exciting episode because we're here to talk about the research article that they just recently published. It's called The First Few Seconds for Flow: A Comprehensive Proposal of the Neurobiology and Neurodynamics of State Onset. And that's in the Journal of Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. Thanks, guys, for taking the time to talk to us. About some cutting-edge neuroscience today.

Glad to be here.

Good to be with you.

Thank you.

So this paper marks several firsts in the field of flow science, so let's, let's dig right in. Um, I want to know, uh, Stephen, you know, I always want to talk origin stories. So what's the origin story of this paper? Can you talk a little bit about what are some of the biggest gaps in our understanding of flow, particularly in regard to how we enter into a flow state, and what took you down the path to writing this paper?

A bunch of different, uh, complicated questions. Um, in terms of, uh, what did we know about flow, that the— and flow state onset, nobody had yet proposed anything for the neural dynamics, the network level of the brain, or the neurobiology of flow state onset. People had started to do over the past 10 years. I think that's right, Michael. Um, better work on, on sort of the neurobiology, the state itself. But how do we get there, um, was an open question.

I, uh, wait, Stephen, can I interject actually?

Yeah, please. Of course.

My first interjection. So we actually reviewed a paper, um, called The Brain and Flow from Alameda in 2020, published in 2022. There's a lot of research about what happens when you're in the brain, what when you're in the flow state. But method— that's methodologically very difficult, right? It's kind of tricky to get people in flow and put an EEG cap or put it in MRI scanners and get them in flow, let alone actually find out methodologically, okay, wait a second, you're not in flow now, now let's get you in flow and see that transition. So it's a method— it's also a methodological issue of the difficulty of studying this.

Sure.

And the approach in this paper, and I think what sets it apart was interesting. So, I have been looking at the question of flow and the question of extreme stress one way or another since, I mean, I devote a chapter to it in West of Jesus. And so, I like at least the early 2000s, I've been looking at this question. Of the relationship between extreme stress, the fight, freeze, and flee response, and flow. Like, those questions have been there. And there's work that I built on when I was writing "West of Jesus" done by a guy named Rob Shulthees that I think is the first time I've seen in the popular literature, and this is like 1986, kind of a neurobiological breakdown. And he took what was then sort of the existing endorphin hypotheses about flow, and then he tacked on a bunch of stuff we were learning about extreme stress. So I've been looking at this question one way or another for about 20 years. And what happened was we were doing our inaugural event in Miami. Heidi Williams was in the audience and I was talking about the fight, freeze, or flee response, and I mentioned casually that some people believe there's no such thing as a freeze response, that it's actually what happens when you get fight and flee at the same time. The body freaks out and freezes. And it was just sort of like a casual aside. Oh, this, you know, anecdote in the literature. Interesting. And Heidi literally just called bullshit almost immediately. If you know her, she is not shy and she's like, that's not true. You need to look at the work on PTSD. You got to revisit some of these ideas. And I smiled and said, okay, yes, I'll do that. And, you know, inside I was like, goddammit, somebody just proved me wrong on stage. And, you know, every—

yeah, I have a favorite moment while you're giving a talk.

I was petulant. I was a little petulant. And that's fine. I don't mind when that happens to me because it made me go home and start doing the research. And what I realized very, very quickly was that a lot of my earlier ideas and these earlier ideas were very, very true. In fact, if you looked at, compared the traumatic stress with, or extreme stress with flow, a lot of the same systems were being utilized. They're both altered states of consciousness. They're very different. They share some overlap, complete focus and things like that. Um, but I started asking myself, well, why does one experience become trauma and one experience come flow? And it led to, um, a thought experiment. It's really a hypothetical, but it's based on like such real-world phenomenon that like there are big exact studies on this phenomenon and that we have videos of it. And it was really easy to visualize. But the question was, you're a motorcyclist, you're driving down the freeway, you get cut off by a car. Now, one of two things could happen. Maybe there are other experiences, but there are two really common responses. You swerve around the car, the swerve goes remarkably well, and by the time you're on the other side and you drive away, you're in flow, right? And with all of the core phenomenological characteristics of flow are showing up. Or same exact swerve, nothing is different other than Oh my God, I didn't feel in control and it scared me. And now I'm driving on the freeway feeling, feeling traumatic stress. And it is the kind of situation that can lead to PTSD. So the question was, what the hell? Like, what? First of all, it gave me a framework for thinking about the problem because it's— you're really talking about at max 2 seconds. So it went from this like really complicated challenge how do you figure out what's going on in the brain in flow or all this other stuff to what's going on in the brain in these 2 seconds. And some of what happens in those 2 seconds for a few seconds of flow are literally already dictated by the experience, right? We know, for example, the experience is going to start with activity in the salience network because that's the network that detects novel, unexpected stimuli, right? So we had a starting point. Okay, this whole experience doesn't matter where everybody's brains are. Ahead of time, the experience starts when the salience network detects the car and it ends when you either drive off with traumatic stress or drive off with flow. And that way of, oh my God, we've got this hugely complicated thing and suddenly it's crunched down and I just have to go moment by moment. And if you look at like how fast things happen in the brain, right? In a sense, the fastest they're going to be able to take place is sort of within the gamma cycle. And we know how long that is. Like, we know what that is, so we could actually even chunk it down further and say, okay, you know, there are going to be 10 milliseconds that we got to account for here and 10 more here. And so it's— those are 20 data points rather than a million things we have to try to figure out. And to me, that felt like a very solvable problem. And because the motorcycle, like, while this is um, the being cut off by a, by a car had been studied already. Like, people had done research and fMRI work and things like that. And what happens when you get cut off by— some of the gaps were already filled in. Um, so it was— I felt it was a very contained form for, like, this puzzle that, like, you know, I've been staring at flow state onset for 25 years and I couldn't even find a way in. Suddenly I had a way in and some of the information already are filled in. And then it was just a question of like, you know, I mean, Michael and I really hammered at it. Some other people really joined in. There were a lot of conversations with a lot of scientists and thinkers along the way just saying, hey, is this possible? Is this possible? You know what I mean? I talked to lots of different people. And, you know, sometimes the victories— like, I remember talking to Paul Zak, who's sort of a god of oxytocin. And Paul's also really good on flow. And, you know, do I have to involve the oxytocin system? And Paul is really convinced that unless there's social flow, this is a solo situation, you don't. So, that's an entire system that I didn't have to talk about. So, there were a lot of conversations like that with people where we were just like, okay, great. We can throw this out because we don't need it. We can, you know, get more closer and closer to, you know, what we know is really active. And, I think as a final piece of the puzzle, Richard Husky, who was one of our co-writers, is at UC Davis and is really one of the leading lights of flow research in America, had done really cool work on the— Scott Kelso had sort of laid the foundation, another one of our co-writers, establishing social neuroscience coordination dynamics. And then Richard Husky had literally come in and started to look at the neural dynamics of flow and flow state onset. So we had, with his work, we also had a target. Like, we knew we were starting and we sort of knew where one of the systems was likely heading. Yeah. And that was really, that was really useful. I'll stop there.

