Mapping Cloud 9: Part 2 - Steven Kotler | Flow Research Collective Radio

That means you could go to work on Monday, spend Monday in a flow state, take Tuesday through Friday off, and you get as much done as everybody else. 2 days a week in flow, you are 1,000% more productive than the competition. It's for these reasons that Forbes once pointed out that the number 1 management metric people need to know, flow state percentage, which is the amount of time people spend in flow. It's why companies like Microsoft, Ericsson, Toyota, and Patagonia have made flow the center of their corporate methodology. And the most important thing, though, is it's not just top athletes or big corporations or experts. It's all of us. Hey there.

If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur and you want to take your professional success to the next level, while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is an entrepreneur for 23 years. It never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline. Like, it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, What do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball. Or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com. Pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com.

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 Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Ryan Dorris here with Flow Research Collective Radio. And welcome to today's episode, which is from Steven Kotler's book, Mapping Cloud Nine. Now, Mapping Cloud Nine, of all of Steven's books, has, for me personally, the coolest subtitle. And the subtitle really is going to describe the essence of what this episode is focused on. The subtitle is Neuroscience, Flow, and the Upper Possibility Space of Human Experience. And that's what Stephen in this book today is going to be talking about. It's a chapter from Mapping Cloud 9. You're going to hear Stephen's voice going deep on the topic Stephen knows best and is most passionate about. So, with that, enjoy today's episode. It's a fantastic one and a real treat to get a sample of Mapping Cloud 9, one of Stephen's books, which came out a couple of years ago. So, enjoy. And until next time, all the best.

Welcome to session 2. This is the point where the science of high performance breaks off from the science of spirituality, and that break occurs because of a psychologist named Abraham Maslow. Maslow, you've probably heard his name. He's one of the great psychological thinkers of the past century, and he starts off— he starts his career in the 1940s. He's at Brooklyn College, and he's being mentored by an anthropologist named Ruth Benedict and a Gestalt psychologist named Max Wertheimer. So back then, all of psychology is obsessed with Freud's legacy, right? We are fixing pathological problems. We have no interest in celebrating psychological possibilities. But Maslow was so amazed by Benedict and Wertheimer. He thought they were such wonderful human beings, quote unquote, that he began studying their behavior. He wanted to know, what are they doing right? Right? And how are they doing it? And he's an anti-Freud, right? And he once said that Freud supplied us with the sick half of psychology, and now we must fill it out with the healthy half. And over time, he moves on from Benedict and Wertheimer, and he's studying other exemplars of human performance. His key interest is success, right? He wants to know what do all successful people have in common, and he's studying Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass, and he's looking for common traits and common circumstances, right? Why can these people obtain such incredible heights while so many of the rest of us just continue to flounder around, right? And a few big points here. He is absolutely in the Nietzsche, James, Freud tradition, right? He believes in self-actualization, famously writing, "What humans can be, they must be." But he also figures out that you don't get to start the process of self-actualizing until our basic needs are met. This is where his famous pyramids of needs come in, right? We've all seen this pyramid of need. And at the bottom is really basic food, clothing, shelter, basic survival needs. And we've got psychological needs like belonging, self-esteem, and social needs, success, right? And all of these sort of have to be taken care of before we get to self-actualization. Now, later on, we'll talk about neurobiologically why Maslow was absolutely correct, and it has a lot to do with the neurobiology of fear and what that does to our system. But Maslow is the first to sort of figure this out, and in a weird way, he sort of extended some of James's ideas, right? But also said not only do we have to, like, use habit and attention to overcome ourselves, we also can't forget the fact that we're basic human beings. We've got human needs and we need to solve them. He also feels that self-actualizers, people who have actually pulled this off, they managed to solve the, like, young Freud culture and mommy way too much problem simply because self-actualizers don't give a damn. They literally operate outside the good opinion of others. He also thinks negative emotions— so William James was a really— he's one of our earliest believers in the power of positive thinking. James is a real proponent of positive thinking, right, and sort of replacing the negative thought with a positive thought. Maslow is more in line with Jung, where he's saying negative emotions, rather than being a sign of like illness, he thinks They are forces for change, and that the more we feel our negative emotions, the more potential energy for change we have. Now, the interesting thing that he notices is that self-actualizers have more peak experiences, more mystical experiences, to use the James term, right, than other people. In fact, he notices that all the people in his study group actually have found ways to seek out ways to alter their consciousness to bring this on. And some of them are really pedantic. Albert Einstein famously used to, like, row a rowboat into the middle of Lake Geneva and stare at the clouds, or sail into the middle of Lake Geneva. And funny story, he— Einstein was a terrible sailor. So this was part of his creative process, and he always used to sail into the middle of Lake Geneva, but he was absent-minded like you couldn't believe and was oblivious to storms and couldn't swim and would sail his boat out in the middle of the lake and even have to be rescued over and over and over again because he was chasing peak experiences. But here's the key point with James. This is where the science of spirituality and the science of high performance go their separate ways. So he's essentially looking at peak experiences, our fancy word for flow states, right? James thought flow was a mystical experience, but Maslow's got this enormous study group. Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, et cetera, et cetera. They're all atheists. Everybody in his study group is an atheist. So suddenly Maslow's like, "Wait a minute, these can't be religious experiences or spiritual experiences or mystical experiences 'cause nobody here believes in God. They're not out of those traditions." So mystical experiences are gone as a terminology, and suddenly Maslow introduces peak experiences. And with his high achievers, his self-actualizers, right, in getting to these peak experiences, he notices self-actualizers, they're really intrinsically motivated, right? They're deeply committed to testing their limits and stretching their possibility potential. And they're frequently using intensely focused activity for exactly this purpose. And this intensely focused activity seems to be, right, what shifting our consciousness, right? And as I said, mystical experiences are out, peak experiences are in. But it's really— you have to be really clear— the sensations are very much the same. So during a peak experience, Maslow explained, the individual experiences an expansion of self, a sense of unity, and a meaningfulness in life. The experience lingers in one consciousness and gives us a sense of purpose, integration, self-determination, and empathy. These states, he concludes, were the hidden commonality among all high achievers. They're the source code of intrinsic motivation. Here's another great quote. The peak experience, Maslow writes, is felt as a self-validating, self-justifying moment. It is felt to be a highly valuable, even uniquely valuable experience. So great an experience sometimes that even to attempt to justify it takes away from its dignity and worth. As a matter of fact, so many people find this so great and high an experience that it justifies not only itself, but living itself. Peak experiences can make life worthwhile by their occasional occurrence. They give meaning to life itself. They prove it to be worthwhile. To say this in a negative way, I would guess that peak experiences help prevent suicide. So this is Maslow essentially going through all of— making James's observations about these peak experiences and Himes' observations about these peak experiences over and over again in slightly very different experiences, right? And he points out the peak experiences, they've got a number of fundamental commonalities. One of them is cosmic unity, right? We become one with everything in these experiences. Now, Maslow says this doesn't happen all the time. It only happens sometimes. What happens all the time is perspective shifts. You get access to higher quality information. You see old things in new ways. And just like James noted, you were more loving on the other side. Same thing with Maslow, right? On the other side of these experiences, we are wider, we're more empathetic, we're less human-centric in our viewpoint. He pointed out that self vanishes, right? And that these experiences are ego-transcending. Fear vanishes as well. We see things in a very positive light. Time vanishes. He wrote, "The person in a peak experience may feel a day passing as if it were minutes, or also a minute as intensely lived that it might feel like a day or a year or an eternity even." There is a very sensation that this sensation, the experience of the peak experience, this experience is the point. This is the meaning of life. And most importantly, the peak experience crushes nihilism. Crushes the problem of nihilism, right? The problem after God is dead is how do we find meaning in life? What Maslow points out is the peak experience is the meaning in life. This was James's idea too, right? That high performance, it's got these basics. You got attention, you got habit, but you also need these peak experiences. Same thing for Maslow, right? He says you gotta deal with your basic needs, all of your basic needs, and you gotta have the mystical experience. So you have to have high performance and spirituality both together if you really want to go A to B here. The other thing that it's important in Maslow, it comes up again and again, right? Nietzsche is a big proponent of suffering, right? You got to go through your suffering. Maslow says that the problem with the path laid out by the peak experience is there's a terror at the front end of the path when you realize how much of your life, your normal day-to-day world, you may you may have to blow up, you may have to completely destroy to get to go on this spiritual path, which is sort of, by the way, Nietzsche said, hey, high performance only for 10% of people, right? Self-actualization, don't try this at home. Maslow comes back to this point. He basically, he doesn't say no, no, he's not a snob. He doesn't do the Nietzsche thing and say only a small portion of people can do this. But he basically says, look, You— once you see what this is going to cost you, right, to quote T.S. Eliot, costing nothing less than everything. Once you see what this is gonna cost you, you are probably not gonna be into it right now. Following Maslow is a name I've mentioned a couple times, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Now, Maslow wanted to know what all successful people have in common. Right? What's linking them together? Csikszentmihalyi, who is the former chairman of the University of Chicago psychology department, then he went on to Drucker University in California, but in the 1970s he's at the University of Chicago and he wants the common answer to Maslow's question. Maslow was like, what do all successful people have in common? Csikszentmihalyi wants to know about everybody. When when everybody, normal people, are at their best, when we're performing at our best, when we're feeling our best, what's going on, right? So Csikszentmihalyi solves this problem, and he solves it by discovering flow. He's often talked about as the godfather of flow psychology, but his story essentially spans the whole of the 20th century. He's born in Flum, Italy, in what now is Reykjavik, Croatia, on September 29th, 1934. He's the son of a Hungarian, Diplomat, and his childhood is totally war-torn, right? He's running from the Nazis on one side and the Russians on the other. One of his brothers is killed, another is exiled to Siberia. He ends up, when he's 7 years old, sent to an Italian prison camp. And in prison, he learns to play chess, and he becomes obsessed with the game. And he notices that when he plays chess, everything else but the board just disappears. Right? Nothing else seems to penetrate his consciousness. So there's no armed prison guards, no prison he can't leave, he doesn't have a dead brother or missing siblings, right? Chess allows him to forget the tumult, to make the best of a bad situation. And this, he notices, is something of a rare talent. In prison, Csikszentmihalyi told audiences when he spoke at TED, I realized how few of the grown-ups around me were able to withstand the tragedies the war visited upon them, how few of them had anything resembling a normal contented, satisfied life once their job, their home, and their security was destroyed. So I became interested in understanding what contributed to a life worth living. Right? So he gets out of prison camp, the war ends, he reads philosophy, he studies religion, he gets involved in the arts, all the things that are supposed to give meaning to life. Nothing quite satisfies, but he does remember what used to happen while he was playing chess. And then one Sunday afternoon, he's in Zurich and he attends a free lecture by Carl Jung. Carl Jung, right? And he loves the talk, and he starts reading Jung's books, and he decides that psychology has got to be how he answers his questions, right? So his studies take him to the University of Chicago, and he decides to zero in on one of the hot topics of the time, which is motivation, right? And Freud's unconscious has sort of been dethroned by Skinner's behaviorism at this point. And because of that, psychologists have a really tough time explaining why people do the things they do, right? The behaviorists say it all