The Body Does Not Keep the Score

Okay. Welcome everybody to the Flow Research Collective Radio. I am Dr. Michael Mannino. I'm the Chief Science Officer of Flow Research Collective, and today we're joined by Steven Kotler, Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective and distinguished research fellow at Florida Atlantic University's Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences. Steven is one of the world's leading voices on flow, peak performance, the science of human potential. He is the author of multiple bestselling books on performance, creativity, and altered states. Including The Rise of Superman, Stealing Fire, The Art of Impossible, and most recently, We Are as Gods. His work has helped bring the science of flow out of the lab and into the lives of athletes, artists, entrepreneurs, leaders, and everyday people trying to perform their best. We're also joined by Dr. Glenn Fox, a neuroscientist at University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business and one of the world's leading researchers on gratitude, Flow, and High Performance. Glenn directs the Foundwell Initiative, which examines entrepreneurial mindset in founders and business leaders, and serves as a principal investigator at USC's SMART VR Center. Before joining Marshall, Glenn led USC's Performance Science Institute, working with the US Marine Corps, Army Research Laboratories, the Seattle Seahawks, Olympic athletes, and Fortune 500 companies on the science of mindset under pressure. He is also the Chief Science Officer of the C4 Foundation, which supports Navy SEAL families. So Glenn has been a key collaborator of ours at Flow Research Collective for years. His research on gratitude and its relationship to flow states and performance has shaped a lot of how we think about performance, resilience, and the emotional architecture of optimal experience. And finally, we have another person on this paper that we're gonna be discussing today. Um, although he's not with us today, we also wanna acknowledge Carl Friston. He's the fourth author on this paper we'll be discussing. Karl's among the most influential neuroscientists of the last several decades. He's pioneered statistical parametric mapping, or SPM, which transformed the analysis of brain imaging data and helped define modern human neuroimaging. His broader work on the free energy principle, which we'll be discussing today, active inference, and predictive processing has had an enormous influence on neuroscience, psychiatry, artificial intelligence and our understanding of how the human— how brains model the world. So today we're here to talk about a paper that the four of us recently published in Frontiers of System Neuroscience as an opinion piece titled "The Body Does Not Keep the Score: Trauma Predictive Coding and the Restoration of Metastability." But before we get into the science and the conversation, I think it's worth noticing the reaction to the paper because that reaction is part of this story. So this was not a large clinical trial. It was not a popular book. It was an opinion article in a systems neuroscience journal with a good impact factor. And yet we— and yet almost immediately it seemed to move beyond the usual academic audience, which is very unusual and interesting. The Frontiers page is now showing more than 78,000 views, 78,318 to be exact. Which is a lot of attention for a theoretical neuroscience paper, and it's one of the top 1 to 2% of all papers published in that journal. And I think the reason is obvious: the title presses directly on one of the most powerful phrases in contemporary trauma psychology and neuroscience, "The body keeps the score." So our paper says maybe that metaphor helped people understand something real, but maybe it also seriously misled us and got the mechanism wrong. The body is absolutely, we argue in the paper, involved in trauma. People feel trauma in their breath, in their posture, their heart rate, their heart rate variability, and so on. But the body's not keeping a literal score like a ledger, right? Trauma's not stored in the fascia like a file. The nervous system is predicting, it's bracing, it's interpreting sensory information, and sometimes getting stuck. That distinction matters. So Stephen, let's begin with you. It's a very provocative title, provocative by design because the book is The Body Does Not Keep the Score. What were we trying to challenge with that title? And can you start us off? Because this paper and this research was really your brainchild. So give us a little bit of the narrative of why you were thinking this and how this paper originated in your mind.

It started when I looked at van der Kolk's book and it started with Evelyn, he basically says that— I'm going to get the numbers wrong, so I'm not going to try to put a number on it— but a very large portion of traumatic incidents, of high-stress incidents, lead to trauma and PTSD. And when I, when I first was reading it, it always bothered me. And I started actually looking at evolutionary models. If he was right, a lot— like, would the species thrive? And I think I got the math wrong. For sure. I'm not like— it's not in the paper. I think you got the math wrong. But everything I looked at said, wow, this, this won't work. Like, the species will go extinct if this is how we process stress. The species won't, won't, won't exist. And that, it just caught my attention, and it was sort of percolating. We did a podcast then. We did a podcast with George Bonanno. George is the world's leading expert on resilience, and he's done the largest studies of trauma anything he's ever done, including the 9/11 study. So, 9/11 happened and New York gave out billions of dollars for trauma and George was put in charge of the money. He was put in charge of the treatment in New York and he discovered that the vast majority of the time— there's actually a meta-analysis, so I'll give you the meta-analysis number. About 66% of the time when something bad happens, the body naturally bounces back. We just there's no lasting trauma. There's a period of grief and mourning, as we all know, and then you're back to normal. And that's the vast majority of cases. And then we have George on the podcast, and I asked him. He said, wow, yeah, like Vanderpool's conclusions don't make any sense to me. He took the data from my sexual trauma story and literally told an invert story. It's not what, what, you know, it's not what Bonanno saw in the data. I don't want to, you know, you can interpret that a lot of different ways, so you gotta keep some space there, but it was very different from what Nana had seen. It was very different from what I— like, I saw the same thing he had seen. And I was also wondering about this. This is a flow question in a weird way, because action sport athletes, one of the populations I study a lot, put themselves into nearly high-stress, nearly traumatic situations daily, multiple times a day. And there's a joke in the action sports community, which is, everybody else calls it trauma, we call it Monday. And if that joke is real, something was wrong with van der Kolk's model. That's where it all started for me. Then, concurrently, we were working on flow and we had been working on flow and PTSD now for 5, 6 years. And it seemed that first we knew that there was a choice in high-stress situations. A lot of times you go towards flow, a lot of times you'd go towards trauma. So why was that the case? What was going on there? Led to our first few seconds of flow paper. And it noted that there are two pathways in the brain. One goes towards flow, one goes towards trauma. And there was a lever in between based on agency and how much control we felt over the challenging situation. That's backed up by a lot of stuff Glenn sees in his work, by the way. But we were looking at that and we started to realize that flow overrode trauma for a very specific reason. It restores metastability, which is dynamic flexibility in the brain. We'll go into more detail later. But trauma tends to lock the brain up. It freezes it. And what you see is sort of networks coalesce and what you get is like the hippocampus and the amygdala. So memory and fear just keep firing, but the brain gets like locked into that network and it can't express its normal range of behaviors and flow overrides it. So suddenly there's problems with VanderKolk's stuff and there was this work on how flow overrides it. And that led to the realization that, oh, wait a minute, the mechanism is totally backwards in what he's talking about. And the third, the final thing, the last thing I'll say here is the biggest problem, and this is really what I was reacting to when I came up with the title and when I started the paper. I've been working with clients, training people for the past decade, 5 years, and they are in this like ridiculous, I call it the cult of trauma. They lead conversations with their traumatic experiences. That it's become a badge of honor. I've seen it hijack like training rooms. I have a rule when I train now, you can't like share your drama stories, it's inappropriate. And all of these, all this entire cult of trauma was built on this idea that van der Pol, he didn't say it, but he didn't not say it. And he certainly pointed in this direction that trauma was this incurable thing in your body and you had to unearth this secret buried memory somehow to release it, and none of that matched the data. In fact, what I was seeing in clients, in humans, is that it was actually destroying lives and doing a tremendous amount of damage. And that was where I really reacted. So it was less his book and more, wow, the public reaction to that metaphor. They've misinterpreted it.