Yeah, let me jump in. Let me jump in.

Before, I just want to, I just want to, I want to cap, I want to recap some of this for our listeners. So the landscape coming into this paper, what I just heard, were there were gaps in our understanding around the mechanisms driving the onset of flow, the neural dynamics or the information exchange that occurs while we're in flow.

Yeah.

Right.

Also methodologically, how are we going to study this? Right. Because there's challenges of keeping people in flow and then putting them in some kind of imaging device, etc. Right. And so I love that you came up with this theoretical model or this thought experiment of the motorcycle to start trying to tease out some of these questions.

So, so, uh, Yeah, so to add on that, that's like the— it's a hypothetical situation, it's a thought experiment. So it happens in real life, obviously, and like Stephen said, it's been studied. But I want to add on to that, that that extrapolates to other high-stakes scenarios like in sports and combat, and also low-stakes scenarios. So we think the way the brain transitions into flow all happens across the board. This is the— when the brain gets to a flow state, when it finds the flow state, this sort of thing happens. It's just that this sort of like, you know, you can even think about like a CEO about, about to give a presentation to the board and it could go really, really well. All of the flow triggers are present, are present, you know, and it becomes a flow state or it can go really badly. Right. And lead to, you know, X, Y, and Z negative outcomes. Right. You know, in the psychology of that CEO. So I think it's broad.

I've definitely had drama from bad presentations. Right. Yes.

Especially when there's a lot at stake.

Right.

And so Yeah, I think it presents a really good way, entry point into exploring these neurobiological mechanisms of onset.

So what you're doing—

One thing I got to add, one final thing.

Sure.

Only because I just— I have found, because we're now, Michael and I, one of the things that we're working on is a paper on intuition. Thinking about the process of like having, having an intuition. Again, it's a— we can like, when it shows up, you can isolate it to like those few seconds. So this framework has turned out to be really useful for thinking about, you know, a lot of the questions we have about brain stuff are these large-scale processes, consciousness, you know, those sort of— these sorts of flow, these sorts of big questions. They're super complicated to wrap your head around. And I like this, this framework of like the onset of the experience as a, just as a starting point, as a way to get a toehold into these really complicated multi-layer processes where there's so much stuff going on. I like it's a framework that like even if you want to take things down to the molecular genetic level, which we didn't do, in this time frame, you could still do it. You're— the scale is right, that, you know, all that stuff is good. So I, I think it's a tool for, for anybody looking to think about, you know, these kinds of hard problems. I think it's a useful thing.

And when you mentioned Torrey, just real quickly about the neural dynamics. So yes, Richard, um, who is an author on our paper, as Stephen mentioned, was really one of the first people to, um, explore Flow from a systems neuroscience perspective. And like when we say dynamics, like when we say neural dynamics and neurodynamics, when people read the paper, really just what that means is different brain areas communicate with one another in really dynamical, rapidly switching ways, right? So you have one sort of like structure of the brain areas talking to another, and then you have another one and then another one, and you go through these sequences. In a very dynamical way that unfolds over time. And that can happen enormously rapidly given the spatial temporal scale of how these, you know, it's all about oscillation, which is like alpha wave, beta waves, gamma waves. Those are called neural oscillations. And that's how brain areas talk to one another.