comes down to to need a reward. We do X to get Y. And this is extrinsic motivation. But that was the idea that never sat right with Maslow, right? He studies intrinsic motivation in super successful people and he figures out that they're being motivated by these peak experiences. Csikszentmihalyi decides to do the same thing with everybody. So does a global study. What is one of the largest studies in high performance ever done. He runs around the world and he starts with experts, right? He starts where everybody else starts, where Maslow starts, He talks to expert rock climbers and dancers and neurosurgeons and Wall Street traders. And then he starts talking to everybody else. So it's Detroit assembly line workers and Navajo sheepherders. And it turns out, doesn't matter who he talks to, he discovers the same thing that I discovered when I did my giant study, The Impossible, right? He discovers that whenever people are feeling their best, whenever they're performing performing their best, they're in the state of flow. And he renames peak experiences flow because as he's running around the world talking to people about these, you know, when was the time in your life you felt your best and performed your best, everybody keeps saying the same thing. Well, I'm in this state of consciousness and every experience, every action, every decision seems to flow effortlessly, perfectly from the last, right? She sent me a hi, talks about flow as being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away, time flies, every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved and you're using your skills to the utmost. So peak experiences are out and flow states are in, and once again, it's a phenomenological description, a description of how the state makes us feel. Now, also, I want to give away a little secret here, which is underneath that feeling of flow, right? To feel like every decision, every action is flowing seamlessly, effortlessly, perfectly from the last. This is telling us something fundamental. It's telling us that whatever else is true, flow is as close to near perfect, and note I said near perfect, not perfect, near perfect high-speed decision-making as we can get. He also, right, he shares James's belief and Nietzsche's belief that you have to get this experience by pushing far beyond our limits, right? Freud had the pleasure principle, and I said flow undoes it, right? This is what undoes it. Csikszentmihalyi writes, the best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times. The best moments usually occur if a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Right? Csikszentmihalyi is also the one who does the psychological research that identifies the 9 core characteristics of flow, which at the time are what he calls a challenge-skills balance. This means that in flow, we are using our skills to the utmost, right? We are stretched to the edge of our skill set so that our skills are just enough to handle the challenge of the task at hand. We're gonna come back to this idea and really tease it out. He identifies immediate feedback and clear goals as two other conditions of flow. Complete concentration on a limited field of view, right? A feeling of being in control. This sense of effortless effort, right? What the Taoists call effortless effort. Flow of being pushed by something greater than you. Altered perception of time, loss of self, and the merger of action awareness. And he also said that these states are autotelic. Autotelic is a fancy word for an end in itself. What he's basically saying is these states are the most addictive on Earth. But psychologists don't like the word addictive, so they use autotelic, which means an end in itself. What it really means is that once an activity produces flow, We will go really, really, really, really far out of our way to get more of it. Now, he also discovers 3 more things that are really important to the discussion of flow. First thing is that flow is universal. It's ubiquitous. It shows up in anyone, anywhere, provided certain initial conditions are met, right? He also discovers that flow is a spectrum. And this is really tricky and it's really important to understand. So on the lower edge of the spectrum, in what he calls microflow, he says what you get all of flow's core characteristics, they all show up, they're just dialed down really low. Now researchers are starting to look at that and we don't know if that's exactly true. It may be true that you can get into flow and for example, that sense of control that you get never shows up. Up and you've just got like, you lose track of time and you forget that you have to go to the bathroom. So I talked about like that quickie email, you sit down to write that quickie email, you look up later, you've written an essay. That's microflow. If maybe you didn't notice time was passing along the way and you forgot you had to go to the bathroom, right? So chicks hit me high feels that all of those things have to be present, just turned down. I and a bunch of other researchers think no, there might be more going on. You get a couple bits of it. Macroflow, by the way, This is a full-blown mystical experience, right? Macro flow is when all of these conditions show up all at once and everything is turned up to 11, right? So at that point, it's a totally mystical experience and really, really powerful. The next thing Csikszentmihalyi figures out is that flow is fundamental. It is fundamental to happiness, well-being, and life satisfaction. In his research, the people who score off the charts for overall well-being, for overall life satisfaction, for I have a meaningful life, I love my life and it means a ton, these are the people with the most flow in their lives. So flow is directly correlated to things like life satisfaction and meaning and purpose. So Csikszentmihalyi does this sort of foundational work. And the next question that people ask, right, after he does his work and we've gone from peak experiences into flow states and we've defined flow as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best, we perform our best. The next question that scientists ask is how optimal, right? Like, what the hell are we talking about? Right? Like, what do we mean? What I want to say is pretty goddamn optimal is the answer. So Michael Sachs, he's a Temple University sports psychologist. He once pointed out to me that pretty much every world championship or gold medal that's ever been won has a flow state at its heart. We now know, by the way, that this is not 100%. You actually can win a gold medal or a world championship without flow. It's just incredibly unpleasant and not sustainable or repeatable. And it happens very rarely, but we do know it's possible. By the way, Jimmy Johnson credited Chick Set Me High with the Dallas Cowboys' Super Bowl victories back in the '90s. Right. We now know that flow— it's not just athletics. We know flow is responsible for major breakthroughs in science and technology. Every major shift in the arts, every big breakthrough in the arts seems to have a flow state at its heart. Hey there.

Just going to interrupt. But if you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur, and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is an, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those. It allows somebody to self-identify, like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We would be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So getmoreflow.com.

