How Time Is Processed During Flow States with Steven Kotler

In flow, right, why does past time pass so strangely? Why does it speed up or sometimes it slows down and you get a freeze-frame effect? It's because as parts of the prefrontal cortex shut down, that hypofrontality I was talking about, we lose the ability to separate past from present from future. We're plunged into what researchers talk about as the deep now or poetically the eternal present, right? The elongated moment. The amount of dopamine in your system has a big, a large amount to do with how we perceive time. So if there's a lot of dopamine in your system, time speeds up, goes by really fast. If I cut dopamine off, time slows down. 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 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, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

Before we talk about this brilliant book, And thank you again for going back over it. Let's tell people about your latest, because last time we spoke it was Last Tango in Cyberspace, which is on the shelf there behind me. And in the meantime, you've written The Devil's Dictionary, another exploration into sci-fi and into the future.

You know, it's the same kind of major theme. I wanted to sort of envision a world, near-term future, where our big environmental challenges—climate change, species die off, had been solved. I wanted to ask the question of, what does it take to get to that world? There's nothing utopian, as you know, about my approach. But I felt like I started painting that picture and working that problem in Last Tango, and I got to finish it in The Devil's Dictionary.

Tell us some of the examples. For example, climate. How, in your mind, do we get there? I don't want to hijack the show away from this bad boy.

I'll give you the overarching plot, and then I'll give you some of the solutions. And so first thing I gotta tell you is there's something called a mega linkage. A mega linkage is, uh, going back to the '70s, we knew that habitat fragmentation was a big driver of species extinction, um, and also a problem with climate change. And so people have been calling for mega linkages. This is like, imagine all the national parks in America sort of linked together by migration corridors. So the plants and animals can migrate freely between them. And the habitat isn't fragmented. This has been for various environmental reasons we're not gonna go into, one of the, like the key environmental environmental ideas we've had for the past 50 years. It's built into the United Nations platform on climate change and species die-off. We're making major progress in that way. So in the future, today we've got a world where billionaires are competing to get into space, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson. I've got in our environmental world of the future billionaires competing to create mega-linguages in their own name. And this isn't as weird as it As crazy as it sounds, Doug Tompkins, who's a billionaire with the Esprit fortune, took most of that money that he made in fashion, went down to Chile, tried to buy up a huge swatch of the country and literally make a, you know, countrywide mega language, Chile. So this is not even new. I've just got a future where you've got billionaires competing and one of the billionaires hires the lead character, Lion Zorn, who you're going to remember from Last Hangout in Cyberspace, Uh, he's got this mega language and suddenly species never seen before on Earth start showing up in his mega language and dead bodies start piling up in his mega language. And Lionzor and the hero gets called in to figure out what the hell is going on. And thus that's how the story kicks off. That sort of answers your question, sort of teases the story.

Oh man, you have me, you have me on the hook here. And you know what I said to you before last time, though, I really enjoyed— I loved the way that you use fact to inform the fiction. So it's in the future, but it's— you're plotting ahead with all your research, all your pattern recognition joining together to actually join the dots forward. Absolutely love that. And I'm sure we'll see a Netflix series, and they need you more than ever, man.

Yeah, I've heard.

So let's get into this bad boy. I'd love to come back to Devil's Dictionary in the future. Sounds absolutely brilliant. I was saying about 'How the Secret to High Performance is Hiding in Plain Sight.' I thought, let's start with that. How is it hiding in plain sight?

What I was talking about in that opening paragraph is in the 1990s, starting in the 1990s, really the 1990s, if you know anything about action adventure sports in the 1990s and you go back to the start of the 1990s and action adventure sports are not mainstream at all, right? These are punk rock subcultures. That are, you know, sort of popping up in these like location, couple of locations. There's Chamonix, right, in Europe. There's Whistler, Blackcomb, British Columbia in Canada, Squaw Valley, or, you know, what's now Palisades Tahoe in California, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a couple other spots. You've got these weird punk rock communities. But what starts coming out of these action sports communities is unprecedented in the history of the world. More so-called impossible feats, never been done, never going to be done, got done in, in 10 years. We now talk about the '90s as the era of impossible. And the examples are like, pick an action sport, and it's not just that the world records got broken, it's they were broken and broken again and broken again and broken again and broken again. Like, there's a quote in Rise I think it's Jeremy Jones, the snowboarder, who said— yeah, it is Jeremy Jones. And he was talking about what it was like to be in Alaska on some of the early heli trips in the '90s, when like literally, you know, you would wake up in the morning and there were rules in action sports like, don't do this or you'll die. And they were changing on a literally like hourly basis. And it lasted, you know, some of it's still going on today. But We had never seen anything like it. And I think the example I give to comparables opening the book is sort of— well, one of them is, I mean, surfing is the classic example, right? This is a 1,000-year-old sport. And from the 4th century AD when it's invented to 1996, biggest wave anybody's ever surfed is 25 feet. And above that, it's impossible. There are physics papers actually written about how it's impossible for a surfer paddling on his belly to catch a wave that's over 25 feet. There's other physics papers that say the human body cannot survive the forces of— and so forth. And today, surfers are, you know, they're paddling into waves that are over 80 feet tall. Some people paddle into a couple that are over 100 feet tall, and they're towing into waves. I think the world record is now over 118 feet tall. These are skyscrapers. They're towing into skyscrapers, right? And we went from like a house to an apartment complex to not a skyscraper, but to a 100-story building in a very short period of time, or 100-foot building in a very short period of time. Nothing like that has ever happened before. So the book looks at where did this come from, why did it happen? I think the cat is out of the bag now in terms of what's happened. But That's, that's what's at the heart of the book.