Yes.

And they've taken it really far and it doesn't hold up. And I think it's standing in the way of really great healing. And really good healing methodologies. And if you rewrite the story, the science, which is what we did, you start to understand, oh, that's why all these things work, that's why these things don't work, and here's a great hopeful path forward. And I'll just stop there because I packed so much stuff into that answer.

So we'll get into the mechanism, and Glenn, I want to ask you a question too, but we'll get into the mechanism a little bit later.

Why—

it was, by the way, on the Cult of Trauma Just want to point out in these trainings that we always see, might be good to flip that and just ask them, hey, how did flow help you, or has flow helped you overcome your trauma? Then they can tell a personal story about not starting with the trauma, but starting with how flow is. And that's, that's great data collection.

Problem I have found is I see what you're saying, but when one person does it, everybody starts to do it. It's like people want to one-up each other with their terrible shitty narrative. And the real issue, as you know, and I might as I'll just go here is flow research is a couple of— if you want to, if you're interested in peak performance, there's a couple of foundational rules, one of which is you better have an internal locus of control. If you have a victim mindset, if you think trauma's happened to you and you've adopted this victim mindset, that's an external locus of control. You've given up power, you've given up agency, and the brain gives up creating the energy required for peak performance. It can no longer learn from its mistakes. It will no longer drop you into flow. So if you're coming to train with me because you want to train up flow, if you have that victim mindset, there's literally nothing I can do for you.

Yes. I was going to ask too, why— Glenn, we've talked a lot about this— why do you think people had this reaction? Why did the book become so popular? It's metaphorical, but it's— he, he acknowledges some neuroscience and even some systems neuroscience in the book, but Why do you think, besides the title, right? It was a great title.

It was a, it was, and the, the story of the book and its trajectory is actually fairly interesting, right? It was a fairly niche book and then spread through a lot of word of mouth. It wasn't a big, big release, right? It's kind of grown and taken on a life of its own. And I want to have just a brief editorial, just that the people who read this book, who have read this book and have found it to be beneficial. That have helped them look inward and process some things. Our, our article and our discussion today is no shade on that at all. What I found anecdotally is that the people who have read this book and have benefited by it have actually gone a step further from the book and actually interpreted it in actual more accurate way. We're not just arguing semantics in this article. We aren't saying he's right and here's some things. We're not saying— we're saying the core thesis of the book is damaging and risky and inaccurate. But what I've found anecdotally is that the people who have read the book and kind of worked with it actually don't use the book's actual specifics. This is kind of an interesting pop psychology phenomenon where I actually think the the work that people have done when they say, "Oh, I've gotten better," it's actually been that they've reframed, they've reconstructed, they've actually had a bit of a cognitive reappraisal, which the book is explicitly against, which the book is explicitly dismissive of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is effective, can be, but is among our more useful tools. It's dismissive of Bonanno's approach of flexible adaptability. In how we handle emotions. And it's embracing of widely debunked theories of repressed memory and also commits a number of logical fallacies in terms of the approach to duality, right? That our paper, people say, oh, this is enhancing duality. And we're not, the paper actually is less dualistic than the book. The book is the dualistic one, right? The book is literally the mind and the body are separate. Literally, and it's more than a metaphor, and the book is signing on to a lot of really flim-flammy beliefs and thesis. And so we're not taking shade from the people who've benefited. In fact, I might say, if you've benefited from the book, what I would say is the book doesn't deserve you. You've done better than the book has set you up to do, and you should be admired for the courage for anybody who looks at their trauma and says, nah, you know, 'F this, I'm doing something about this,' right? That's courage. That's what the book doesn't deserve. The book is saying this is going to live in your gut somehow, and it's going to come up and get you some way, and you might even remember it, and it'll go up. And those are the claims that are really damaging.

And the other thing— hold on, one other thing.

I just— thank you, thank you.

No, no, no, you're totally right. But the other thing that I got to point out is his original study wasn't very big. That was one of the other things that sort of bugged me is if you looked at the dominant trauma narratives, Van der Pol's study wasn't very big. And what's his name up in Canada? Gabor Maté, who is another voice here, saying very different things and coming from a different place. But if you look at Gabor Maté's study, there were 100 people in it. They've extrapolated everybody from 100 people and VanderPolk's wasn't a whole lot bigger if I remember correct. So, that was the other thing that sort of caught me is, wow, these are really big claims for single studies. You know what I mean? That didn't feel kosher to me.

Good.

Yeah.

No, interrupt. Yeah. Just the methodology behind the book is not super sound in general. A lot of the citations of survivors of, quote, studies of survivors, you look at the citation, it's a personal conversation. It's a lot of things that it's puzzling. I find the book really hard to read. I find it a little triggering, to be honest. I find that the tone of the book and the stories in it, I find really hard to get through, but because of our paper, I had to read it like 2 or 3 times. Well, that's absolutely fine. I'm doing some work on that myself, but I hope people embrace the narrative that we're telling.

You have trauma from the body keeps the score.

It's gonna live in there. Who knows how it's gonna manifest?

That's the part. There's, it's very anecdotal data and we have from our opinion, the new kind of false memory, Glenn. Hypothesis. So Glenn, let's unpack that a little bit more what you were saying.

Yeah.

So from the perspective of affective neuroscience, what do you think it actually means for an emotion to be embodied? Because we don't discount embodied cognition. We are talking about mechanism in the central nervous system. But we don't discount. In fact, we've done research on embodied cognition, especially relates to flow and peak performance. But when someone says, I feel trauma in the body, how should we understand that without like dismissing the truth of their experience? So I'm asking from a felt perspective and from a scientific perspective.

Two things. First, Stephen said something so great and inspiring when he said that the take of our perspective here is a much more optimistic perspective. Than presented by the book because it means we have tools to manage these things and to deal with them. So when we might say, I feel trauma in the body, it's a perfectly accurate thing to say. And that's because the brain is, go figure, part of the body. And the role of the brain is to serve the body and to protect the body and to guide it into resource-rich environments and avoid dangerous environments. I'm simplifying considerably.

A lot of people are saying that on social media as well. The brain is part of the body.

Exactly. And so, when we say feel it in the body, it's completely accurate. And, the thing is that the things we feel influence the way we think, right? And vice versa, right? So, it's a two-way street. So, the messaging of the paper, and again, what I like is our paper is entirely theoretical and we're not saying this is how it is, it's saying here's a line of inquiry that fits this set of facts a little better. Here's a new hypothesis. That's the paper. It's a new hypothesis. So when people say that, it means that as we see in the paper, that it's, it's the brain is doing a little extra pattern matching that maybe it's suboptimally designed to do. What it, it's designed to find threat and make coincidences, right? And find coincidences. And so feeling something in the body means that you're associating, that you're constructing an emotion that you have layers of emotion and feeling that are blending together and that your job, you know, or your job or the conscious awareness of these feelings is influenced by changes in the body. That's how emotion— that's a rough overview of how emotion works. But the idea that it's stored outside of these loops is not true.