I want to talk just to give you an idea. When we talk about optimal performance, we talk about what's possible. I want to tell you a story that I told in The Rise of Superman. And if you've read The Rise of Superman and you're listening to this, I apologize. And if you haven't read The Rise Superman, you're gonna love this story because it encapsulates what flow makes possible. And it's a story about a skateboarder named Danny Way. Now, Danny Way is not a household name, but he's often considered by many to be the greatest skateboarder of all time. And he is the creator of what is known as the mega ramp. He introduces this in a 2003 skate video, the DC video, and nobody knows what the hell to make of it. It looks more like a surrealistic painting than anything you would to ever skate down. So, Jake Brown, who once actually nearly died in a mega-ramp miscalculation, told The New York Times the first time he saw it, "It was like 3 times the size of anything I'd ever seen in skateboarding. It was crazy." It still is crazy. Danny Way, in 2004, he convinces the X Games to make the mega-ramp, which is, by the way, a 70-foot roll-in to what is like a 50-foot gap jump that lands into a— quarter pipe that tends to throw people 50 to 70 feet above the quarter pipe. It's a monster, right? Any error along the way could kill you. It's that big, right? 2004, he convinces the X Games to make the mega ramp the center of the skateboarding competition, right? He also claims it's the only way he's going to compete in the event. And no surprise, right? He wins. Same year, he's flying over the Great Wall of China, looks down, and decides that, "Hell, I wanna jump the Great Wall of China. I wanna use this mega ramp to jump the Great Wall of China." It's never been done before. He decides he's gonna do it. So he goes to China on an inspection tour, right? He wants to find a launch point, and he settles on the Xuan Gate, which is the widest spot in the wall, and he thinks it does the most honor to both skateboarding and the Great Wall of China if this is where he's gonna jump it. It, right? And goes home. These ramp builders start building the ramp, right? And he thought he was going to have to jump maybe 50, 60 feet. And they're measuring it out, and they realize, right, Wei's now back in the States, they're in China, they reach him by satellite phone and call him up, and they're like, uh, Danny, um, buddy, you may have to clear a gap of over 70 feet. To jump the wall? Isn't that, like, I mean, just too gnarly? Danny doesn't even pause, and his answer, which has since ended up on T-shirts, is, "No, nothing's too gnarly." But I have to say, when all this was said and done, that Great Wall mega-ramp, it was pretty gnarly, right? The roll-in, the ramp he's gotta skate down, it's 100 feet long. It is the size of an Olympic ski jump. It leads to this 70-foot gap jump over the wall into a 32-foot quarter pipe, which is the largest anybody's ever constructed. So, that pipe is gonna throw him 35 feet in the air, so he's gonna be over 70 feet above the deck. So, right, any fall is fatal. Any error could have fatal consequences. But this is the problem in skateboarding. Skateboarders make errors, right? It is a game of mistakes. Of failure. And Way once said, and this is interesting, speaks to flow, "Skateboarding is a game of failure. That's what makes the sport so different. Skaters are willing to take a great deal of physical punishment. We'll try something endlessly, weeks on end, painful failure after painful failure after painful failure. But for me, when it finally snaps together, when I'm really pushing the edge and skating beyond my abilities, there's a zone I get into." Everything goes silent. Time slows down. My peripheral vision fades away. It's the most peaceful state of mind I've known. I'll take all the failures. As long as I know that feeling is coming, that's enough to keep me going. Wei's trademark is that he keeps going and he keeps going. And in fact, he shows up in China the day before the event, and he's gonna take a practice run on the mega ramp. And it turns out it's gonna be his only one. So he climbs to the top of the rock ramp, and the thing to know is Danny Way is actually afraid of heights. He's terrified of heights. This platform is 100 feet off the deck, and it's wobbling. It's shaking back and forth. He's bouncing up and down, and the whole thing starts to shake and reverberate. And this is a really bad sign. A couple years earlier, a BMX rider tried to jump the wall, but a bad ramp construction sent him over the landing pad and into the side of a mountain, and he died from massive internal organ failure a couple hours later. So it's a big deal, right? Last person who tried to jump this wall died for this effort from a bad ramp, and his ramp isn't working so well. He decides to take a practice run anyways, and it's his only one. He trained, he built a ramp to train on this in the desert. China, lot of humidity. The air is too thick, it slows him down, he underjumps the gap, he pancakes, he ragdolls, he flips over, his knee is shattered, Ankle is shattered. His leg is in horrible shape. He is rushed to the hospital and he decides, trademark Danny Way, he walks out before going to see the doctor. He doesn't even want to know the extent of the damage. And he comes back to the ramp. And while, by the way, while he's in the hospital, the ramp builders are going back at it trying to fix the ramp to make it work better with the humidity. So they're making the ramp bigger. So the next day, right, while millions and millions and millions, 125 million Chinese people are watching, he can barely walk. He climbs 10 flights of stairs that second time. He's literally like lifting his legs step to step to step. He's moving slowly. He's breathing hard. His head is hanging down. He gets up to the top and it looks like he's paging like a caged animal in the video of this, right? He sort of raises one arm to quiet the crowd, puts his board down. He gets down, shifts his weight forward. Mind you, shattered ankle, shattered knee. And he's about to try to jump the Great Wall of China on a skateboard. And he pulls it off. 5 seconds after his ramp makes contact, he jumps the Great Wall of China. And because it's Danny Way, and because he's not in it for the money, or the fame, even though he's got a broken ankle and a shattered knee, he jumps it 5 more times. In fact, he throws a 360 along the way. Just to make sure that one's not a fluke, he does it again. So, Travis Pastrana, who's one of the great freestyle motocross action sport legends of all time, said about that, he said, "Look, on that ramp, with totally healthy limbs, Danny's risking his life." But he destroyed his steering foot and his knee. Once he sets himself on that board, if either the ankle or the knee gives by a fraction of an inch, he's going to fly off the side of the ramp and die. If you want to talk about pushing limits, most people can't even stand on a broken