So one of the things I thought was so interesting is there's tons of books that compare the attributes of sports to the business environment, but they miss what you did with this book. Until you did this book, capturing the essence of— and really, you do this brilliantly— and I was seeing the linkage between what you did with your science fiction books, essentially your futuristic books, and capturing the moment for these high-end extreme sport athletes. But most books in business comparing business to sport miss the state that these guys get into and the breaking of the pain barriers. For example, you talk about Danny Way, for example, and I thought about my own career in sports and I was like, I barely, barely got in flow. Like sometimes when you were absolutely depleted at the end of the game and the entire team came together sometimes, but it took a long, long time to get into those states because you nearly had to be totally worn down. These guys fast-tracked right into it.

It's true, and there are a lot of reasons for that. So you're talking about flow, right? Like, the secret for all this performance is the optimal state of performance consciousness that we talk about as flow, scientific term, and it more specifically, first, any of those in-the-zone moments, total absorption, complete concentration, when you get so focused on the task at hand and everything else starts to disappear, melt away, and all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, tend to go through the roof. So that's flow in a colloquial nutshell, right? Psychologists define it by 6 core characteristics. The work I do at the Flow Research Collective, where we look at the neurobiology, the brain mechanisms that underpin it, we define flow by like 11 different changes in the brain and our physiology. Strategy as well. So the definition, I was colloquial, we can talk for the next 2 hours about what the term actually means. But it is, you know, and it's not just action sport athletes, of course, it is anytime the impossible becomes possible. This could be in science and technology and art, doesn't matter, in business. Whenever that happens, we see people utilizing through consciousness known as flow. There's no other way to do it. Humans are designed for peak performance and flow is how we do it. Evolution shaped all— every human can get into flow. Most mammals can actually get into flow. And what's interesting about your career is I would argue that you're probably wrong on two fronts and you're probably right on one front. So let's go back to your career for half a second. One, There are a bunch of different neurochemicals that show up in flow. People like different neurochemicals in their body, just like people like different substances in the real world, right? They're doing the same thing. And there are certain athletes, and you see this a lot, like the mountain bike community is really famous for this. They're the people who are real heavy endurance athletes, tend to ride endorphins into flow. And what's interesting is we used to think endorphins were the big explanation for flow, And now they're actually like, they're, they're just a minor part of the story, um, and they tend to show up very late, right, in the kind of chain of events that— but for some people who come in, you know, there's— by the way, people who come in like you, there's also all this research out of the, uh, sadomasochistic community, right, the S&M community. There's a, a masochism-based flow state, right, like a pain-based flow state.

I did my research, man. I did my research. But that's, that's—

I mean, like endurance athletes sets the same high, right? You're doing the same things. But that's not everybody who ride that particular pathway. And that may just be you. But the other thing is that I— the two things that are worth pointing out. The one is you were probably really great at getting into a state of micro flow. So flow is like any emotion, anger, right? You're a little irked, you're homicidally murderous, it's still anger, right? Flow's the same thing. There's a micro flow state. This is where I said flow is defined psychologically by a bunch of core characteristics, complete concentration on the task at hand, this merger of action awareness, the vanishing of self and self-consciousness, time passes strangely. We don't feel peak performance even though we're performing at our best. We feel a sense of control, like, oh, I can control things I can't normally control, right? This is basketball players talking about, I'm in the zone and the hoop looks like as big as a hula hoop, right? And I can't miss, that kind of thing. And then The experience itself, the fancy word is autotelic, it just means joyous, ecstatic. If an experience produces flow, we want more of it. So there's microflow, right? This is when those things show up and they're like dialed down to one or two. So this is like, let's take it out of sport for a second. This is like you go to work, you sit down to write a quickie email to a colleague, right? You get so sucked into what you're doing that an hour goes by and you didn't notice. And maybe your sense of self and self-consciousness didn't totally vanish completely. The bodily awareness was gone because when you pop back into your head, you're like, Oh crap, I got to go to the bathroom, right? This happens to all of us all day long. We do this all the time at work. So that's microflow. It's pretty hard to be a serious athlete and not be able to put yourself in the microflow during practice because otherwise you just can't sustain it, right? As you know, like practice with— if you're just practicing and there's no flow and you're just using drawing on grit to do it, sooner or later you burn out. You drop out of that sport. You cannot progress. That's a hard limit because grit's a very limited resource. And when we talk about really sustained grit over time, it's always in combination with flow for that very reason. Flow, in a sense, redeems and justifies the grit. And so, grit without flow is burnout. That's literally a recipe for burnout at work. And as an athlete, it doesn't really matter. So, Oftentimes what happens in the competitive moment of the game is you have bits of flow, but because of the nature of competition, it can just as easily drive you out of flow. This is not to say that you can't perform at your best because this is one of the cool things flow does. It sort of shows you what's possible when you're at your very best. But once you see what's possible, you start being able to reproduce those same skill levels without flow. This is sort of how we level up. In sports in general. So I would argue that you were probably in microflow a lot more than you knew, but especially if you're like, if you're looking for what you were looking for, which is that big endorphin high, and that's when you're saying, oh no, I always tell people, like, you could always tell when the endorphins show up because, like, I'm a skier and I always tell people, like, when you're riding up the chairlift and it's 10 below zero and you're sitting on hard metal and it feels like you're lying back on a plushy couch, that's how you You know when the endorphins have showed up, right? That's what that feels like. And it takes a while, as you pointed out, like I can get to that portion of the flow state, but I usually have to like, if I'm skiing, it's at the end of the day, I've been skiing for like 5 or 6 hours at that point, you know, full on. But there are a lot of different ways that are available, you know, more flow triggers available to non-competitive athletes, to action adventure sport athletes, I think than there are to regular.