And I was thinking about this goes wrong. So I've got a slightly chewed up MCL right now. Ski season's over, my MCL is a little chewed up. This is not unusual after ski season. There's some treatment done on it and it's healing, but there's a lot of sensation in the knee as it's healing. And what's amazing, because this was a recent trauma, right? So every twinge in my knee, my brain immediately interprets as, oh, the knee is hurt, right? So the knee is hurt, the knee is hurt. And the funniest The funniest thing about it is I was like, finally I was looking at all the symptoms, I was like, am I healing or not? And I threw them all into ChatGPT and I was like, what's going on? And it was like, these are signs of healing. Like you're assigning it, you're calling it pain and you're calling it discomfort and you're actually healing. And the minute I reversed it, the knee pain went away. And I was laughing. I was like, okay, we wrote this. This is exactly, you know, this is, the somatic marker hypothesis to a T, right? The pain is localized in my knee, so my brain now interprets every sensation from my knee as pain and trauma rather than what it was, which was the exact opposite. No, you're actually healing.

Exactly. Yeah. And that's how it works, right? I mean, we're coincidence detectors.

Talk a little bit more about the somatic marker hypothesis. Antonio Damasio was your advisor and the paper went through a couple of revisions in under review, right? And, and one of the reviewers pointed out that we should discuss that a little bit more, especially like the convergence and divergence zones. So talk a little bit about why that's necessary.

Should not I learned writing this paper erogenous zones and like Freud misinterpreted.

I didn't like you really good.

This is really insider Antonio Damasio baseball.

Antonio will not like it. Right?

I know at all. At all.

I don't know how to follow that. So, all right, so high levels.

By the way, there's a book written by Wayne Dyer a long time ago called Your Erroneous Zones, and it was a big self-help book.

Did you just bring Wayne Dyer into the Flow Radio? Like, I may have to fire you for this.

Well, or this could be another paper talking about the neurodynamics of self-help. Okay. Go ahead and go on. Maybe.

All right. Let me build on that. Go back. So somatic marker, somatic marker, it refers to a conclusion made by Antonio and a host of collaborators over about a decade or more worth of research where Antonio's background and Antonio and Hannah Damasio, both mentors of mine. Were working neurology clinics and seeing patients who were cognitively intact. Their memory was fine. Their perceptions were fine.

Their—

they showed quote, no, very few neurological issues, right? But their lives are falling apart after some sort of brain injury. And it doesn't make sense through the, through a lot of the normal channels to evaluate someone's neurological condition. If their brain and all the tests are fine, why is their life falling apart, right? It shouldn't— what, what's missing? So what they wanted is to develop maybe a diagnostic theory or some reasoning to explain what happened to the brain and why these people's lives were falling apart. And what was happening is that these people's lives were falling apart due to problems with their decision-making. These people were making poor decisions. They had what we call myopia for the future. I mean, they're looking at just what's right in front of them and how can I, how can I maximize, you know, pleasure pleasure or reward at the— in the most near-term possible. Okay? So what they found through a series of experiments was that what's missing was the somatic signal, the signal of the body as it's capable of influencing our decisions. What they found was if you break the link between our bodies and our decision-making processes, decision-making breaks. We need emotion and we need feeling to inform decisions. And we need rational thought. Go figure, rational thought. Pretty— I'm a big fan of it. They get to work together.

That neurobiologically, that's some loss of connectivity between, just to get into the neuroscience, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, because those are highly connected.

It's, it's the main area of damage that causes to, causes damage to decision-making is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. So it's the part of the brain that sits, you know, right above your nose, right above your eyeballs, basically. And people with damage to this part of the brain can show severe decision-making dysfunction. And this is a part of the brain connected kind of to everywhere, of course. So you have the arcuate fasciculus.

So let me, let me put some numbers on it for people so you can understand. One of the ways the Damasios did this was the very famous Iowa Gambler's Task. And you are all familiar with this. This is this study where there's 4 decks of cards. 2 of them are rigged, 2 are normal. Everybody's given a little bit of money and it's a payout game. You flip a card over and either You get money or you lose money. And 2 of the decks are stacked, as I said. They're really big rewards, but they're really big losses. And the other 2 decks are smaller rewards and smaller losses. And what happens with most people is you take the test and about 20 cards in, you get a bad gut feeling and you start avoiding the rigged decks and you start taking cards from the beneficial decks. And usually like 40 to 60 cards in, you realize. Why? So the body sensation shows up first and then the consciousness comes later. If you have damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, right, they don't notice. So they'll keep taking cards from the bad decks because they never get the somatic signal that something's rotten with those decks.

Exactly. And when you measure their stress responses after they make a risky decision, they don't show the typical arousal responses that you see in folks who are the healthy controls. So, what's missing is the emotion. The emotion is missing and the bad decisions, literally the missing of emotion. This is how it comes together. This is why the somatic marker hypothesis I find to actually be really profound for how we decide, how we think, how we reason, how we feel, how we create. That's what I think is actually quite a powerful interpretation of it.

It's very tough.

Can I ask you a question here that, first of all, It might be helpful if we differentiate top-down from bottom-up. Somatic markers are always bottom-up, correct? That was my question. But before you answer it, start with top-down, bottom-up, and then answer my question.

It's a harder question to answer. So let me think. Let me just try to describe this succinctly. So top-down refers to probably what most of us refer to like your cognitive reasoning. So when you're munching on an idea and it's is probably taking the form of a verbal stream of thought. So the kind of you thinking a process through in a kind of verbal sense of going, well, if I go here, then I go that. Think of planning a complicated day of logistics. You probably are narrating it and articulating your thoughts in your mind to say, okay, we'll go to the store, then I have to be here by then. And right. So you, this is, this would be kind of a top-down approach to things. And you might even— you can apply this to, I've got a big public speaking event, I'm nervous. You can use a top-down strategy to say, well, nerves are part of the process. I always get nervous and I usually do great. And I can reframe and reappraise and restate the purpose of what it is. That's what we would call a top-down, right?

Bottom line, King, pressure is a privilege.

Yeah, it's a great— exactly right. Reframe, reframe, right? And a bottom-up would mean what is our body's sort of state that's influencing our decision and our behavior. So if we are feeling, you know, say really, really warm, the temperature in our room is really hot or really cold, might change, will change how we perceive things, will change how we decide things, right? And there are studies, a very, here's a very basic, basic thing is that if you make people really, really thirsty and you give them a decision-making task, right? The salience of that thirst creates a bottom-up signal that changes how people may behave. And so these are top-down, bottom-up. So how do somatic markers and top-down, bottom-up— it's a big area, lots of unknowns in this region. But the idea is that if you're using top-down thought to change emotions, really hard to do, by the way, really, really hard to do. There's some controversy about how and the degrees. Don't worry about that. Just know that—

explains that, I think. So let's talk about that later.

Yeah, we should talk about that. That's not I really wish Carl were here for so many reasons. But anyway, so they can work together basically is all I'm saying is that the role of somatic markers is that you kind of have this bottom-up priming of different thoughts, feelings, and action patterns. And then you can have a top-down response to those where you're thinking and reappraising and that can change, can, not always, can change the emotion. And so it's a big cycle. It's hard to say where one stops and one begins.

Yeah, in the paper we talk about interoception a little bit because it matters here a lot. But the— so interoception is the— and that's what we relate the bottom-up part of that we're talking about now— is the sensation of things going on inside you versus external information coming in. So the— your, your how hot you are internally, your muscles pain, dry mouth, these things going on inside your head, thoughts, your inner awareness. And a lot of that comes through the vagus nerve because 80% of the fibers of the vagus nerve go from the body up rather than the top down, right? And so interoceptive sensitivity and accuracy is highly— higher interoceptive accuracy and sensitivity is correlated with better decision-making. One of the studies that we talk about quite a bit is the London Stock Trader, you know, study where the people, London Stock Traders, on the trading floor who have better interoceptive accuracy and sensitivity made better trading decisions. So that was great empirical evidence to back up the somatic marker hypothesis. Yeah.