ankle. Dantony not only stood, he withstood 4 Gs of pressure going into that quarter pipe, and he did it 3 times in a row. And here's the interesting thing. When you ask Dantony about this, as I asked him, you want to know, "how I did something like jump the Great Wall of China on a fractured ankle?" he said. "I can't answer that. All I can tell you is what I already told you. When I'm pushing the edge, skating beyond my abilities, it's always a meditation in the zone." So earlier, when I said whenever we see the impossible becoming possible, this is exactly what I was talking about. So after scientists figured out, oh, flow is the secret to optimal performance, and we started putting numbers on it, right? How optimal, right? We did it in sports, then we did it in art and technology. Did it in business also. So McKinsey, the business consultancy, they did a 10-year study of top executives, and they found that top executives in flow report being 500% more productive than out of flow. You got to think about that. That means you could go to work on Monday, spend Monday in a flow state, take Tuesday through Friday off, and you get as much done as everybody else. 2 days a week in flow, you are 1,000% more productive than the competition. It's for these reasons that Forbes once pointed out that the number 1 management metric people need to know— flow state percentage, which is the amount of time people spend in flow. It's why companies like Microsoft, Ericsson, Toyota, and Patagonia have made flow the center of their corporate culture. Appropriate methodology. And the most important thing though is it's not just top athletes or big corporations or experts. It's all of us. Ned Hallowell, the Harvard psychologist who coined the term ADHD, he once pointed out, and I love this quote, flow naturally catapults you to a level you're not naturally in. Flow naturally transforms a weakling into a muscleman, a sketcher into an artist, a dancer into a ballerina, a plotter into a sprinter, an ordinary person into someone extraordinary. Everything you do, you do better in flow. From baking chocolate cake to planning a vacation to solving a differential equation to writing a business plan to playing tennis to making love, everything you do, you do better in flow. Flow is the doorway to the more most of us seek. Rather than telling ourselves to get used to it, that's all there is, instead learn how to enter into flow. There you will find in manageable doses all the more you need. So flow is all of us performing at our best. So after we figure out how optimal is optimal, the next question is where is all this coming from, right? And this is where neuroscience has caught up with us. So for those of you who are familiar with Moore's Law, right, 1965, Gordon Moore, couple years before he founds Intel, notices the number of integrated circuits on a computer chip had been doubling every year, year and a half, and He's blown away. He's like, wow, this means every year and a half my computer gets twice as fast, but the cost stays the same. It becomes twice as powerful, but the price is the same. He said, this is amazing. I'll bet this lasts 5 more years, 10 more years. Well, as we know, that Moore's Law has lasted for 60 years. It's the reason why the smartphone in your pocket is 1,000 times cheaper, 1 million times smaller, and 1 million times faster than a supercomputer from the 1970s. '70s. So Ray Kurzweil, who's the head of engineering at Google, their head of artificial intelligence, discovers back in the late '90s that it's not just computers that function this way. Anytime a technology becomes an information technology, right, once you can program it into the ones and zeros of computer code, hops on the back of Moore's Law and it starts accelerating exponentially. And the technologies that have jumped on the back of Moore's Law are some of the most powerful technologies the world has ever seen. Artificial intelligence, robotics, work, sensors, nanotechnology, biotechnology. Biotechnology, neuroscience starts really, really picking up speed in the '90s and the early 2000s, right? And this allows flow researchers to do something we've never been able to do before, which is peel back the hood of flow, look inside the brain, figure out where is this coming from, right? And we're going to talk a little bit about the neuroscience, the neurobiology of flow. Now, if you want to understand neuroscience of anything, then you want to know 4 things. First thing you need to know is neural anatomy and networks. This is where in the brain things are taking place, right? Neural anatomy is, oh, it's in the amygdala, or it's in the hippocampus, or it's in the prefrontal cortex. Effects. All right. But since things rarely take place in one spot in the brain, right, there's a connectome, the wiring diagram of the brain. So it's network effects that matter. Right. And then you want to talk about neurochemistry and neuroelectricity, which are the two ways the brain communicates. It either sends chemical signals or it sends electrical signals to talk to itself and to talk to the body. Right. So we are going to talk primarily about these 4 categories and what we discovered about flow. Now, the old idea about flow and peak performance, which has been around for— actually, it's a bastardization of a William James quote I gave you earlier, but you know it as the 10% brain myth. This is the old idea on peak performance, which is the idea that at any one time we're only using a small portion of our brain, say 10%, And peak performance, aka flow, it must be the full brain on overdrive, right? And it turns out we had that exactly backwards. First of all, just to clarify, from an evolutionary perspective, the brain is conservative by design. So we would never not use 90% of the brain. That would just make absolutely no sense from an evolutionary perspective. It would be a whole bunch of wasted space. Space, and evolution wouldn't permit that. Besides that, the funnier part is that we had it totally backwards when it comes to high performance. So in flow, we're not using more of the brain, we're actually using less of the brain. It's an efficiency exchange in a sense. So in flow, we need a tremendous amount of energy for focus, for attention in the present, right? Flow only shows up when all our attention is in the right here, right now. So what the brain does is it shuts down non-critical structures and gives you more energy for attention. The technical term for this deactivation, these non-critical scutters that shows up in flow, is transient hypofrontality. Transient means temporary. Hypo, H-Y-P-O, it's the opposite of hyper. It means to slow down, to shut down, to deactivate, right? And frontality refers to the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain right behind your forehead. Now, you probably know prefrontal cortex is damn important, governs a lot of your higher cognitive functions. So your sense of willpower resides there, your morality is