So, and I wanted, so there's so much to unpack here. So I want to drill down into this framework. That you've come up with. So what we're talking about really is a high-stakes or a high-risk scenario that has lots of different flow triggers, right? So the challenge-skill balance is there. We've got someone that's deeply concentrated on the task at hand. In your— in the paper, you're talking about the motorcycle scenario. So based on your exploration of the research, your review of all of the science to date, what's your take on the different factors that might push someone in the direction that's in that situation, in the direction of either flow or to trauma? What's happening there? What, where, what's going on?

Let me start with that one. Let me— Steven, you mind?

No, I know you, you always like this one, so you can— I love it.

Yeah, yeah. So this is a great question. Um, so I'll start off with a quote from Steven. Uh, he has this great quote in, in The Art of Impossible: flow starts when you say yes to the fight. And so that's very, very interesting because there's always a challenge. There's a challenge you're presented with, a perceived challenge. And you're bringing a certain skill set to that task. So there's always this moment of, of approach or avoidance. And so we think is happening here is that getting into a flow state versus a trauma, getting into a flow state is associated with a proactive willingness to approach the situation, to approach the challenge, to face it, versus trauma, which is maybe associated with a reactive sort of willingness to avoid the situation. So you can couch this in terms of approach avoidance or fight or flight, right? But flow is always associated with a challenge, and a challenge presents difficulties to the brain. And so whether you're in a high-stakes scenario or a low-stakes scenario, and so that's what kind of we're exploring is this point of departure that the brain takes with approach versus with avoidance.

And it— sorry, it's worth— I mean, this isn't a new idea. And it's like, if you go back, Hans Seel's, like, I think it's 1935 paper on eustress and distress, which was based on the Yerkes-Dobson curve that becomes, once chicks and the egg shows up, the challenge-skill balance, right? He had this notion of positive versus negative stress going all the way back, and the— in these two systems And, um, what's interesting about it— so some of this work, it really started like I was thinking about all this stuff. I had dinner with Andrew Huberman when we were up in Seattle, uh, at one of our early events. And Andrew's lab at Stanford had literally separated out the fight response, and they figured out that the fight response is localized in the thalamus whereas freeze and flee were in the amygdala. And so the mechanism I was looking for, and we don't, we're not 100% certain if you're all, what Michael said is 100% true all the time. You're always going to say yes to the fight. You're always going to approach it. We, we believe that usually that actually means quite literally triggering the fight response. So when that, like that momentary surge, and while it's not in the paper, um, you get testosterone among other focusing and energizing chemicals. You get a little bit of testosterone with that fight response. And the, the, the, the freeze response, the flee response, it's that I'm trying, I don't have control and I'm trying to run away. That's start. And it's, and really want to emphasize, it's not just saying yes to the fight and approaching, it's a sense of I got this. Versus, oh my God, I'm gonna get my ass kicked. Now, you can go into a situation and think you're going to get your ass kicked and still triumph and end up in flow on the back end of it, but it's— it seems much more unlikely.

And that's also part of the overall project here, is linking, like you said, sense of I got this— that's the phenomenological, subjective, like, felt experience— and linking that with what's going on in the neurobiology. So you have this neurophenomenological approach. That's what really trying to do. And one of the goals in the paper, for the first time in the literature, really trying to connect the neurobiology, the empirical data with the phenomenology, the self-reporting that Csikszentmihalyi studied and seeing how those mutually constrain one another, right? So how the data informs what people report, but then also using those self-reports, that sense of control to inform how we interpret the data from neuroimaging studies, for example.

And it— which is huge, which is huge. This is a huge advancement in flow science and our understanding of flow. And if I'm hearing you correctly, it feels like one of these key differentiators between, you know, is someone going to go down the path to trauma versus the path to flow, is this ability to act in that moment. So, and which seems like it has huge implications for, you know, building antifragility, resilience, and potentially even treating PTSD versus the—

in fact, the inability to act, right? Like going all the way back to VanderKolk's really famous 1989 paper, inability to act is always associated with trauma. The end result of this inability to act is Marty Seligman's famous work on learned helplessness, right? Like where the inability to act is so bad that you just give up. Our argument is essentially that flow is the flip side, is this learned powerfulness, right? It's based on, you know, deciding to act. And in a sense, you can say that flow starts when we detect novel stimuli and decide to act on it. And it's interesting also, if you look at the systems-level neuroscience view that we end up with at the end, Richard Husky's work, He— we're either seeing metastability or synchrony. It's a little unclear between the executive control network, which allows us to stay focused on task and keep out all distraction, and the goal-directed network, right? And the goal-directed network, that's— this is acting and the ability to act and approaching. Like, that's what's kicking that into gear. Right. The novel, in a sense, you can see the two things that end up being in flow. So you're getting involved early on, right? Because you've got this salience thing that you're focusing on. So you've got the frontal parietal control network getting active right then and there. You've got the goal-directed system kicking in. A bunch of stuff happens along the way, but in the end, Richard's argument is that these two systems, there's synchronous behavior. So they're doing roughly the same thing at the same time. The other, the other option is, uh, Scott Kelso's idea around metastability, um, which is sort of the same thing's happening. It's just sort of a slightly different, different way. It's not quite as synchronous. And, um, I think we need better imaging data to actually figure out which one that's going to be. Um, it's hard to get like these, these neural, the neural dynamics are fast, as Michael said. So like trying fMRI, you know, it's like a 2-second picture, and we're talking about stuff that takes place in like 200ths of a second, right? It's hard to— it's hard to figure that out.