So one of the things I really wanted to share your work with our audience for is the benefit to achievement of any kind, like to help people out there who have dreams and ambitions but can't get around to doing them. Because as you mentioned in the book, at the time there was a 10-year McKinsey research paper on the benefits of flow and how it was one of the most important business attributes or skill sets that somebody could have So it's— the benefits are ridiculous.

I'll just go through, um, I've got— the research was done all over the place. I'll try to give you the sources because they're all over the place. So we'll start with, uh, motivation and productivity, which go through the roof. And the McKinsey study you referenced, um, this is a self-reported study, so you've got to take it with a little bit of a grain of salt. But they spent 10— they went around the globe for 10 years talking to CEOs and, um, leaders of really large organizations, how much more productive are you in flow? And the average response was 500% more productive. Some of the responses, for example, Richard Branson once said to me, there's 2 hours in flow, there is nothing I can't get done. Well, how do you quantify that? You know what I mean? Like, what is that? Above, like, what is that percentage? I don't know how to measure that, but We see that all over the place in our research at the Flow Research Collective. So for those who are not familiar with us, we're a research and training organization. We're focused on the neurobiology of peak human performance. So what's going on in the brain, the body, when humans perform at their very best. On the research side, we do this stuff in-house and in conjunction with folks at Imperial College in London, University of Southern California, University of Southern California, of San Francisco, UC Davis, and on and on and on. And on the training side, we work in 130 countries. So, and we work with tens of thousands of individuals, right? We work with everybody from like stay-at-home dads to 9-to-5 moms, all the way up to like US Navy SEALs, professional athletes. We also train a lot of organizations. We work with tech companies like Facebook and automobile manufacturers like Audi and consultancies like Accenture and on and on and on. All of this is to say, the only reason you should really care is, one, we have a wildly diverse, globally accurate picture of peak performance, like what works, what doesn't, why. Because we are data geeks, we measure everything and anything. And so I can tell you, for example, we see after our 8-week training, um, as a general rule, we see a 4x increase in productivity. For people really consistently, really consistently. In fact, I just saw some recent data. Every time we put through 1,000 more people, we grab 300 at random and look at their numbers just to see where we are, what our baseline is. I just looked at the most recent numbers and productivity was up. People were 4x as productive as before. That's in line with McKinsey's numbers and says, okay, yeah, this stuff is We see the US Department of Defense figured out that soldiers in flow will learn 240% to 500% faster than normal. This is a big deal, right? Two reasons, right? You could talk about those fabled Anders Ericsson, Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours to mastery. We know how important expertise is in business. This research shows that we can cut that in half, right? As I talked about, flow underpins grit. At a really, really deep level resilience. I'll give you a new study. This happened during COVID They were looking at who flourished during COVID and who languished, who got their ass kicked, who thrived, and what was the biggest differentiator. And they looked at tons of stuff. And it turns out the amount of flow you got in your life during COVID was the only thing that mattered. It was the largest differentiator for flourishing. This is not surprising because we know that flow is built in to happiness, wellbeing, life satisfaction, meaning, purpose. I mean, like the data here is like, how much does it elevate those things? It depends on which category you're in. It depends on your measure. But literally when psychologists define happiness and wellbeing, there are 3 tiers available to all of us. And the best we get to feel is defined by how much flow we get, how that flow is tied to our purpose. The second best we get to feel is How much flow we get, and that's tied to our goals. And then there's just general happiness where we don't really have a whole lot of control. So flow is deeply tied to overall well-being, happiness. It is radically important for increasing empathy and what is known, depending on nature relatedness, our ability to see, perceive, and care about the natural world. So this is some of the stuff I actually write about in The Devil's Dictionary and Last Tango, right? The overlap with environmentalism that, that, that flows. But, and then there's the physical side, right, where we see increases in strength, stamina. In fact, well, flow— we can't tell if flow increases strength or it deadens pain so much and it turns off. So it turns out you've got a strength governor, right? You're, you're— you can at any one point go to the gym, your body is willing to do about 60% of max work because it doesn't want you to get hurt. If you're a trained weightlifter, trained an athlete, you can get that up to about 80%, 86%, and then it's like a hard fast. And the only two times you get access to the remaining 14% is like fight or flight, the woman lifts the car off her baby kind of scenario, and flow. Those are the only times you can go above that. So, we see that with strength, with stamina, with fast twitch muscle response. We can go on and on. Business-wise, really important, And if you look at all the studies on what is the most important business skill for the 21st century, it's always creativity and innovation. And creativity and innovation spike massively in flow. Depends on who you're looking for for numbers and how you're breaking apart creativity. It's 400% to 700% above normal. But here's the cool thing. Teresa Amabile— I always screw her last name up. Amabile. I don't think that's wrong, but like, oh, she's at Harvard, she's brilliant, business researcher. She found out that the heightened creativity that comes in a flow state, average flow state, there's no average, but let's say it's 90 minutes long. She figured out that that amplified creativity sticks around for a day, sometimes 2 days after flow. So that's really cool as well. I can keep going. This list actually keeps going. Flow is optimal human performance. So like I'm literally listing all the aspects of human performance. Like everything gets optimized. In fact, like when you say everything gets optimized, I'll just— this is just so it's absurd, but this is an actual science conversation that we're having now. So we know that we've got the big microbiome and, you know, it's in our gut and it's not— it's a lot of foreign bacteria. So microbiome is involved in flow. And so people are literally now asking this question. It's a real question, but it's just sort of blows my mind. Like so many things get optimized in performance. You have to ask yourself this question. Like, Is optimal performance human or is the non-human portion of us also cooperating to produce ultimate human performance? That's a real science question right now, which is crazy, but it's a real science question.