It, it's when you start to notice it is when it starts to be really fun, right? That's when you can start to play, especially flow. I think flow states and interoception are really interesting, right? I think the signals that go down when you're in a flow state, hunger, I don't know about y'all, but if you're in a flow state, And the only thing that'll kind of pop me out is I realize like I'm shaking with hunger and I'm like, oh my gosh, I must have been so hungry. But I was so dialed in that—

I'm working on a line of Flow clothing that senses caloric burn and can tell you when you actually need to fuel up because it's one of the big— most athletes get hurt right as they come out of Flow. They're not yet completely out of the state. But what you're talking about, all those bodily needs that you've been suppressing, this is one of the big injury windows.

That makes so much sense. That makes so much sense. That's cool.

Two things. One is, so somebody published a commentary on our paper already, which is academically getting some traction here as well as we mentioned it.

Let me just point out, haters gonna hate.

Haters gonna hate, but look, and there was great articles written in Psychology Today by some professors and doctors, in SciPost. We also should mention we were written up, the article was written up, and Eric Dolan of the SciPost science communication. A lot of people loved what we, what we talked about and see the, the testability hypothesis that come from the paper. But just to talk about this Cartesian dualism in terms of Antonio Damasio's work, the, the first sentence of the abstract is, I want to read it. Although the authors explicitly attempt to avoid Cartesian dualism, the structure of the argument may inadvertently reinstate a contemporary functional dualism in which causal primacy remains centered within neural inference while the rest of the organism becomes secondary or just merely expressive. I hope our audience got that.

Big words.

I'm not sure I got that, but okay.

Yeah, we avoid Cartesian dualism, right? And we're talking about the top-down and the bottom-up. And we're doing that by the— Glenn, you mentioned our paper's a theoretical neuroscience paper. So we want to get into the mechanism of the theory. And when I say theoretical neuroscience paper, I don't mean just for our audience and for our listeners that it's theoretical in the test, in the sense of like not being testable and it's just a theory. And no, it's a, a well-grounded comprehensive explanation of empirical evidence that makes predictions. Describes how things are happening in the brain and explains. So that's what a theory is in theoretical neuroscience. And two of the biggest theories, we should just get into this now maybe, that we borrow from or use to explain some of this connection between flow and trauma as well is the free energy principle by Karl Friston, and then another theory called metastability, which we'll get into as well.

Michael, let me interrupt you for half a second just so to put some— I'm gonna let you go into it, but This is what Michael's talking about, the intersection of Karl's free energy principle and Scott Kelso's metastability. These two ideas have really been at the center of almost everything the Flow Research Collective has done over the past 3 years. We found a way in the first few seconds of flow actually to bring these theories together. These had not been really united theories beforehand. Nobody— they were both very dominant theories, both sort of emerged from the attempt to take complexity science, which had been in physics, and move it sort of into neuroscience.

Correct.

A number of breakthrough discoveries came out of it. Metastability was one, free energy principle was two. And Michael and I found a way about 5 years ago that we saw that they were complementary. We found a way to put them together. And that's what's really unlocked so much of the work that we've been doing these past 5 years.

Yeah. And we started with our paper in 2022, the first few seconds of flow. Where we're talking about metastability and we mentioned theoretical frameworks to try and explain flow and how the brain can go into flow or brain can go to trauma. And so I think, so what was the unique thing about this? It was trying to explain—

Why don't you just start with what both theories and then we'll go into what's unique.

Well, okay. Well, let me say, cuz I'm gonna lose the thought if someone—

Go ahead. Go ahead.

Sorry, my bad.

So the, what's unique about this I think is that for the first time we, applied this idea of neurodynamics. Both theories deal with neurodynamics to flow. And what I mean by neurodynamics, for, for our listeners, is that network science, right? Brain areas communicate with one another. They have a certain dynamics in time, and how that dynamics changes over multiple different scales, spatially, temporally— that's what computational neuroscience and dynamics really is. And now we know that a lot of the brain, or almost all of brain function and operation is explained by these ideas of neurodynamics and different theoretical frameworks. So let's get into free energy principle and metastability. And so there's a— yeah, one other thing I want to say before that actually is that we published a very— another recent paper, and you mentioned complexity science, looking at the different ways to measure that dynamics and those neural activity when people are in flow versus boredom versus frustration. And so there's a lot of convergence of other papers coming out now based on, I think, our work is that dynamics and metastability and free energy principle can really help explain how the brain drops into flow, right? And what a flow state is. So what is metastability? Metastability is this theory that was founded by my advisor as well, Scott Kelso, who founded the field of social neuroscience and coordination dynamics. And the idea is that it's highly correlated. The word metastability means that the brain is highly flexible. Right? It's cognitive, a high level of cognitive flexibility. So the brain, these dynamics and these networks of the brain can switch modes. They can talk to one another. They can use one and then come out and then use another one real quick. So it's this fast dynamic switching between how different brain areas talk to one another that creates this flexibility. And so one of the ideas is, so in other words, by the way, synchrony in the brain.

Is bad, right? When everything starts working together, you have an epileptic seizure or a heart attack. So metastability is adaptive flexibility. When the brain becomes really, really rigid, very— you get trauma, you get all these other things, but you also get physical symptoms.

And higher metastability, we just found—

metastability, by the way, won't give you a heart attack, but synchrony and heart rhythms will.

So you think about, like, a large swath of the brain get in sync, and that is bad, right? That is— that is— we need a little chaos in the brain. That's what metastability is really about. So different parts of the brain integrate with each other, but then simultaneously they segregate. And so what happens is there's a term that I want to throw out that we talk about in the paper called attractors. And so these are just stable states that we all enter into. So trauma might be a stable state, different personality traits, consciousness, these kinds of things might be attractor states, right? Where the brain finds that, finds that stability and locks in.

And by the way, it's an attractor state.

Flow, by the way, is an attractor state, and it's correlated with higher metastability. So what we found in other research is that higher metastability, higher adaptive flexibility, allows the brain to explore all of these states without getting locked into one. So it enhances the repertoire of possible brain states that are available, and when it does that, it can flexibly switch between these different networks, which is what needs to happen in flow. So that's metastability. And now the research is showing that higher flow states is higher dimensionality, higher metastability. And so now we argue that if trauma is an attractor state, a stable attractor state, that's one of the reasons why getting into flow and managing flow in your life can reorganize the brain and make it more flexible. Now, why— this leads into the free energy principle. This is the way I'm, by the way, interpreting our own paper. So why does that happen? Well, the free energy principle explains that. So what is the free energy principle of Karl Friston? So Karl Friston, it's now one of the most highly cited theoretical frameworks in neuroscience, and it's just based on the brain being a prediction engine, which we talk about quite a bit, right? So the brain predicts what sensory information is going to come in, and then there's an error associated with that. So sometimes the error is high and it doesn't get it right, and sometimes the error is low and it gets it right. That's called prediction error. What the brain wants to do is minimize that error, and it wants to minimize uncertainty about its predictions, its priors, its models, its assumptions that it has, and incoming sensory information. And so we think that metastability, giving a higher level of flexibility, allows the brain to reorganize itself, and flow can do this. And we'll explain why, to be able to unlock some of those priors and stable states that are traumatic and allow the brain to appropriately interpret incoming sensory information. How was that, gentlemen?

Good. Let me add one thing that we know from the dad on trauma.