And, and piggyback on that, like, um, I wanted to go back to this idea of cognitive control. And you— well, first of all, post-traumatic growth. So learn powerfulness. That's— this is one of the reasons why— then there's research on this. There needs to be more research on this. We're actually working on this now. That flow can actually— we know flow helps with burnout. We know flow helps with depression. Flow increases psychological well-being and subjective well-being and so on and so forth. But flow may also act as a very interesting therapeutic approach to PTSD. And this exactly may be why. And another bit of evidence to support that, that we review in our paper—

this exactly may be why. That's a declarative sentence from a scientist if there ever was one.

I'm always— our job as scientists is to just tell me I'm wrong, falsify my hypotheses. Okay, right here.

No, I loved it. I'm fine with it.

This is like I'm hearkening back to my dissertation defense here. Um, sorry, you know what I'm talking about. And Stephen, you will know what I'm talking about.

So we—

but this idea of PTSD, um, and the relationship between flow and PTSD, if we do consider flow a matter of cognitive control, which Richard does, and we definitely discuss and think about too. And I'll explain that idea of cognitive control is just the brain going through its dynamical networks to be able to, you know, figure out goals, problems, tasks, and to deal with the demands that the environment places on the brain and those rapidly switching demands and being able to make decisions and that kind of thing. That's cognitive control. Flow might be an uber cognitive control And it's been shown actually that people with PTSD have trouble recruiting brain areas that are involved with cognitive control, number 1. And number 2, when they do learn to recruit those brain areas by doing specific behaviors and interventions, we see less PTSD. That's just really good evidence that this actually might be the case. Richard gives this great analogy of the, like a car going from a scene in Standard, going from first gear to sixth gear. So sixth gear is the flow state. It's this difficult-to-reach state because the brain needs to go through these networks, these different cognitive states and network topologies to find that flow state. And again, it happens very fast, but you can't just go from first gear to sixth gear. You have to, you have to go through these stages to get to this difficult-to-reach state versus an easily reachable state like, you know, I know I'm hungry, I'm going to go to the refrigerator and grab a piece of cake or something like that.

Pardon the interruption. Thanks for tuning in to Flow Research Collective Radio. If you're listening to this, here's a bold bet I'm willing to make about you. My guess is even though you're a high performer, you're still only performing at about half of your capacity, maybe even 10%. Now, even if I'm wrong, assuming that you're performing at less than your full potential opens up the possibility for you to improve. And that's good news. When you've already outperformed most of your peers by a long shot, you've got a skill stack that people envy, it's why you earn what you earn, and yet you're just warming up. You know those days when you knock out more in your morning than most do in an entire day? Well, what if you could perform at that level every day, reliably, consistently? What would that unlock for you? Now, here at the Flow Research Collective, we study the human nervous system when it's functioning at its absolute best. After training thousands of high performers, from Navy SEALs to Fortune 100 executives, Here's what we've found: you're evolutionarily hardwired to perform at your best. All it takes is pressing the right mental buttons and pulling the right biological levers, so to speak. It's about getting your neurobiology to work for you instead of against you. Now, if you want to make operating at a 10 out of 10 level as natural as breathing, just go to getmoreflow.com. We'll show you how to reliably trigger a flow state where you feel limitless and you do your very best work. This won't require any biohacking or nootropics or gadgets or caffeine guzzling. This higher gear is endogenous, which means it's a state that your brain produces on its own. No external stimulus is required. Just go to getmoreflow.com to learn how to get your biology working for you instead of against you so you can make peak performance second nature.

All the best.

So just to kind of sum up this piece of the paper, it feels like, um, the argument that you're, you're you're hypothesizing here is that flow and post-traumatic stress are basically opposite sides of the same coin, and that flow might be a primary driver of post-traumatic growth. Is that correct?

Yes.

Yeah. So you also, you also explore the relationship of flow to other, other altered states like psychedelic states. Can you talk a little bit about, about that and why you chose to go down that path as well in this paper?

Let me start and then pass it over to Michael because he's got a ton to say here. And I'm just going to kick us off with a little. So one, there's a ton of research on the psychedelic state. Like, as Robin Gard Ayers' lab for years has been giving people psychedelics and imaging their brain. So we have a really good picture of This is your brain on LSD. This is your brain on mushrooms. This is your brain on MDMA. Literally, this is your brain on DMT, right? And, and we had worked partnered a little bit with Richard's lab already years ago to do sort of like comparisons between flow state onset and some set and setting psychedelic stuff. So we knew that that was a fruitful— it was a fruitful collaboration there, but it was an And we've got a lot of information about traumatic stress also. So it was— we had less information about flow, but we've got really good data piles in these places and there's a lot of overlap. So you don't normally think about the overlap, but like, you know, for example, flow and traumatic stress both have complete concentration. You're going to be paying attention to the thing, right? We see at the— in psychedelic states and in flow states, that sensation of oneness with everything and the dissolution of self. Time dilation. We see that you also see time dilation or time passing strangely in traumatic stress. So there's all these overlaps in phenomenon also that, you know, you can, you can start asking really good questions. Well, why is LSD doing this? Flow is doing this, and trauma is doing this. And while there's maybe not enough information in any one of these piles to solve that question, you put them side by side to start looking at it that way. And it becomes really rich.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Stephen, you, you said everything.