Oh, man. That is awesome. That's awesome. That's where it's gotten to now. Even since you wrote this bad boy as well.

You have to remember that that book was When did I publish that? 2013, I want to say. So most of the research was— that book was probably— the research that went into it by almost the field as a whole, with the exception of a couple things that probably got dropped in later, was complete by 2011. And when I wrote that book, just to put it in perspective, there was one, maybe the second textbook on flow had just sort of come out. There are now this entire shelf that I'm pointing at right behind me. Those are all flow textbooks and the vast textbooks, not even books, textbooks for graduate level psychology and neuroscience students. They've all showed up in the past decade. When I wrote Rise of Superman, pretty much every flow paper that had ever been written is in the footnotes, documented in the footnotes. I just— so in Art of Impossible, which is a more recent book that I wrote on this topic, it was 4 times bigger than those. And since then, I think it's doubled again.

Pardon the interruption, and 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. I mean, 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 operating at a 10 out of 10 level, as natural as breathing, just go to getmoreflow.com. I'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. Because though there are so many researchers, the field is so exploding, um, it's a, it's a, it's a great time to, to be studying peak human performance.

In this book as well, Stephen goes right back to Csikszentmihalyi, goes right back to William James, right back to 1890s, right back to the sources. Uh, Maslow's in there. Right back to those kind of sources to actually build us to this idea of human potential and passing that potential. I loved one part, and I'd love you to share this. So you mentioned there about, okay, you gotta, you gotta be practiced in your game, you gotta be to a point of proficiency, and then if you get into this state, you, you get way, way past that point of proficiency. And one of the things you talked about was, for example, with surfers was when they looked at them from a brainwave activity perspective. The brainwave activity was really interesting because different brainwaves were doing different things at different times. And this is something that is so important for productivity anyway, but so few people know about this. I'd love you to share some thoughts on that, Stephen.