there, long-term thinking, logical, complex decision-making. All this is the prefrontal cortex, right? Inflow this portion of the brain shuts down. So I want to mention that this idea of transient hypofrontality was first proposed by a Georgia Tech neuroscientist named Arne Dietrich, who's, uh, he's no longer at Georgia Tech, but he was when he came up with the idea. And then it was validated by a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist named Charles Lim. So Arne Dietrich proposed it theoretically. Charles Lim took fMRI and did brain imaging studies, and he did a series of them. First, he looked at jazz musicians who were in flow doing improv jazz or out of flow just sort of playing standards. And then he did the same study, was repeated with rappers. So they were either freestyling, right, totally deep in the moment, in flow, freestyling, or they were doing kind of standard versus other raps. And across the boards, what they saw is activity, the prefrontal cortex shuts down. Now, this explains a lot of the weird, so-called mystical, magical, spiritual qualities of a flow state. Why does time pass so strangely in flow, for example? Time, it turns out, is calculated all over the prefrontal cortex. And as parts of the prefrontal cortex wink out, we lose the ability to separate separate past from present from future, and instead we're plunged into the state that researchers talk about as the deep now. Now, by the way, the deep now, huge impact on performance. Think about fear and anxiety. Most of the things we're afraid of, most of the stuff that scares us doesn't exist in the right here, right now. Unless you are having a heated argument an action adventure sport athlete or a soldier, chances are the shit that scares you, it's either horrible stuff that happened in the past that you'd like to avoid happening again in the present, or it's some scary stuff that could happen in the future that you'd like to steer around from the present. So as we move into flow, anxiety flushes out of our system because anxiety is not a present tense experience very often, right? Right. This has a huge impact on performance. Same thing happens to our sense of self. Why does our sense of self vanish in flow or for that matter, in meditation? Self is actually a calculation performed all over the prefrontal cortex. And as parts of it wink out, we lose the ability to perform that calculation. Our sense of self disappears. Again, huge impact on performance. When our sense of self disappears, as I said earlier, our inner critic goes along for the ride, right? That nagging, always-on, inner defeatist voice in your head, your inner Woody Allen. When we drop into flow, Woody goes silent, right? Again, huge impact on performance. When this happens emotionally, we experience it as liberation, as freedom. You are actually biologically getting out of your own way. Emotionally, that freedom, that liberation translates into performance, right? We have performance benefits. For example, creativity spikes in flow.

Why?

One reason is with the inner critic turned off, you're no longer doubting every great idea you come up with, right? Those ideas instead are flowing, right? We see the same thing with risk-taking. Risk-taking goes way up in flow. 'cause you're not governing yourself as much. Now, sometimes this is fantastic, right? And it can lead in really good directions. Sometimes it's extremely dangerous and can lead in negative directions. In fact, there's a German study that was done a couple years ago that says if you chase flow over the course of a lifetime, your risk tolerances are going to go up and up and up and up. This is why often, by the way, you see artists sometimes really wanting to break with tradition and doing something new, right? Picasso starts off as a traditional painter and suddenly discovers Cubism, right? Some of this is about taking bigger and bigger risks and bigger and bigger risks. And we'll talk about why that happens. But know now that risk-taking goes up right now. You also got to understand what just happened. We've got this idea that there are these timeless, miraculous, mystical states. It goes all the way back to Nietzsche. To Haim, to James, to Jung, to Maslow, to Chick Set Me High, and suddenly it's biology. Suddenly what was mysticism becomes biology, right? This is an astounding shift. And by the way, just so you have an idea of how far the biology is along and where some of the subtle differences are, and we're going to come back to this idea later, but I just want to drop it in now. Now. So what is the difference, for example, between flow and meditation? They're both altered states of consciousness. They both seem to have something to do with pulling our attention into the right here, right now. Well, these neural imaging studies have given us a clue. What we see in Charles Lim's study is, as I said, the prefrontal cortex gets shut down, right? Completely. In flow, one portion of the prefrontal cortex, the medial orbital prefrontal cortex, becomes hyperactive. What does this portion of the brain do? It does a couple of things, but what's most important for our purposes is creative self-expression, right? In meditation, this part of the brain stays quiet. In meditation, you see transient hypofrontality as well, but you are not expressing yourself creatively. It's not an action state. You're trying to let go of yourself or focus on your— so you don't need this part of the brain. It's not active. In flow, because it's an action state, because every decision leads perfectly effortlessly to the next, right? This portion of the brain actually becomes hyperactive. It's really turned on. So this is important as an idea just so you understand how far the science has come, that we can now start to look at flow versus meditation and start to make intelligent deductions about Oh, they're different because of, and this means, and we'll get to all that later, but I just want you to have the idea that it's going on. And let's jump back into the next bit of flow neuroscience. So we talked about neural anatomy, where things are taking place in the brain. I'm going to sort of leave networks to the side for now. We'll come back to that later. And I want to talk about brainwaves, right? Whenever you encounter stimuli, whenever you have you have a thought, the brain has an electrical response, right? We measure those responses as scientists with EEG, and we can measure those responses with EEG down to like the 1/1000th of a second range, right? And this allows us to track how the brain changes over time, which no other technology can do, right? Like if you looked at fMRI, that's quite of a fixed snapshot. Now that snapshot is starting to evolve and we're We can get brain scans that can see across time, but if we really want to look at time signatures, we use EEG, right? And EEG measures brainwaves, and those electrical responses, they basically— bursts of electricity. It's like throwing a rock into a pond. It creates a