I'm so glad you explained free energy principle. You did a great job. You did a really good job. I've always struggled with the name of it compared to free energy principle.

Free Free the glutens. Free the glutens.

Sorry.

Yeah. It comes from physics, actually. And that's what a lot of this dynamics is applying physics to.

Yeah. Yep. I interrupted you, Stephen. Yeah, go.

Yeah, I lost it. I lost it. It was gone.

Oh, shoot.

Sorry.

You wanted to add one thing.

You wanted to add one thing about trauma and its relationship to flow. And we think, we postulated in our 2022 paper, maybe this will jar your memory, that psychedelics also kind of work this way as well. They share some overlap with flow.

With flow states, but they restore metastability. Again, it's the same, it's the same mechanism, right?

Yes, correct.

In fact, a lot of the work, some of the work that we're moving into right now in FRC with trauma, we're using flow for trauma, but we're also looking at combinatorial therapies to combine flow and psychedelics. And this has been sort of a longtime dream of myself and Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Medicine. This goes back to the early '90s and conversations we had back then about the best way forward with trauma. Now, finally, because legislation has changed and there's priors, we can— we're moving forward on that work. So that's really exciting and points to some really new sort of new possibilities for healing.

Yeah. And in terms of prediction, the brain gets locked into these really nasty negative predictions, which—

this is— yeah. So this is what I wanted to say. This is back to the bottom-up, top-down thing. What happens with trauma, one of the things that happens with trauma is, and this was my knee example, we overweight. So memories in the predictive coding framework, experiences, life is weighed, right? Traumatic experiences weigh a lot, right? So they have greater influence over bottom-up predictions, right? So experiences that weigh a lot will influence bottom-up predictions, experiences. And one of the things that happens with trauma is those bottom-up weights, those traumatic priors start influencing everything, right? The trauma basically alters the precision weighting of certain memories. And so they become an attractor, right? As Michael talked What about— system always gets attracted to it. And so what the system really needs to do is to reweigh those, those bottom-up priors. Right. And that, that's one of the things flow helps us do.

Right.

And we've shown that flow increases metastability, so it makes the brain more flexible. Why? Because flow— a lot of different reasons, but one is it expands that possibility space that the brain can enter into. So it relaxes the priors. And this is very similar to psychedelics and Carl Friston and Carhart-Harris. They have this Rebus theory, the relaxed beliefs under psychedelics.

And by the way, if you're, if you're looking at this on brain imaging, right, if you're looking at trauma, you see very specific sort of networks firing again and again. Once you move to flow, it's a— because it's a task-specific state. So it's not the full brain being connected. It's everything that's sort of associated with the text. You see all kinds of crazy connectivity. Inside that bound search space. So instead of just like these two networks cycling, you see the brain going all over the place on psychedelics. That space widens out and it's the whole brain. The connections are all over the place. But that's literally what it looks like. And it's what it looks like when you look at EEG data, which is literally brainwaves over time. Right. That's what you're— that's what's being measured, changes in brainwaves over time.

Yeah. And another thing, another line of evidence is about cognitive control. So, and Glenn, maybe you could speak to this a little bit too, but we argued in our 2022 paper that flow is a little bit of a higher level of cognitive control. It's a difficult to reach state, right? Yeah. You have to do all these, get these internal conditions right and the external conditions right. And that's what we train for. And when you get those right, it goes from first gear all the way up to sixth gear is flow. Cognitive control is make goal-directed under pressure, better decision-making, less distraction, these kinds of things. And it's been shown that people with PTSD have lower levels of cognitive control. And also when you retrain them in cognitive control exercises to increase this and that way of cognitive control, they have lower symptoms of PTSD. So this also is some research out there that it's alignment with these, these theoretical frameworks.

Yeah, I would say kind of two lines of thought, just reacting to this. First of all, I think Our paper has a potential to explain why a lot of these, quote, I'm gonna use big air quotes, alternative treatments work better. And so pardon me for the air quotes, but I'm talking about art therapy, you know, all the different things that people do, breathwork, yoga, why these things kind of have a resetting belief. And flow, we think, is one of the states that may accelerate that recovery. So, we at the C4 Foundation, we have a ranch. We got to get you all up to the ranch. We'll do our next podcast up there, 560 acres. You could see the Mojave Desert to the Pacific Ocean. We bring up— we've got about 1,000 people from the Naval Special Warfare community come up to the ranch. They go through our programs. And really, our programs are like basically shut up and go outside. That's the basic premise of our programs, but they have— we do art, we do sessions, and then we do— and we don't do any therapy at the ranch, but we do a lot of social support. We do group stuff.

And art is super flowy. All you're doing is dropping people into flow.

It's flow. It's flow. I mean, and like, to me, it just— I, I know I'm— I— it's circular, but it's so intuitive to me, just myself, that I, I think that we could start to coin the term flow deficit. Disorder because I think I start to get really gummed up and really bad when I have an art studio in the garage that has every tool I could want. Well, almost, but, and I can go out there and build something and really, really wipe out a lot of rumination. Right. And it can be challenging to get into this state, but I'm just intuiting that a lot of these mechanisms and even in the book, which we're kind of debunking in many ways, the book does in spite of itself have a lot of anecdotes that actually support our approach where he said, oh, this person had a great time doing yoga and combining it with some therapy and doing with these things and saw this considerable improvement. And, we commend that and we think, oh, no, this makes sense. It's not this person working on hidden influences outside of their brain's ability, but it's that flow is resetting priors that you're seeing resources. One of the things about flow is you're kind of going, oh, I actually have enough resources to make this happen. I'm not just going to stop at the first obstacle, right? That you're like, ooh, I'm a little challenged. That's it. If it's not challenging, it's not flow. And finding those resources, I think, can work at a literal sense of if you're doing surfing and you're like, oh, I've got enough waves to surf, or I've got enough energy for the next wave. But they're also metaphorical resources to say, oh, I kind of have what I need to get better. Oh, there's a time I can feel good. And sometimes it's like with your knee healing, we'll use an example. It's like the first few walks or jogs or maybe the first few runs, you're going to get flow, your knee is going to be okay. You get to the bottom, you're like, yeah, you know, you're going to get reward from relief.

Yeah, this was the thing, you put this into the paper, this was your line. And I like you, and it really like it dawned on me, which is you're basically like in flow because you're constantly stressing yourself and challenging yourself. You're telling the brain, hey, check this out, look, it's stress without trauma. And look, it's stress that leads to pleasure. So not all stressful situations lead to bad outcomes. And you can imagine if you have PTSD and every car backfiring, every— your startle response is jacked up to 11, that when you're reproving to yourself basically that it's okay, that you can handle stress.

Yeah, flow teaches your brain how to approach rather than avoid. And Stephen, your line is so great, I'll repeat it again. Then in The Art of Impossible, flow starts when you say yes to the fight. And so that neurobiologically explains why it sort of reorganizes the brain to teach your brain that this is okay, I got this, I can handle challenge, I can handle this stress, the good kind of stress. And Glenn, I want to ask you a question real quick. So that can lead to healing of PTSD. So there's a lot of research about flow and burnout and flow proneness. Also flow proneness being highly correlated with lower cardiovascular disease, um, anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder. That paper was amazing. It cited Flow Research Collective, our training there.