So really, you hit the nose.

It never—

I'm sorry, man.

Okay.

All right.

No, no, let me, let me frame it. So we, we wanted to extend our model into the psychedelic state, I think, for what Stephen said. But you can couch that in terms of for two reasons. One, because we know that psychedelics have a massive impact on treating with new psychotherapeutic approaches of psychedelic-assisted therapy, PTSD, depression, even alcoholism, like all kinds of, um, and there's a, there's a, we have a really good model about why that happens. This is based on Carhart-Harris's and Friston, Carl Friston, who's the top-cited neuroscientist right now in the world, um, they have this model about that describes how that happens. It really explains very nicely why psychedelics work so well to alleviate these symptoms. We could talk about that. The second reason, as Stephen said, is because there's a lot of similarity between the flow state and psychedelic state. So there's an altered perception of time, there's a diminishment and altered perception of self. So you have some, you know, and we can put people in scanners and, and give them psychedelics and just let the world happen to them and just, you know, again, very difficult to do with flow. But very easy methodologically to do with psychedelics. Although legally there's this— there's people here in the States and the UK are trying right now to like figure out how to study psychedelics in a lab. But we have really good, rich information about what happens. However, there are a lot of distinctions and points of departure between psychedelic state and a flow state. So in a flow state, you have clear goals. You are bringing a certain skill set to your task, to the challenge at hand. There is immediate feedback. And so on, which you don't get in a psychedelic state. I mean, going back to the motorcyclist scenario, imagine the motorcyclist, what they would do if they were down that highway 90 miles an hour and a car swerves and they were on shrooms. Um, much different outcome, right? Um, so we can make inferences about what happens and how the brain transitions into a flow state from looking at what we already know about this data, uh, neuroimaging data from a psychedelic state. And, um, We think we've covered that very comprehensively in the paper, and it provides a really good tool to extend the model to understand what's going on in the brain during the flow state and how it gets into the flow state versus, for example, trauma.

So which is incredible because previous to this, right, it's, it's all kind of anecdotal and/or correlational, right? So this is creating a model to actually test this. So can you speak a little bit about what are the, what are the specific gaps that this paper is seeking to address? Because you're basically teeing up the field of flow science for a whole new frontier. So can you talk a little bit more about that?

I've got— I'll just talk about one or two points, which is there's I want to say 4 or 5, maybe more measurable signals in the brain that seem to precede flow state onset. And some of those are very new to this paper. The one that we're most excited about is what's known as the P300B. So, let me finish my statement and I'll come back to what the P300B is. My statement is—

Sure.

What's cool about this, it fills gaps of— it gives us new ways to test markers for, oh, this is the brain moving into flow. Now we know. And it unlocks a whole ton of computational modeling approaches, which is one of the things Michael and I have been talking about since we first met about, oh my God, like, let's start, you know, really bringing, bringing the tools of computational modeling computational neuroscience to this problem. The P300— well, I did. So let's talk about the swerve itself and the transition into flow. This helps. So you— the first thing you've got to realize is there's probably not one swerve. In our scenario, we give you three. That's if you watch motorcyclists, there's a swerve away from the object, but you just yank the bike right. So now you got to sort of swerve back to course correct. And then it straightens out and you lock into a new trajectory. So there's really like movement, counter movement, final trajectory, right? Essentially 3 mini swerves. What we realize is, and this is really like the clearest signal of flow state onset, is as you have that first successful swerve, there's going to be a bunch of free stuff in the brain. Involving mostly phasic dopamine and things along those lines. But you're going to, you're going to make that swerve. It's going to go better than you expected and you're going to get a signal of surprise. Oh my God, I got better than expected results. That signal is known as the P300B. P means positive. 300 is 300 milliseconds. So 300 milliseconds after the event, right? Post-event is what the P300 is. And there's an A which happens when we detect novelty. And a B, which happens when we detect surprise. So literally every time you make a swerve— and by the way, when you get that P300B, you get a little more dopamine because it's— you've just attained a goal, right? So the system is feeding on itself and getting more intense. But it's these multiple P300Bs that we think show up at the front end of a flow state that nobody's looked at before. And this, because it's even, you know, take it out of this high-stakes scenario. I'll just give you like personal anecdote from writing and then, and Michael, I'll talk about Alex Honnold a little bit with this. But you know, invariably when I'm writing and it starts going well and I'm like at the front end of flow state, it's usually what happens is like I write a sentence or a fragment of a sentence or a couple of words or whatever where I'm getting, it's a better than expected result. I'm like, oh, like I, there was a challenge. And I solved it. And the answer, I read it and I'm like, oh my God. Right? Cool. And I get a little more fired up. And usually, for me at least, I'll get 3 or 4 of those flowy, arty sentences in a row. And that's usually, that's my transition into flow every morning as a writer. It's that, and there's a specific way I behave with the material to help engender that. But, um, that's a really like common scenario. And then Michael was actually just— we were talking about, uh, the recent Alex Honnold movie where you can literally see the, the other—

wait, wait, hold on, hold on, because you're gonna skip.