Neurodynamics, right, Brandon? This is a lot of the work that I've been involved in. In fact, I've got a big geeky science paper on the neural dynamics of flow state onset, what happens at the neural dynamics level. So when you talk about brainwaves, you're really talking about like neuroelectricity, right? Like, and really you're talking about networks, right? And what we— so one of the things that we know about flow is it shows up normal. There are a bunch of different brainwaves, but normally, uh, we're talking brain is in beta. Beta is the dominant wave in the brain. Beta means you're awake, you're alert, you're paying attention, you're focused. If, uh, you're in high beta, it's a very fast-moving beta wave, that's anxiety. Now you're paying too much attention, you're, you're overfocused, you're a little freaked out. When you calm down even further, below beta is alpha. Alpha. This is like daydreaming mode, right? This is the brain sort of idling along, and it's also the brainwave most associated with creativity. And below alpha is theta. Theta normally, it shows up when we're focused and alert. And there's an alpha wave that comes out of the prefrontal cortex that correlates to like really intense focus. There's another one that comes out of the hippocampus that correlates to learning and memory. But usually it's like REM sleep, right? That's what theta is really known for. And I always say the easiest way to think about like these things is like how sticky our idea is. Like when you're in high beta and you're thinking about something, you can't, you're obsessive compulsive, you can't stop thinking about the thing. Beta, you can get a little more freedom. Alpha, like this is daydreaming mode. Like you may think about your sort of green sweater and it may remind you of the green turtle and you're like, You're going from idea to idea. And then you're like, then dreaming is like, well, the green sweater goes to the green turtle goes to the green planet goes to the green, you know, right? You go idea, idea with no resistance whatsoever. So flow takes place on the borderline most of the time between alpha and theta. That's sort of a baseline. But what you were talking about, and this is really cool, they were looking at flow in surfers and actually it was flow in elite athletes. It's a guy named Leslie Shearman who did most of this work. He was for Red Bull. When he was— but they found that elite athletes, like top 1%, this was one of the differences between like top 1% and top 5%, was really interesting, is that whenever we make a decision, it doesn't matter what it is, the brain goes through a decision-making cycle. There's all a bunch of steps. And normally, if you're in flow, you bounce out of that alpha-theta borderline, you'll bounce around. Most people who get bounced out of that alpha, theta, borderline can't get back in really quickly. It's hard to get back in. And it turns out that the better you are as an athlete, the more elite you are as an athlete, the easier you can return to that baseline. There are a couple other things that help. We've learned, uh, uh, in— there's research done on Formula 1, uh, race car drivers that showed that also having a growth mindset helps you return to that baseline more quickly and things like that. So there's some other things that go into it. But, uh, yeah, that, that, that, that was, that was some neat, neat research. And, um, we'll see. It'll be interesting. Um, we're doing a bunch of EEG base jump in a base jumping simulation that's very, very realistic and terrifying. Um, we're, uh, right at the front end of starting a huge research project with it with a with folks from UC Davis and folks from UCSF, Adam Gasolli's lab at UCSF and Richard Husky's lab at UC Davis. And we're gonna start, we're gonna look at this again. Most of, you know, it's really, it's more interesting to look at a question of like oscillatory networks and like, you know, are they in, do you have brain networks that are synchronized or not? Is it, that work is super geeky. I could become a neuro geek and really annoy and lose you. The next 20 minutes.

You won't lose me, man. Our audience loves that. Go as deep as you like. I thought I'd connect the dots though, in pattern recognition mode, of when you talked about at the time. So most of the researchers at the time, one of the challenges was they had never experienced flow themselves.

I'm laughing because it's like, it's still a, um, I still think it's an ongoing problem, right? Where like you've got A lot of these top researchers, and so what ends up happening is you end up with like studies run on bad flow paradigms. Like, we're going to give people video games to play, and sometimes they're picking really good video games, but sometimes they're like, it's Ms. Pac-Man or something. And I'm like, look, if you happen to be a Ms. Pac-Man fanatic, right, like it is your jam, Yeah, this is going to be a flowy experience for you. But if it— like, what do you— like, you have to— flow demands complete concentration on the task at hand. It shows up when we really— like, curiosity is a flow trigger. Want more flow in your life? Curiosity is one way to get there. Novelty, risk, complex— all these things produce flow. Um, you're not going to get them unless you're a total video game geek in video games, right? There's another study, um, And the research who's done this is brilliant, brilliant work, but like where they use math problems, like addition problems. And I like, I even my friends who are total math geniuses, math geeks, static, you know, they're like, I don't get who the hell gets into flow doing addition, right? Like, like, unless you're doing like speed tests back from like first grade or right, like kindergarten, I don't think anybody does, right? So like Sometimes you look at the paradigms where they're studying this thing, you're like, what are you— like, what? What are you doing? What are you doing? And that, you know, one of the— I think one of the— you mentioned Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi earlier. One of the great things that Mike brought to flow research is he was a serious rock climber and mountaineer, and he was also a pretty— I mean, he was a talented artist, artist in his own right. But as a writer, he's a fantastic writer. And people don't know this, but he— besides publishing, I think, 20 brilliant science books, he also wrote short stories for The New Yorker. Like, this is a guy— yeah, people don't know that. He's a, he's a thorough— he was a thorough Renaissance man. And so when he came into flow research, I think one of the things that he brought that maybe Maslow didn't have and James didn't have at this level, or Nietzsche didn't have at this level, the earlier flow researchers, was he had a tremendous amount of firsthand experience in the state. And you see it in bits and pieces. Arndt Dietrich, who is a longtime flow researcher, I write about him in Rise a lot. He's a distance runner. He was a marathoner and an ultra marathoner. And it's interesting though, you also see there's a division because you see a lot of runners doing flow research. You also see a lot of— there's a bunch of golf research on flow and things like that. And it's interesting because those are very different kind of flow states than like what's happening in the action sport athletes and how— the difference is you pointed out, and this is what was so great about Rise of Superman and why I could— what was so wonderful about the action sport athletes is at the elite level. If you're not in flow when you're— before you pointed out, you could not be in flow as an athlete and still sort of go out there and ride. But at the elite level, like if you're, you know, Shane McConkey before he passed and you're trying to ski a crazy gnarly line in Alaska, or you're Danny Way standing at the top of, you know, the world's largest halfpipe butt drop on a skateboard or any of those other situations, if you're not getting into flow, you're going to go to the hospital or go home in a body bag. It's flow or die at the elite level. And you can't just, as a general, it's pretty damn hard to do it without flow. So what that gave us as researchers and me as an author and researcher was a hard data set with which to work with. I didn't have to wonder. You know, nobody was using math paradigms with these athletes or Ms. Backman. Like, you're either— like, it was easy. I was like, I knew they were in flow because they're not dead, right? Cool. Like, I got that.