But post-traumatic growth, you hold on one sec, Michael. I want to add one data point to it because it was in our data and we never talk about it, but it's really clear. So when we were, when we were running Zero to Dangerous, our big 8-week Flow Training, we were measuring everything and we would see consistently for people who completed the program roughly a 74% boost in the amount of flow, I'm in flow, that they're spending. So, very trainable. We figured that out. But concurrently, there was a 41% reduction in anxiety. So, it wasn't just that one thing went up, it was that flow went way up and anxiety went way down. And by the way, 40% boost in motivation. Though you like that, you know, this is, this is sort of trauma being overwritten in real time. If you're seeing anxiety drop by 40%, that's a fairly substantial drop for 8 weeks. Like, if you had a trauma therapy program that could reduce anxiety by 40% in 8 weeks, that's a very successful trauma therapy program. And we weren't trying to do that. We were literally trying to train knowledge workers in flow so they could do better at work, which is stressful and overwhelming.

And leading to burnout and all these things. Yeah. So flow helps with PTSD, but it also can lead to post-traumatic growth or PTG. We, we've done some work on that and we've talked about that as well. Glenn, can you talk a little bit more about post-traumatic growth and, and how that relates to some of your work on gratitude and resilience?

Yeah. So I mean, it, it goes a little back to George Bonanno, right? And all the number of stories and research studies, he found that people, when they make meaning out of things, that's when you really get a lot of growth. When you contextualize, you integrate, you change how you feel, you engage with it, right? So what we look at, I'm building off of a model in my research right now. I'm testing it called the biopsychosocial model. I'm sorry for the long term, but this was— I still think it's a Chili Peppers song from like the '90s. That does sound like the biopsychosocial sex magic.

Sexually, right? Yeah.

Their 1995 album.

Uplift Bofo Party Plan.

Yeah, I think that's, that's right. I'll call Anthony Kiedis and Flea. Flea's a USC grad, by the way. But, um, I digress. But we are, so the biopsychosocial model is a way of quantifying changes in the body that occur when we feel either challenged or threatened, right? So a continuum. So this is an extension of so many stress theories that say, well, maybe stress itself isn't bad, right? Maybe it's how we process the stress that is what either creates the flow response or the toxic response, right? Or whatever, and in between, right? And so, the biopsychosocial model is a layer on these previous stress theories where for any given stressor, we can enter into a state of challenge or threat physiologically, not even talking cognitively at this point, I'm talking physiologically.

Physiologically.

Because if you'll notice, when you feel stressed, when you feel stress and you might feel that stress triggers a dread response and you're like, "Oh, I've got to do what?" So, we study public speaking because it's like the universal fear. And so, it might be— so, we put people, we bring in the lab and we're like, "You're going to give a talk to an investor." We do this with entrepreneurs. You're going to meet an investor. We have an investor. We have a venture capital We have a scout that works with us. The person comes in, they've got to pitch to the scout. And for some people, they're like, "I got to do what now?" And they freeze up. Their heart rate goes up though, right? Heart rate goes up. Now, if they go, "I get to meet an investor today. Holy cow, what happens?" Their heart rate goes up, right? So, your heart rate, increased heart rate is a pretty useless signal for determining how activated and someone's readiness for a challenge., right? So, what you have to look at, and this is what Jim Blascovich has done, is what I'm trying to do in my study, still TBD. What you have to look at is how much blood the heart is pumping. So, through something called cardiac impedance. And so, it turns out that if you feel excited about a challenge, if you feel challenged and excited by a stressor, the amount of blood your heart is pumping goes up, right? And conversely, if you're feeling dread and you want to shrink up, your heart rate still goes up as it does in both cases, but you don't pump very much blood in your heart. So what we're doing is we're measuring the— first of all, how does— how do these dynamics work?

Are you saying that anxiety could be blood volume in the heart?

Yeah, maybe. I don't know. Am I saying that? You saying that? That's why it's an extension. It's a logical extension.

But absolutely, talk about not— talk about like anti-Cartesian duality, right?

Like 100%, 100%. I think it's just like the, the, all our research on vagal tone and my research on gratitude and vagal tone, which I need to publish. And it's like wild how vagal tone predicts not how grateful somebody is, but how varied they are in their gratitude responses. Think about, think about that because it's showing that the people with the better regulatory systems for emotion are not just going more, more, more, more, more gratitude. They're going, "Well, that's a little bit here. Oh, that's a good one. Oh, this is a medium." And, they have high-resolution approach to things. Sorry, I just dumped this new—

No, time out for one second because you had a totally tangential thought that has nothing to do with anything and we're probably going to have to cut it out of the podcast. But, Michael was talking earlier this week a lot about all the new research coming out showing if you work with AI for too long, it erodes sympathy, right? Your ability to feel sympathy.

I haven't seen that.

Empathy and prosocial empathy.

And so what I was wondering was, would vagal tone— those with higher vagal tone maybe have less sensitivity to the AI, right? It will erode less intrinsic motivation and less sympathy. This is a very testable, weird, weird thing. And Michael, I've always asked, with the vagus nerve? Like, if I go drinking at the Hard Rock in Vegas, does that impact my vagus nerve?

If you become a vagabond?

No.

If you wander around Vegas and like your vagal nerve wanders around your body, which is why it's called the vagal nerve. Yes. I think that was—

wait a minute.

If I have a binge in Vegas, a random walk, a random walk, random walk.

Okay. By the way, by the way, now, now that you did that, I have to also, dude, what if we looked at how AI performs on the Iowa Gambling Task? Just as a side note. Sorry.

Really wild. You're making a really interesting argument about AI and agency and semantics. Oh, that's interesting. I think there's a bunch of stuff we should do here.

Okay.

So there's like 4 studies that came out of this conversation so far. So my work here is done.

That's the whole— we get, we get 3 neuroscientists together and you're going to come up with new research.

You know, it's, it's the greatest thing. Oxytocin. Paul Zak. Paul Zak said, I hate meeting scientists because it either means I'm gonna make an enemy or I have to do research.

That's exactly great. That's perfect. So I want to get a little bit more into the flow trauma connection, right? And we talked a little bit about the mechanisms. That's what we're writing about. In the paper, mechanism, not metaphor. And how, I guess Stephen, this is more for you about using flow to override burnout and burnout leading to trauma as well and helping with PTSD. How do we train for that? What are some specific, there's a lot of different—

Yeah, so I will—

And wait, wait, wait, one more thing. How do we test, how do we test that from this paper that flow restores metastability? And that trauma has lower metastability. And then if you learn flow and you get into flow, what is it going to look like? How long? What are all these parameters?