So that was—

that's back to the neurophenomenology. That's the whole point of the paper. I mean, if flow is associated with overcoming these challenges and, you know, stretching but not snapping. And then when you achieve that, that's a felt sense of, oh, better than expected results. So flow is associated with that self-report, that sense, that subjective sense of better than expected results. I'm achieving challenges, there's an effortless— this is amazing. Turns out there's a— we can— there's a neural marker for that. There's actual very well-studied neural marker for that specific experience. And this, this, this P300, and it's been very well— so it's associated with it changes with age, it changes with certain neuropathologies like dementia or schizophrenia or even tinnitus and things like that. So you can actually blend the subjective and the objective here with this idea of— and so we can say if we find empirically a series of these P300 waves, when you're actually— that, that might mark neurally this transition into a flow state.

You see, let me take it one step further and then I'll let you come back to the Alex Honnold thing. Just, I just want to build on what you said for just half a second.

Yeah.

Because you were talking about neurophenomenology and this is such a classic example. So one of the classic def— one of the 6 core characteristics of flow is a sense of control. Yeah. When you have multiple P300s, right? Oh my God, better than expected results, better than expected results. What does that give you? I'm in total control of shit. I keep being in control.

Amazing, right?

Like, that's that, that's the exact feeling. Yes.

Um, and, and that's testable.

Experience and flow. And this is exactly where it comes from.

Yeah. And that's, and that's testable. And so with Alex Honnold, I was still, I was like talking to Steven, um, you know, that's a high-stakes scenario, right? And back to that sense of control. I got this. I can overcome this challenge. Alex was climbing half the Overhaupt When Alex was free soloing El Capitan during, you know, in his movie Free Solo that Jimmy Chin produced, he's, you know, I got this, I can approach this, I'm not going to avoid this, right? It's a very challenging situation. Well, there's one scene in the movie where, in the documentary, where he has to go up this, I forget what the actual part is, it's like a straight up part, but he has to do this karate kick to get to that point. And he practices the flexibility, he practices the karate kick. In that point in the movie where he does the karate kick and he makes it, it's like, that's like the most challenging part of the solo, I believe. So he does the karate kick and he like looks up at the camera. He looks up to Jimmy Chin and he likes to, like this kind of, you know, he smiles like, oh, I got it. That was a better, you know, it was a better than expected result. Major P300 that probably happened and soared the rest of the thing in flow.

And I mean, it's so cool. And I think, you know, as I was reading your paper, this was the experience I was getting as you were, you know, cuz you, you do this so beautifully. You talk about the different levels, you talk about the neurobiological changes, the neurochemical changes, how information is being exchanged throughout the brain and how it all relates to the phenomenology of flow. And it all just starts to make sense when you look at it in this framework. So I think I, I, well done on putting this all together. And to your point, now it's all testable, right? Now that we have this framework to think about flow and all of the different levels of potential changes that are occurring.

That was the other thing about the paper you asked. Another gap that I, that I really— and I'm really proud that it filled this gap— is I felt that any proper definition of flow state onset, you've got to account for One, you got to account for the, like, the 6 core phenomenological characteristics of flow. Obviously, you also have to account for how all the flow triggers work, right? If this is the onset of flow, right, you should be able to see where the purported triggers are working and why. And finally, you should also be able to see all the performance benefits and be able to say, okay, this is, this is why we're getting all those things. And Now, we're not— I don't think we're not the first people down this rabbit hole. Other people have taken swings at this as well. But I like where we ended up. I think it's coherent and it's got some advantages over a lot of the stuff that came before.

Yeah. And also one gap in the literature is the distinction between correlation and causation. And that you get that a lot of neuroscience and psychology and so on and so forth. But I think one of the things we've done to address is that, you know, what, what, what, what's correlated with the experience of flow, what are the antecedents to flow that actually have a causal mechanism for getting into the state that caused the brain to transition into the state and start, you know, start doing different things dynamically. So I think we've addressed this idea between correlation and causation in a way that no previous paper in flow neuroscience does, at least.

And you— and can you talk a little bit about— so we haven't really gone into your discussion of flow triggers in the paper. Can you talk— can you give a quick summary of where you go with that?

Yeah, sure.