Yeah, actually, you're right, because I was thinking about it. And also, in the sport I played, it probably depends on your position. If you're a goal kicker and the stakes are high and the base is loaded and you're taking that kick in front of a stadium packed tactful. You're probably in flow because— and actually, it links something to Dietrich, because one of the things you said about Dietrich, until Dietrich came along, everything was backward. It was like, oh, things are turning on. But Dietrich mentioned, no, it's inhibitory, things are turning off.

So Dietrich, uh, he has since— and we have since— so in Rise of Superman, let me explain this and let me tell you what's changed since then, because it's a little different than what the story I tell in Rise of Superman. We've learned more, but Dietrich came along and as you pointed out, like before we thought peak performance was this old idea, it was really, it was actually a misinterpretation. Somebody missed, Dale Carnegie misquoted William James. That's what happened. Dale Carnegie misquoted William James and then everybody misquoted Dale Carnegie. But going all the way back, we used to think that ultimate performance First, we used to think that we used only a small portion of our brain, right? What's now called the 10% brain myth, right? We're only using about 10% of our brain. When times of peak performance, aka flow, it's got to be the full brain on overdrive, right? And as Dietrich pointed out, we had it backwards. We don't use more of the brain. We actually use a lot less of the brain. So the term for this is hypofrontality. Hypo is the opposite of hyper. It means to slow down, to shut down, to deactivate. And frontality refers to the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain back. It's right back here. Very powerful part of the brain, complex, logical decision-making, long-term planning, sense of morality, sense of willpower, executive functions. That's what this part of the brain does. We used to think it was a total blanket shutdown. When Dietrich first proposed the idea, we thought the entire prefrontal cortex turned off. Now we are starting to realize it's, yes, that's true. We see massive deactivation in the prefrontal cortex. Now they call it call it localized frontality because it depends on what you're doing, right? Huge swatches of the prefrontal cortex turn off, but some parts of it stay active, and it depends on what the activity is. So like if you're playing a piano versus playing football versus, you know, working on Wall Street to, you know, uh, different— I mean, all flow scenarios, right? But different things are going to be active and inactive. So, um, but yeah, uh, and, and this is— Dietrich himself has, uh, uh, is, has recanted. He, he's, you know, so every— it was a brilliant idea and it, um, was a revolutionary concept for advancing flow science, and it did, it kicked everything open. Um, but we've since revised that idea a little bit and and Diedrich as well, he's been involved in revising his own idea.

Well, thank you for humoring me on that as well. And I'm a bit of a nerd, like, I find it difficult to jump to an author's latest book without having read the previous book. So that's where I appreciate you updating me as well on this.

With me, you've got, Jesus, 14 books. I know, I know.

And I had to go back to come forward. But one of the things that I thought was really is time dilation, because many people might experience this and they're kind of going, what's going on there? For example, you talk about, I can't remember the guy's name, the guy who falls and grabs the rope. Who was that? Dean Potter. Yeah, so you talk about Dean Potter and he's fallen to his death into the cave and he managed to save himself and he can just hear everything around him and he can think clearly. And this is when this inhibitory aspect's going on.

Yeah. So, um, there are actually 3 different— this has also changed from— so when I wrote Rise of Superman, time— we know time is processed all over prefrontal cortex. So in flow, right, why does past time pass those strings? And what does it speed up? Or sometimes it slows down, you get a freeze frame effect. It's because as parts of the prefrontal cortex shut down, that hypofrontality I was talking about, we lose the ability to separate past from present from future. We're plunged into what researchers talk about as the deep now, or poetically, the eternal present, right? The elongated moment, whichever. All of us, if you've ever felt awe, right, that's the stretching out of time that happens really frequently. And we now know— so here's the big funny the amount of dopamine in your system has a big, a large amount to do with how we perceive time. So if there's a lot of dopamine in your system, time speeds up, goes by really fast. If I cut dopamine off, time slows down. So I'll give you an example of that on all. So you may or may not know this, the brain is a prediction engine, right? It always wants to predict what's about to happen. How much energy do I need? right? That sort of thing. And so, like, as you're reaching for the doorknob, the brain is predicting, okay, the door is going to be open, it's going to feel like this when you turn it, you're going to need this much energy. And if it's not open, if the door is locked, what you'll notice is that time seems to pause for a second. What has happened is dopamine has been turned off. Your brain goes, oh, doesn't match your prediction. Prediction, no dopamine, right? When it matches your prediction, a little bit of dopamine. No, doesn't match your prediction, no dopamine. And you— that slows down time and you go, what? And that's— then you're like, oh shit, the door's locked, or oh wow, it's jamming and I gotta really crank at it, or whatever. So that's another timekeeping system in the brain. And it turns out what we call time is also a measure of the information density in the scene. So when there's a tremendous amount of information in the scene, it's slower than when there's very sparse information. The denser the information in the scene— and this, uh, this was great work that came out of my friend Anil Seth's lab at the University of Sussex, and he writes about it in Being You. No, he doesn't. Maybe he doesn't write about the dopamine work in Being You. Maybe he writes about some of the work. I don't know if he goes who's all the way into it. But his papers cover this stuff at length. I might be lying, I can't remember if it's in that book or not, but you should read that book anyways because it's fantastic.