Yeah, let me— so I'm going to park the second one. Let's do the practical one first. I don't want to start with trauma. I want to start with burnout because we, we at the Flow Research Collective and have pretty— starting to accumulate data, enough data on this to actually start to do something with it. But there's something in flow research that we've been calling the primary flow activity, right? This is whatever you've basically done since you were a little kid that completely absorbs your attention, right? For Glenn, it's going out into the garage and working with tools or machines and whatnot. For me, it's either skiing or writing. For Michael, I know playing the guitar is one of your activities. There's a bunch of physical activities, ping pong. We can sort of go on. My wife, it's hiking the dogs in the backcountry. Everybody's got whatever this is. Some people, whether it's coding computers or dancing salsa or gardening or reading or playing with their kids, they're incredibly varied. But if you're burned out— I also think this is true for trauma, but trauma, like people who have suffered trauma, if there's body stuff going on and your primary flow activity is physical, this is where you're going to have to modify But what we found is for burnout, if you spend 2 to 4 hours a week in your primary flow activity and you get 7, 8 hours of sleep, so start sleeping at night and get 2 to 4 hours of your primary flow activity, that seems to be enough to start waking the system back up, starting overriding burnout. It's definitely the early stages of overriding burnout. Trauma, how far it can go. I, you know, there may be more, way more needed. This— and, and if you're dealing with clinical burnout, by the way, rather than just like, I'm burned out— clinical burnout is a very distinct thing— then I think you're going to need sort of more flow therapy than, than just, you know, what I'm recommending. But that's like always, like, wherever I start with people, that's always where I start. That seems to be what the data shows again and again and again. So what's cool about this, and I always say this, and like, this is one of the things that I is interesting, and this is one of the things that I do think may sort of inadvertently— doesn't show up in van der Polk's work, but it shows up in like the overwhelmingly popular the book became and the reaction, which is that it seems like incidents of trauma are going up across the board and burnout and things, right? Like all the negative mental health stuff. And one of, I think, the reasons is I mean, it used to be the biggest blocker in primary flow activity was adulthood. I'd like you— as you grow up, you're like, I'm gonna put away childish things. So the surfboard goes away and the skateboard goes away and the guitar goes away. And it's the single worst thing you could do for your mental health and your well-being. But here's the thing that I can't tell you, but I think this is one of the reasons institutional trauma and all that stuff has gone up, is as you get farther and farther away from your primary flow activity, I think your incidence of trauma will go up.

Yes.

Right? When your body is faced with a stressor and you're not getting into flow super regularly, as Glenn sort of pointed out, I think you overreact to it. So, I think a lack of flow makes you more prone to trauma. And flow proneness, because we know flow proneness is neuroprotective against trauma, anxiety, depression, all these I'm just arguing for the opposite, that a lack of flow leads there. So in terms of how we test it, this is—

sorry, sorry, I didn't interrupt.

No, no, go ahead.

No, no, Glenn, I like this. I think I like this idea of flow deficit disorder. That's interesting. I don't—

I guess, yeah, speaking to right, what you're right, we're talking about the same thing, Glenn, right?

Exactly, you're talking about the same thing. So exactly, that's right. So that's controversial because how to classify, what are the criteria, you know, like these kinds of things. Because it's not only about peak performance, it's about meaning and purpose and well-being and life satisfaction and all these things.

But you could literally take a group of Navy SEALs about to deploy, you could measure the amount of flow in their life and see who comes back. But like, it's not a— it's good, you know, it's— you're— there are a lot of variables. They're going to all have to be exposed to the same action. Like, there's a lot of like ways that can go wonky, but that's one way to look at it. A lot of the work that we're now doing, trauma and recovery and all that stuff, is exactly how I'd want to measure it. So, first of all, if I'm measuring metastability, the complexity science framework that we— for measuring flow, there are 12 new neural metrics for neural— new measures of brain dynamics and metastability in there. So, one, This is one of the things that's really exciting about that paper is at the same time as our trauma paper came out, 2 weeks later, we said, "Hey, we think metastability is going to override trauma. And, by the way, here's 12 new ways to measure metastability." That's fairly powerful.

Very good.

So, the example I use, and this is I think what the next step with— I think Glenn's going to be involved in it is we're clearly going to take a group of Navy SEALs. We're going to measure the amount of metastability in their brain pre-SURF therapy. We know surf therapy drives people into flow. We talk about that in our paper, right, as one of the examples. Surf therapy has proven very effective in treating PTSD. It's been done all over the place. So all we really have to do is measure metastability pre and post in that population versus controls. And I think that would be sort of the next logical step there. If we can do that next week, it'd be great. So, if you're interested in donating and funding this study, flowresearchcollective.com, ping us. You guys think I'm kidding. I'm deadly serious. We've got our nonprofit set up. We can now start to— we can now do this.

Just want to— yes, absolutely. We can set that up. We can do that. That's if you're— all our listeners are interested out there. We have testable hypotheses, quantifiable measures that we can do this with.

And we're having lots of fun talking to organizations like ARPA-H and the NIH. And so these studies are moving forward sort of across the board as well, which is great. So I feel like not only have we designed studies, but like they're starting to move forward. And I think we're going to see real, real proof and validation. And what, you know, what I've said, and I think so, I will make the bold statement and then you guys, as much more hardcore scientists can yell at me for this statement, but as far as I can tell, an accurate read on all the data is that mental health is a solved problem. It's just not distributed. William Gibson thing, the future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed. I think one of the things about that we now start to know about metastability and trauma and addiction and even conditions like ALS or TBI, right? All of them lock the brain up There's overwhelming evidence restoring adaptive flexibility seems to benefit all these conditions. And so, I think this is what we're going to see over the next 5 or 6 years. And I think it's going to absolutely forever change the landscape of mental health and neurological dysfunction.

And neurological dysfunction, neurodegeneration, and ALS we've talked about and have some possibility of doing some research on. All kinds of neurodegenerative disorders.

I mean, one of the more interesting findings in the gratitude research is how much gratitude, or I want to say, I don't want to say how much, but it's been shown that practicing gratitude helps people with Parkinson's and that part of, because it's a dopamine circuit breakdown in Parkinson's. And many Parkinson's patients say that it's actually the emotional symptoms are worse than the physical ones because it is a dopamine, you know, deflation.

Yeah.

And, and gratitude is a dopamine, um, I don't know, it's just not just dopamine. Don't mean, don't use the dopamine. I'm always, dopamine scares me to talk about in public, but it's, uh, the idea is that gratitude does help with dopamine, right?

It's a, I've been in private with Glenn and what he does behind closed doors, he just can't, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. The door is shut.

Oh, it's, it's the, it's the road reward drug, Stephen. It's the happy chemical in your brain.

But I do remember, I like, I really do think that one of, like, that one, when Greg Burns did his original research and we figured out that dopamine wasn't the reward drug and it was the thing that shows up to give us the courage to take the risk to get the reward, that was to me one of the more monumental discoveries. And I always think what I think is funny about that discovery is it really came more out of like a field that doesn't really exist, which is neuromarketing, right? Like they were trying to use the brain to sell things to people. And like Reid Monague was involved in that work, right? But these are brilliant neuroscientists and the work is really good and really interesting. It didn't turn out to be the best way to sell people things, but they learned so many amazing things, which I always find funny because in neuroscience you could like have a wrong field and yet have discovered a ton of stuff that actually is incredibly useful and worthwhile. Yeah. And I think those are probably fields we're just not there yet. There's a there there, but we're just not at the point that we can measure it and really look at it and get rid of all the compounding factors.

Yeah.

So, speaking of the body and the central nervous system, Parkinson's, a study came out recently, maybe a couple months ago, showing that the respiratory rate machine learning models can predict Parkinson's disease with like 99% accuracy. So you, you go to sleep, you put on a wearable, it tracks your respiratory rate, and just from that motor movement of the respiratory rate, there's a pattern between that and motor degeneration from the brain. So that's really interesting, and that leads me maybe to the final thought we we, we brought up AI a couple of times, and now we're doing research on AI and flow. And Stephen, you wrote about this very eloquently in We Are as Gods, and the requirement for flow and cognitive reframing and mindset and bias and all these things as toolkits for this age of overwhelm in the age of AI. So we're doing some research on human performance optimization and AI, and, uh, there's a lot there. And so let's just maybe talk about that for a little bit. What do you guys think And Stephen, this is mainly for you cuz you wrote about this in terms of using AI to engender more flow and to quantify it, and then getting into flow bidirectionally the other way around with AI, uh, to enhance human-AI collaboration and also restoring metastability just to bring it back to our paper. How would you tie that to our paper?