It's—

so it's interesting. In terms of the triggers and the performance benefit, this is— it's almost funny. Almost everything you're looking at, with the exception of grit and some of the creativity stuff, we can come back to that, both on the trigger side, the benefit side, it's all tied to phasic dopamine. So, Right. Tonic levels of dopamine are just, you know, where you're at. Phasic are these sharp spikes in response to things going on in the world. And almost all of the performance benefits can be tied to phasic dopamine release. And from all the triggers are basically you get, you get, you get a shift in, in the salience network, which gives you some activity in the locus coeruleus and norepinephrine system and you get some activity in all the dopamine systems. And it definitely seems like the triggers are more tied to phasic dopamine than they are to the LCNE system. It seems like that system sort of opens the door for focused attention, and that's where it sort of starts, right? And like, when you look at things like complete concentration, that, that process it literally starts with the salience network, and that activity starts with the locus coeruleus producing norepinephrine, but it's maintained through phasic dopamine. So it's really those two, those two systems from a trigger standpoint we see the most. Where the paper gets interesting, I think, and raises questions is in and around What do we mean by the challenge skills balance? That gets one of the things that seems to be clear from our paper and other work is that, um, the challenge doesn't really— like, we're sort of taught that you have to, like, use your skills to the utmost. And that may have more— this is speculation, I'm not— this is not in our paper, but that may have more to do with the need to fight, this need to approach than anything sort of longer lasting. All right, I'll stop there. Okay.

You know, I want to, like, comment on the locus coeruleus norepinephrine system because I, you know, we do, we do cover those systems in the paper. And actually, we review a paper that was published because a part of our paper is a review, a comprehensive review. And we review a paper in 2021 that there was a little mini, mini kind of like publication that talked about the locus coeruleus norepinephrine system. And one of the things that we propose in our paper is this idea of the adaptive gain theory, which was published by Ashton Jones or something like that back in 2005. And the idea is that you don't want to be too distractible, right? But you don't want to also be inattentive and sort of non-alert. You— the locus coeruleus needs to be fine. And Stephen's right, it's attentional regulation, right? It's that idea of some flexibility. You need a Goldilocks zone. You need some of that flexibility. Same thing, by the way, with a psychedelic state and how this happens with flow. Flow needs to be in that Goldilocks zone, that inverted U-curve between— of firing just right. And the interesting thing is that that matches the Yerkes-Dodson curve, which Stephen mentioned earlier, which is all about performance versus, you know, stress or cortisol or whatever you have down there. And you have, you know, you don't want to like be bored, right? But you don't want to be burnt out. You want to be optimal performance happens at the top of that curve there. We have just the right amount of stress matches just the right amount of locus coeruleus firing norepinephrine. And the other thing is to really interestingly, so the locus coeruleus projects into the prefrontal cortex, and it projects to different pathways into the prefrontal cortex, which we know is in certain ways involved in localized hypofrontality. Certain parts shut down, certain parts light up, certain parts communicate with other areas of the brain in this cognitive control way we talked about it earlier, but one of the pathways is that the locus coeruleus allows us to ignore distractions. And then the other pathway that the locus coeruleus projects to allows us to, or gives us the ability to ignore, curb impulsive behaviors. So you're, you have this simultaneous ability, and that might be, back to your question, and a sort of a mechanism or an entry point into like why these triggers work the way they do. Good.

So we've covered so far what are maybe the, the neurobiological mechanisms driving the onset of flow. What are some of those differences that might propel you towards stress or towards flow? We've talked about flow and post-traumatic growth. We've talked about a little bit about the neural dynamics, um, that are, that are going on during flow, uh, and also how is the neurobiology related to the phenomenology of flow. So, and this is all captured in the model that you outline in the paper. So I want— I'll give you both a moment to think about it. But my big question, because you lay out an agenda for potential future research that can now be undertaken, I want to know from each of you what you think the biggest burning question is for what's next for flow science. Where do we go from here? What's the next biggest question? We should be seeking to answer now that we have this model to work with?

There's definitely some validate. I mean, there's a lot of stuff in there that I'd like to try to validate. And, you know, it's funny, like, I'm just thinking of some of the stuff that we're working on. We're working on a paper on flow and caffeine. We're working on flow and pain. We've been working on flow a little bit in the endocannabinoid system. There's a bunch. And these are all one way or another, they're sort of aspects of the same thing. So, I think for a while we're going to be sort of playing in that spot. One of the things that— so, one of the things that's really interesting to go to the systems level a little bit deeper. Like, what's the difference between a psychedelic state and, and, and a flow state? Michael touched on it. In psychedelic states, uh, you see like a lot of undirectional connectivity, different parts of the brain just talking wildly with each other. It's like a giant conversation all over the brain. Flow is much more constrained. Like, you're gonna have this crazy wild conversation, but it's inside, very tight bound. And the reason I'm really interested in this particular thing, because it gets at the thing that I find so magical in flow, which is that its impact on creativity. So you get this massive heightened of creativity, but it's very limited. It's inside a tight box, which is funny because it's sort of, again, it mirrors the phenomenology. Everybody knows that like the blank page is really intimidating, but if you've set some preexisting limits, easier to be creative inside those limits, right? This is just creativity research 101. I talked about it in The Art of Impossible, and it's mimicked by the neural dynamics. You see that exactly in the neural dynamics. And, um, similarly, you see, uh, the temporal parietal junction get involved. This is a part of the brain that does perspective-taking. So you've got the creative stuff and perspective-taking. The reason these things are really interesting to me is And we push on that creative, like of all the things that we want to use flow to amplify, I've always been so deeply fascinated with creativity. It's so important to the world. It's so important to society. And this gives us a way of looking at it where I don't think it's just actionable or practical quite yet, but it's a way to start asking deeper, harder, more interesting questions about flow and creativity. And it also gets, um, Are there like advantages to being creative without flow? Like when might that be? You know what I mean? All those kinds of questions open themselves up to a different kind of analysis now.