wave, right? And these are brainwaves, which is what EEG measures. And there are 5 major brainwave types, and each correlates to a different state of consciousness. So the slowest brainwave, right? This is the one with the longest pauses between the bursts of electricity, right? Is delta, right? And this is found between 1 and 3.9 hertz. And this only shows up when we're in deep dreamless sleep. This is delta. Delta seems to be, by the way, very important for the consolidation of memory and learning. Right above delta of delta, we see theta. This is between 4 and like 7.9 hertz. Theta correlates to REM sleep. It also correlates to meditation. Monks and people who have 10,000 hours of meditation training, their brainwaves have a lot more theta in them. Also, it correlates to insight, and we'll talk about why that is. And it's often associated with the process of novel if you care. Between 8 and 13.9 Hz, that's alpha. This is sort of the brain's basic resting state. When we're in alpha, we're calm and relaxed and we're lucid, but we're not really thinking all that much. This is daydreaming mode sometimes. Alpha is also associated with creativity sometimes. Beta is a fast-moving wave. It's between 14 and 30 Hz, and it signifies learning and concentration at the low end and fear and stress at the high end. So if you're listening to my voice right now, now, and provided I'm not stressing you out too much, you are in beta. That's where we normally are. Now, above 30 Hz, there is a fast-moving wave known as gamma. Now, gamma only shows up in what's known as binding. This is when a bunch of thoughts or a bunch of ideas come together for the first time to create kind of a new thought. It's the laying down of a new neural network. So flow, what the research has taught us, takes place on the borderline between alpha and theta. Now, you don't live there 100% of the time. When you're in flow, your brain is not always at the alpha-theta borderline. It will bounce around. You'll jump up to beta. You'll go to other places, but you will always return to the alpha-theta borderline. Now, the cool thing about this borderline, besides the fact that you could only get there normally, not in flow, if you had years of serious meditation training. More importantly, for creativity. So we talked earlier about gamma. Gamma shows up with binding. It's the neurological signature of the aha moment, of a eureka insight. When a bunch of ideas come together, eureka, I've got it. Well, that aha moment, its signature is a gamma spike, right? Gamma is what is known as a coupled wave. Now, that's a very fancy way of saying it only shows up when the brain is in theta. It's coupled to theta. So you can't get that gamma spike unless your brain is in theta. Now, it is hard, as we pointed out, to be in theta when you're actually awake. It's very, very, very rare. What this means about flow, and this tells us something really fundamental about flow and creativity and flow and insight, is that that flow is one of the only times when we are perched on the edge of aha insight at all times. So whenever you are in flow, you are on the edge of having a huge breakthrough insight. So when scientists say things like flow shows up whenever there's significant progress in the arts or major breakthroughs in science and technology, this is why we know that's the truth. And this, by the way, this aha insight work work was done by my friend John Koinos at Drexel University and Mark Young Beeman at Northwestern. Really brilliant neuroscientists. So we talked about neuroelectricity. Now we have to talk about neurochemistry. This is the other way the brain communicates, and flow is also the product of neurochemistry, which has a huge impact on performance. In this state, we get 5, possibly 6 of the most potent neurochemicals that the brain and the body can produce. And all of them amplify physical performance, right? They amp up muscle reaction time. They increase strength by some estimates as much as 15%, actually. They decrease pain sensitivity. But their bigger impact is cognitively. And so I want to talk about out kind of all 5 or 6 of these neurochemicals, and I want to talk about how they impact cognitive performance. And to just give you the brief full list, the neurochemicals that underpin flow: you have norepinephrine, which is primarily known— we feel that, we experience it as either anxiety or excitement. Dopamine, which is the reward drug that we get from taking a risk to do something hard. It's the brain's principal pleasure drug. We also get endorphins. These are pain-killing substances. They're the internal version. They're endogenous opioids. They're similar to exogenous opiates like heroin or OxyContin, morphine. But just to give you an idea of how powerful the internal neurochemistry is, there are about 20 different endorphins produced by the brain, and the most common one, what's showing up in Flow, is 100 times more potent than medical morphine. Morphine. So when we say these are pain-killing, feel-good drugs, they're killing a lot of pain and you're feeling really good. You're also getting anandamine. This is the same psychoactive that's at the heart of marijuana, at the heart of THC. Anandamine is another internal chemical that mimics an external chemical. It's another pain-relieving chemical, but it also amps up a bunch of different cognitive functions, which we'll talk about in a second. And you get serotonin. This is the common chemical at the heart of the Prozac revolution. You might get oxytocin, Oxytocin, the so-called trust chemical or love chemical. We'll talk more about what it does in a minute. But what I want to do to explain kind of the impacts of these neurochemicals on cognitive high performance is talk about the three sides of the so-called high performance triangle. And it's called the high performance triangle because these are the three sets of skills that most researchers are convinced are most critical to thriving to high performance in the 21st century and the right here, right now. And that's motivation, learning, and creativity. Creativity. And we'll start with motivation. Let's just talk about the crisis in terms of just work, for example, the crisis in motivation we're now living through. So Gallup, every couple of years, they do a survey of worker engagement. How motivated are American workers kind of thing? And what the last time they did this, they found that 83% of American workers either are disengaged or actively disengaged on the job. And active disengagement has to be my absolute favorite euphemism in the world, because what it means is, I hate my job so much, I'm going to go out of my way to sabotage my company. That's insane, right? Now, the other 17%, these are people who have jobs that produce flow, and these are dream jobs, right? These are folks who show up early, they stay late, they love everything they do. It's totally meaningful, totally on message and on point. Flow is a huge boost in motivation.

Why? Why?