I'm catching up, I'm catching up. You mentioned Mrs. Pac-Man, but there is actually a study done with Frogger, and I thought it was interesting because I thought I'd link it to what you just said there about the amount of information coming at you. And this is where it was really interesting that athletes performed a little bit better than non-athletes, and there was a reason behind this.

So, um, they built a life-size Frogger game, right? Um, I can't— God, it's been so long, I can't remember where they built it.

Illinois, University of Illinois.

Thank you. They built a life-size Frogger. They wanted to know, uh, like, are athletes gonna be better than non-athletes? Are they gonna be faster? And it turns out they were. But not for any of the reasons we thought, right? It wasn't that they were faster. They didn't move quicker. They didn't do any of those things. It was that they could recognize more patterns. It was pattern recognition. And pattern recognition is sort of fundamental to the brain, fundamental to performance, fundamental to flow. Or did I screw that study up? You're looking at me. No, I got it right, right?

No, you got it. You got it. Yeah, absolutely. Well, a great memory. Great memory. I love that because, you know, I often think about my job and I'm going, you know, I can manage multiple information. I'm kind of going, where does that come from? But a practice as well.

Yeah, let me take it one step further because a lot of people don't sort of get this. Pattern recognition is sort of one of those fundamental things the brain does, right? It's like what neurons do at a really basic level. It's, it's what everything does. But what people don't realize perhaps, um, is that pattern recognition is also the foundation of what we call wisdom. And wisdom itself is definable psychological trait with definable neurobiological antecedents. But here's the cool thing, it's neuroprotective against cognitive decline. So wisdom and intuition and our ability to access flow actually grow, increases as we age, does not go away. And it's neuroprotective against Alzheimer's and dementia and all kinds of stuff. So pattern recognition, the outcome of that fraud study, that magnifies up over the course of our lifetime and turns into expertise and wisdom.

But that shows the importance of ongoing learning, ongoing doing stuff. Yeah, not sitting around, which is a huge, huge part of your work. Last one for you, and I know you're probably sick to death of talking about this one, but you say there's dozens of neurochemical signatures involved in any type of flow. There's quintet though, that at the time, and maybe this is updated since as well.

This is still, this is still true. Um, you are right. Uh, so we get in Flow 5 of the most potent feel-good performance-enhancing neurochemicals the brain can produce: norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, anandamide, and endorphins. Um, in Social Flow group flow, shared flow experiences, also oxytocin, but that doesn't show up in solo flow. But to put this in context, just like, how good do you feel? What are we really talking about? Like, we'll come back to it. We've talked a lot about what it does for performance, but just like impact on feelings. So romantic love, when we fall in love, this is Helen Fisher's work out of Rutgers University, not mine, but when we fall in love, that's predominantly norepinephrine and dopamine. Me, right? You get the same levels of norepinephrine and dopamine that show up in romantic love, in flow, plus 3 other feel-good neurochemicals. We were talking about endorphins earlier. How good do endorphins make you feel? Endorphins are the internal version of opiates, right? These are internally produced opiates. The most common— there's like 20 different endorphins in the brain. The most common one is 100 times more powerful than medical morphine. Opiate. So you're talking about a very potent— so you've got, you know, love plus 100 times medical warfarin plus anandamide plus serotonin. This is a very feel-good cocktail. And, um, these are also— these are the neurochemicals that really explain. So like, why does motivation go up so much? Why did McKinsey find 500% productivity? What, like, where does that come from? These feel-good neurochemicals, right? That's what's producing the boost in motivation. Right? And that's also why flow is the antidote to languishing and grit and is so important overall life satisfaction and well-being and so forth. Also, by the way, the pattern recognition. Pattern recognition is mostly dopamine. Yeah.

A little bit of norepinephrine. I just really wanted to share. And that's so important for learning, which is really at the heart of a lot of your work.