Yeah. And I'm interested. That's great. I think like I said earlier in this talk about the influence flow can have on PTSD and alleviating and just improving mental health. And I think this— we've proposed a theoretical model that allows us to explore that empirically. So that's another one of these.

Yeah, I agree.

Well, it has— flow has these effects on, as I mentioned earlier, subjective well-being and psychological well-being. And those have been distinguished in the literature. And flow has effects on both. And, uh, but why? Like, what's that story?

Michael and I are also working on a paper for, uh, um, the military right now.

Yeah.

And we're looking at resilience.

Yeah.

And it's just— it's the next extension out of this question, like flow and resilience. Why are special forces more resilient than average army? What does it have to do— how does it have to do with flow and social neuroscience and all these same sort of questions, right? You know, resilience, post-traumatic growth, that we're all— it's all the same grit, this is all the same neighborhood, right? Um, this can be the same sets of systems.

And if there's a flow network that might be like a, you know, a sing— you know, a way the brain finds the flow state in terms of a flow network that might be involved in cognitive control, which we propose in this paper, It gives us a way to empirically testably model that and some neuromarkers that might be associated with that. There's a lot of open questions that this paper sort of like gets the points to and hopefully will get other researchers thinking about how to approach these both methodologically, theoretically, empirically, and even the reviewers of our paper actually you know, highlighted that too, that it could have this sort of big impact. And that's not— that's, that's kind of there to get one.

Yeah, Tori, one of the things Michael just said, and I just disallowed— I've been saying, God, I probably wrote it in West of Jesus. I've definitely been talking about it ever since. But, you know, jokingly used to say— I was talking about, you know, flow as an anecdote for grief, and I used to say, if you're heartbroken, go skydiving. Because it'll overwrite the memory, right? It's more powerful. And this is not a new— this is not a new idea. I wasn't, I don't think, the first person to talk about using flow to heal trauma. And people have been poking it for a long time. But what we now have is, as Michael pointed out, we've got mechanism and that allows us to ask a totally different set of questions and it allows you to get very, very practical, right? I mean, almost everything we do at the collective starts with neurobiological or, you know, neurodynamical mechanism and we've worked from there. So, the fact that we have this picture of flow state onset, you know, I want to say it gives the clients of the Flow Research Collective a pretty good advantage.

Right. And, and to leverage how to get into flow. If we understand that, how that happens to the brain, this could be leveraged for a practical application. And really, it ties the theoretical framework for how flow works in the brain, which has not become before this paper. And it, it ties that to an implementation strategy, possibly, and a practical application which is, is on the ground for people looking for more flow in their lives.

Which is huge. I think that this is a massive step forward to advance the field of flow science just in general. And it's not just about peak performance and productivity, it's about well-being and resilience as well. So amazing. Well, thanks, team, for taking the time to discuss the paper. Hopefully everyone's now running out to go read it.

It's a huge paper. So we distilled it.

Yeah, it's an open access journal, so it's free online, right?

Yes.

And this is— and this is their new reading guide if they run into, you know, any trouble with the technical pieces. So thanks. Thanks again for taking time.

Trouble sleeping at night? Boy, do we have a paper for you.

Well, very good flow while reading this paper. If you don't, then it's not challenging enough.

You know, I was gonna say, that speaks to how nerdy I am because I was riveted the entire time.

So, but, you know, That's awesome.

Thank you. That's awesome.

All right, folks, well, have a great day.

Thank you again. Thank you, Michael.

Great.

Bye, everybody.

Take care.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Now, your time is priceless, and in terms of dollars and cents, it's valuable. Whether you're an entrepreneur, executive, or a manager, you're paid well. But when you're short on time, you end up in a tailspin. Now, if you want to get more out of less time, just go to getmoreflow.com. We'll show you how, because you know that when you manage your time well, you can move mountains. But your time is like sand slipping between your fingers. Your to-do list grows, but time doesn't slow. You'd think that with less time you'd work harder or smarter, but a scarcity of seconds makes you prone to procrastinate, which makes things worse. But you can end this time trouble right now. Here's how: make more out of less through flow. You don't actually need more time. You already have enough. What it takes is switching to a higher gear of performance to get more out of that time. Now, here at the Flow Research Collective, we study the human nervous system when it's functioning at its absolute best. There's a peak state you can tap into with reliability. It's called flow, or being in the zone. It's an optimal state of consciousness where you feel your best and perform your best, and in it, time seems to slow down. Now, if you want to access flow consistently and reliably, just go to getmoreflow.com. Our protocols come from research out of Harvard, DARPA, and Stanford, and others. Our founder, Stephen Kotler, Work has been praised by the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Clinton, and Vishen Lakhiani. We draw from over 25 years of flow science to train a wide range of peak performers, from Navy SEALs to Fortune 100 executives. Because our training is grounded in neurobiology, it works for everyone. So if you're interested, just go to getmoreflow.com for all the details. That's getmoreflow.com. All the best.

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