Jesus, like 5 hard questions in there, man. Yes. It made me say, "That's Glenn." Wow. Okay. In no specific order for the exact— So let me start here. One of the things that's very interesting about the modern century is that a lot of soft skills from the 20th century, creativity, flow, focus, they're really hard skills in the 21st century because the world itself is coming for your focus. We're living in an age of information overload. Directly downstream from information overload is cognitive overload and fractured attention. The world is coming for your attention systems. And so, flow, because it resets the nervous system, one of the things that we know is as we transition to flow, nitrous oxide is released. Nitrous oxide, if you've ever worked out, you go to the gym, you lift weights for 20 minutes and your chest opens up and it gets It's quiet upstairs. That's nitric oxide. It pushes stress hormones out of your system. Flow is this huge release of nitric oxide, so it resets the nervous system back towards baseline. So first and foremost, one of the reasons you want to double down on your primary flow activity is because it just resets the nervous system. This is why it's useful for trauma. This is why it's useful for burnout. But we just said that there's a flow deficit syndrome or whatever Glenn's great phrase was.

FDD.

Okay. I've suffered from FAD, right? Is that right, Glenn? Is it FAD?

Fat flow deficit disorder?

It's FDS. I don't know what FAD is.

FDS.

I've got FDS. I tried the Pepto-Bismol. It's not working. I'm just saying.

That's much better.

So, but I think that for the same reason, so you like flow starts to become something that's sort of mandatory defense. Where it gets really interesting in the AI question, and I've said this for a really long time, is that one of the things that flow amplifies is divergent thinking. It amplifies creativity across the boards, but there's really good evidence that divergent thinking goes up the most or very, very high at least. That's what an AI can't do. They're convergent thinking engines. They converge on data. They don't do wild outside the box. Connections. Now, there are people trying to mess with this a little bit, and there are different arguments on how successful that really is. But here's what we really know: humans in flow are phenomenal at divergent thinking. AI is phenomenal at convergent thinking. And if you put the two together, it's the best of both worlds. And what I like about that also is it's really— when you're working with AI, so there's AI is very useful for getting into flow. And this is probably one of the things that's happening to a lot of people. And this is sort of one of the reasons I think AI is leading to cognitive offloading is because people are using the tool for so long. Why? Because it produces this fast feedback loop, fast reward loop. Feedback is a flow trigger. So is, by the way, pattern recognition where you link ideas together. So if you're using the AI to help you link ideas together and you're doing this collaboratively where it's not just the AI doing the thinking where you're feeding into the AI, it's going to be a feed. Now, you've got this cycle of flow triggers that's spinning. You can put yourself into flow very easily with an AI and you can also overstay your welcome a lot in the same way that we find that injury goes up as you're moving out of the flow state, right? I think we're going to see really bad thinking. Same thing is happening to people. And I think you're going to see higher instances of cognitive offloading in that window as we're moving out of flow, just because flow is metastability. And if you're— Right. So those were like 4 answers to like 4 impossible questions.

Yeah, good.

You answered them very well.

A lot of— We need to end this podcast.

I'm going to close it right now with a question.

I was going to say, I could ask both of you the same question.

I mean, I think AI is such a puzzle. I'm a bit of an AI skeptic.

Me too.

I think that, but I do love, one thing I love doing is like vibe coding apps. I've made 3 now and there is a flow state when you see it come together. There is something. I think that the places where I call it kind of mental kettle corn— do you know when you eat kettle corn and it's like, it's really good and your body instantly wants more of the flavor, but it'll never get what it wants out of it? It'll never quite get you what you want. I think AI is kind of mental kettle corn in a lot of ways, in that like, I'll be like, that's amazing, oh wow, I got it! And then I'm like, uh, that— nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, not, not— did not take me where I wanted to go. There's a certain path to AI boosting productivity that exists for sure, for me personally. But there's also a lot of distraction. I think it's a power tool. I think it's like, I think it's a power tool that you put in your garage and it's good for something, but not everything. It'll get, you know, certain things will get more clear. But I think AI and flow, I mean, I don't know. I certainly felt it, you know, working on the little apps that I've built. And then I've also felt extremely disappointed by it in a lot of other contexts too.

Agreed. Agreed.

Okay. Well, I think, so I think flow, I think AI can help measure flow and create a feedback loop for, you know, for measuring it and then getting more flow and helping you discover your primary flow activities. And, you know, you could use it as a companion in that way if used in the right way. There's a lot.

Yeah. I mean, certainly Michael, you also gotta say we built a Flow AI. And it's coaching our clients right now and it's awesome.

It's awesome.

There's not, I mean, I, you can't use it on your own. You need it with, with working with like live people to sort of kick you in. But it's a great tool.

It is a great tool if talked to in the right way. And it, there's a double-edged sword, right? So that, that is for sure. And I think we're more re— and also machine learning, a couple of studies came out last year in 2024. 5, looking at being able to distinguish machine learning models, being able to distinguish flow states from non-flow states based on certain physiological markers. So we're going to follow up with that as well. Do you want to—

The last thing I wanted to say, because it's something I'm seeing and I'm seeing in people I work with, is one of the things that's funny about AI is it's a machine. It's a machine that we interact with, with words. And most people are willing to get really angry at their AI, right? And it happens all the time. Like, you're an idiot. What do you do? Right? You're like, and you would, you will say things to your AI, to whatever LLM you're working with that you would never say to another human being. Right? At all, all the time. And you do it all the time. And what you're not realizing is you're actually getting angry. Like you're getting angry. You're getting emotionally worked up. And that anger is impacting decision-making and judgment and your ability to get into flow and a whole bunch of other stuff on the back end. So I think like people can— you have to be really sort of careful with your emotions with AI because you will read it like a machine. And if you treat it like a machine, you're still going to have the emotional react— you know what I mean? You're getting— because you're saying outrageous things to it that you would only say if you were really pissed to another human being. And that's sort of like just normal conversation with your AI because it gets so frustrating to work with it sometimes. So you really can get frustrated, really. And then you've got other flow problems and other performance problems because you didn't manage to regulate your emotions because all the filters are gone, right? And it like, what's actually missing, and you're glad, I think you're going to get this, and this is, I I think brings us all the way home. You don't get the somatic markers. If I call you a dumbass mofo, blah, blah, blah, right? Like, my body is well aware of what I just said to you. Like, it— I feel it, right? Like, I, I have a harder time getting angry. Like, when I get angry at people, I get really upset afterwards, as a general rule. Like, it's bad for me. I don't like it at all. It makes me really upset. Get pleasure out of that. But I don't have any of those signals with AI. Like literally, Damasio's work alone just says, hey, wait a minute, if I'm getting righteously angry and I'm not getting the right signals, I'm making bad decisions.

That's a really— I think that's a really interesting take, right? I mean, there's something about that. There are a lot of studies on dealing with robots and not robots, right? Somebody from our our group published one of those, how you, how you understand their empathy and things. And I think there is definitely a missing loop on somatic markers in AI. And Antonio and a friend, Kingston, of mine published a paper on the need for feeling bots, feeling robots, robots that feel, right? And I think it, I don't know, I think that's another frontier of affective computing.

Social neuroscience as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, gentlemen.

Gentlemen, thank you. Thank you so much for your time, Glenn. Thank you so much. That was great. Stephen, excellent. Great work on this paper. All of us. And we'll tell Carl and Kristen as well. And go read the paper and let us know your thoughts.

Thanks everybody. Thanks for hanging out with us. We'll see you next time on the next episode of Flow Radio.