I gave you a hint earlier. All 5 of these chemicals are pleasure chemicals. And when I said that endorphins are the internal version of opiates and the most common endorphin in the body is 100 times more powerful than medical morphine, well, it's the same across all of these neurochemicals. They all mimic an exogenous street drug, in a sense. So endorphins, as I said, are opiates. Opiates. Dopamine is cocaine, the widely considered the most addictive substance on Earth. Norepinephrine is speed, crystal meth, that substance. Serotonin is either MDMA, Molly, ecstasy, or LSD depending on the pathway in the brain it takes. Anandamine, as I said, is THC. And the real point here is you couldn't actually cocktail the street version of these drugs. You would be comatose. You'd be dead. Get, but the brain cocktails them perfectly. So when McKinsey, for example, found that top executives are 500% more productive in flow, it's because of this feel-good neurochemistry, which is why researchers talk about flow as the source code of intrinsic motivation. Right? That's really what Csikszentmihalyi means by autotelic. So learning is the next thing we want to talk about. So quick shorthand for how learning and memory work in the brain is that the more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, better chance that experience will move from short-term holding into long-term storage. This is sort of one of the jobs of neurochemicals. They tag experiences as important, save for later, right? Flow is this enormous dump of neurochemistry, which is why studies run by by colleagues of ours at Advanced Brain Monitoring in conjunction with the Department of Defense found that soldiers in flow, radar operators in flow, snipers in flow will learn 230-plus percent faster than normal, sometimes going all the way up to 470% faster than normal. This is a huge deal. We've all heard about Malcolm Gladwell's sort of retread version of Anderson Erickson's work on 10,000 hours being required for mastery. What the research shows is that flow can cut that in half. So huge boost in learning, huge boost in motivation. Creativity is probably the most exciting thing. So the Red Bull Creativity Project, run by the energy drink company Red Bull, was actually the largest meta-analysis, largest study of creativity ever conducted. They did a meta-analysis of over 30,000 different studies. Peace, Creativity. They interviewed thousands and thousands of artists and creatives, and they came to two overarching conclusions. The first is that creativity is the most important skill for thriving in the 21st century. And the second is that we absolutely suck at training people to be more creative. We have no idea what we're doing. We're really bad at it. And the reason is we keep trying to train up a skill, and what we need to be doing is training up a state of consciousness. Flow surrounds the creative process. Without getting into too much geeky detail, creativity is a recombinatory skill. It's what happens when the brain takes in new information, or even old information, but sees it in a new way, combines it with older ideas, and uses the result to produce something startlingly new. So all the neurochemicals that show up and flow surround the creative process. So when we're in the state, we take in— and this is primarily thanks to norepinephrine and dopamine— more information per second. So data acquisition goes up. We pay more attention to that incoming information. This is again norepinephrine and dopamine at work primarily. So salience goes up. Now we find faster connections between that incoming information and older ideas, what's known as pattern recognition. So pattern recognition increases. We also find faster and farther-flung connections between incoming ideas. This is anandamine at work, actually, right? We've all— if you've ever been stoned, you've had the experience where really disjointed ideas are suddenly linking together in new and novel ways, and you're really excited by the insights you're getting. That's anandamine at work. So lateral thinking thinking goes up. And on the back end of creativity, the definition of creativity— there's no established definition, but the working definition that most scientists use is the creation of something novel and useful. Now, useful means it's not enough just to have the good idea. You also got to make it public. So on the back end of the creative process, there's risk-taking, right? There's always risk-taking when you make the idea public. All the neurochemicals inflow surround this process. You amplified risk-taking, heightened pattern recognition, heightened lateral thinking, heightened salience, and heightened data acquisition. Which is why in studies run at the University of Sydney in Australia and at Harvard, we find that creativity spikes in flow 400% to 700% above normal. It's a huge jump. And interestingly, and this was work done by Teresa Mobley at Harvard, that heightened creativity will outlast the flow state. Typical flow state is an hour and a half, and length, about roughly, though they can vary wildly. And there's an altruism-triggered flow state known as helper's high, discovered by the guy who created Big Brothers Big Sisters, Alan Lukes. Um, and helper's high can sometimes last a couple of days. So these are wildly different, but usually it's about an hour and a half. But Teresa discovered that the heightened creativity will outlast flow by a day, maybe two. So huge, huge huge impact on high performance. Now, there is a last sort of set of skills. There's actually— that high performance triangle should probably be a high performance square because the last set of skills that show up in all our studies of 21st century skills are cooperation, collaboration, all those social skills. And here, flow also gives us a huge leg up.

Why?

Same neural chemicals. All of the neurochemicals that show and flow do double duty as social bonding chemicals. So Rutgers scientist Helen Fisher has discovered that norepinephrine and dopamine underpin romantic love. So literally, when we are falling in love, that incredible sensation, it's norepinephrine and dopamine. And just by the way, to put things in context, right, falling in love has got to rank pretty damn high on the most pleasurable experiences you can have here on Earth, right? There are volumes of poetry and literature and music and everything else about this experience. It's so powerful. And yet it's only 2 neurochemicals and flow is 5. Just to give you an idea of how potent a state we're talking about. Endorphins, right? These pain-relieving drugs, they also underpin maternal bonding. So the bond between mother and infant, the bond between father and infant and an adult It's the bonds between friends. Serotonin, it is a pro-social chemical. It makes people calmer in social situations. Anandamide makes people more open to others and openness to experience and their ideas and other people. Oxytocin is the so-called cuddle chemical or trust chemical, though I have to tell you it is neither because oxytocin not only will give you trust and love, it will also give you in-group tribalism. And white supremacy is a byproduct of oxytocin, those sorts of things. So good and bad at once. And interesting, these social bonding chemicals. So ropes courses, everybody who's ever, you know, worked for a corporation has probably gone to an employee offsite team building where there's a ropes course. What's a ropes course all about? For reasons we'll get to later on, ropes courses are flow triggers and they're trying to trigger flow because they want these social bonding chemicals. Because if you can put a whole team together in flow with these social bonding chemicals flowing through their brain, you can essentially shortcut the friendship building process. You can shortcut your way to trust and cooperation and collaboration using this chemistry. All right, this concludes our second session. We've gone Maslow through Chick Set Me High. We have taken high performance from Nietzsche up through Maslow into chicks sent me high. We have gone from mythology and mysticism to psychology, biology, neurobiology finally. And what we've started to see is that some very, very powerful and familiar mystical experiences If you're on any kind of spiritual path, you've probably had that experience of time vanishing. You've probably had that experience of self disappearing or getting really quiet in meditation. So now you have some idea of where it's coming from. You understand the science of where it's coming from. Later on, we're going to find out how to use that science for our benefit. But now at least some of the mystery has been decoded a little bit and is hopefully starting to make a little more more sense.

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