[Speaker:DAVID_SHERMAN] It is. I also think one of my favorite books ever, Ari de Guz is The Living Company. He was the head of innovation at Shell forever. He wanted to know, so Jim Collins wrote Good to Great and he said, look, these companies outperform the S&P 500 for 15 years. And at that point, Shell had been in business 70 years. And our interviewee was like, I don't care about companies that had kicked ass for 15 years. I want to know about the companies that are kicking ass for 100 years or 200 years or 500 years or 1,000 years. And he did the study of the longest-lived companies in history. And he looked for commonalities. What do they share? What's the same? The only commonality among all the longest-lived companies in history is that all learned to outlearn the competition. That was the biggest distinguisher. Flow significantly amplifies learning. How did these athletes we talked about in the beginning, we were like this era of how do they get so far so fast? They had better access to flow than possibly any other group before in history. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Some of them are cultural. Some of them are individual. Some of them are technological. There's a bunch of stuff that go into that. And that's sort in the book, but that's sort of what happened. I recommend going out and buying The Art of Impossible because it's a step-by-step playbook for peak performance. I would also recommend— I mean, so here's the thing I think we can just give to your listeners that is actually beneficial. So you go to flowresearchcollective.com/flowblockers. So it turns out there are 6 major flow blockers, things that stand between you and more flow. We built a diagnostic. It's free. Anybody can take it. You ask for one thing you can do, here's a free diagnostic. Take it. It'll diagnose your life, say, okay, this is the thing you're doing that's standing between you and way more flow. So that's a simple place to start. But literally Art Impossible is is it broken down into a playbook. And the interesting thing is peak performance is not easy, but it's not particularly hard. It's more about doing, being able to do the same thing again and again and again, day after day after day. But peak performance is really about 6 things you have to do every day and about 7 things you have to do every week. And none of them, most of them fold onto other things you're already doing or things along those lines. So It's remarkably easy to kind of lift our performance. But FlowBlocker, the FlowBlocker is a great place for people to start. The thing I always like to sort of point out, this is true with the athletes in Rise of Superman, this is true with really kind of everywhere I've gone in my career. I always say that like my career has been spent studying those moments in time when the impossible came possible. Possible, right? Whether it's the action sport athletes we're talking about there, you know, any of my other books really look at that. And I think possibly as much as anybody else who's alive, I have been in the room, or, you know, one way or another, when the impossible became possible, right? Uh, in so many different scenarios. And which is to say, I've had a front row seat at the extraordinary. But the thing that I always want to point out to people is I've spent my career in the room when the extraordinary happens, covering the extraordinary, trying to figure out— and I always like to say that everybody who accomplishes the extraordinary, they start out ordinary. It's always, right? It's always the same formula. It's always— I always like to say that we are all capable of so much more than we know. And one of the reasons we don't know is that human potential, human capability, our own capability is invisible, A, and it's especially invisible to ourselves. And like there's endless examples of this in various ways, but like the short version is we push in our skills to the utmost, we drop into flow, our abilities expand, we do that over and over and over and over again. And that's what allows ordinary people to tackle extraordinary challenges. And there's nothing else going on. And this is available to all of us. It comes built in biologically. So I don't know if that's a final message, but that is the thing that I've learned again and again and again and again in this work. Beautiful, man.

What a mission. And last thing, you mentioned FlowResearchCollective.com. That's where people can find you. The Rise of Superman on YouTube is still up there. It's absolutely fascinating. This book is a cracker. It's still out there. It's still up for sale. I'm going to share, Bing, a little picture here of The Devil's Dictionary as well for Stephen. Get a copy of that, and hopefully we'll do that in the future. Does he say, "I and I, me, my brethren," on that as well? Does he still say that?

No, no. There are not nearly as many Rastafarians. Okay. I don't know if there are any. In The Devil's Dictionary because I go to a different part of the world in that, in that book. Um, but, uh, there's gonna be— there's more in the— in— I created a world, I gotta keep writing. So like, of course we're gonna have to bring some of those characters back.

Awesome, awesome, man. I really look forward to it. Author of The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance, Stephen Kotler. Thank you so much for joining us.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Question for you: when was the last time you were in the zone? When you were in so deep that afterward you were stunned by how much you got done, even though very little time had passed? Now you've got bold goals, yet you're slammed with work and you're short on time. And you know the heights of productivity you can achieve when you get into the zone because you've been there before. But it's a mild form of torture knowing how productive you're capable of being without access to that level of output. With it all the time. So how do you get into the zone whenever you need it? There's still a lot that we don't know about flow states, but over the last 25 years of researching it, we've learned a lot, and we've shared our findings with thousands of high performers. You're in flow during those moments of total absorption when you're so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Time passes strangely and performance just soars. I mean, motivation and productivity, creativity and innovation, learning and memory, cooperation and collaboration, concentration all skyrocket, in some studies as high as 500% above baseline. Now imagine what you can accomplish if you could reliably increase your productivity by 5x. And the best part? Flow is accessible to everyone, anywhere, at any time. You don't need to pop a pill. You don't need to be surfing a monster wave. You don't need to meditate on a mountaintop for 10 years to get there. Flow is accessible to you right here, right now. If you'd like to amp up your productivity and get leverage on every second, go to getmoreflow.com. Flow.com. Just think of your 10 out of 10 days when you get more done in the morning than you typically do in a full day. Now imagine if you tapped into that level of performance with push-button consistency every day. All this is possible when you trigger flow frequently and reliably. Just go to getmoreflow.com, unblock your flow, and unlock peak performance.

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