Transcript
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MALE SPEAKER: I’m really happy to welcome
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our two guests and my friends here today,
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Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal.
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As you know, wellness, optimum living
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have been big topics at Google for a while.
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And they are complex issues.
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I know my colleagues wrestle with these issues a lot,
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trying to figure out solutions.
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And today, what they will be presenting
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and what we’ll learn more about, flow,
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I think is a big part of this complex puzzle.
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And so I want to give you a little bit of background
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with both of these folks before we get started.
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So Steven is a “New York Times” best-selling author.
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He’s an award-winning journalist and co-founder
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of the Flow Genome Project.
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And he has many books, including “Abundance.”
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And his new book, “The Rise of Superman”
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will be the focus on today.
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His books have been translated in many different languages.
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Articles have appeared in more than 70 publications,
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including “New Times Magazine,” “Atlantic Monthly,” “Wired,”
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and “Forbes.”
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Jamie Wheal is the executive director
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of the Flow Genome Project.
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And he’s a leading expert in neurosemantics
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of ultimate human performance.
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And he works with Fortune 100 companies, leading business
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schools, Young Presidents’ Organization,
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an also Red Bull, with their world-class athletes.
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So with that, I’m going to turn it over to Steven.
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[APPLAUSE]
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STEVEN KOTLER: Hello.
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Thank you guys for coming out.
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I very much appreciate you being here.
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I want to kind of just orientate you
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a little bit to what we’re going to do.
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I’m going to kind of give you an introduction
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to flow and start breaking down some of the neurobiology, how
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it works under the hood and giving you
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kind of the broad spectrum of importance.
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And then Jamie’s is going to take over
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and he’s going to talk about practical applications
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about how you can get more flow into your lives.
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As a way to kind of begin, I want
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to tell you kind of where I began with this, which
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was when I was 30 years old, I got Lyme disease.
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And I spent the better portion of three years in bed.
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If you don’t know what Lyme disease is like,
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imagine the worst flea you’ve ever had,
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crossed with paranoid schizophrenia.
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So by the end of it, the doctors had pulled me off medicines.
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My stomach lining was bleeding out.
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There was nothing else anybody else anybody could do for me.
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And I was functional, 5% to 10% of the time.
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My mind was totally shut down.
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My body was in so much pain, I could barely walk.
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I was hallucinating.
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My short-term memory was gone.
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My long-term memory was gone.
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It was all gone.
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And at this point, I was going to kill myself out
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of practicality.
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The only thing I was going to be from here on forward
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was a burden to my friends and my family.
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And it was really a question of when and not if at that point.
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And in the middle of all this kind of negative thinking,
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a friend of mine showed up at my house
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and demanded we go surfing.
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And it was a ridiculous request.
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First of all, it had been about five years
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since I had surfed at that point.
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And the last time I had surfed, I
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had nearly drowned in a big way of accident in Indonesia
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and wanted nothing to do with surfing.
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And as I said, I could barely walk across the room.
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And she was a pain in my ass.
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She wouldn’t leave and wouldn’t leave.
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And kept badgering me and kept badgering me.
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And after finally about three hours of this,
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I was like, what the hell, let’s go surfing.
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What is the worst that can happen?
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And they she kind of walked me to their car.
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And they put me in their car and they drove me to Sunset Beach
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in Los Angeles.
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And if you know anything about surfing in Los Angeles,
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you know that Sunset Beach is just
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about the wimpiest beginner wave in the entire world.
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And it was summer.
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And the water was warm and the tide was low.
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And the waves were crap, like maybe two feet high.
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And no one was out.
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And they walked me out to the break, literally by my elbows
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and kind of helped me out there.
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They gave me a board the size of Cadillac.
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And the bigger the board, the easier it is to surf.
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This was enormous.
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And I was out there about 30 seconds when a wave came.
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And I’m not quite sure what happened,
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muscle memory took over, whatever.
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The wave came.
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I spun the board around.
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I paddled a couple times and I popped up.
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And I popped up into a completely different dimension.
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My senses were incredibly incredibly, incredibly acute,
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I was clear headed for the first time in years.
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I felt like I had panoramic vision.
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And time had dilated.
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It had slowed down.
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So that freeze-frame effect, if you’ve ever
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been in a car crash, that was my experience.
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And the most incredible thing was I felt great.
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I mean I felt alive, that thrum of possibility.
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And it was the first time in about three years
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that I had felt it.
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And that wave felt so good, I caught four more in a row.
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And after that fifth wave, I was disassembled.
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I was gone.
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They had to carry me to the car.
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They put me in the car.
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They drove me home.
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They had to put me into bed.
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And people actually had to come and bring me food
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because for 14 days, I couldn’t walk again.
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So I couldn’t make it 50 feet away to my kitchen
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to make a meal.
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And on the 15th day, which was the day
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that I could walk again, I got back in my car
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and I went back to the ocean and I did it again.
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And again, I had this kind of crazy, quasi-mystical
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experience.
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And again, it felt great.
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And the cycle kept repeating itself.
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And over about six months’ time, when
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the only thing I was doing different was surfing,
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I went from about 10% functionality to about 80%
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functionality.
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So my first question was what the hell is going on?
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Because surfing is not a cure for chronic
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autoimmune conditions, first of all.
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Second of all, I’m a science writer by training.
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I’m a rational materialist.
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And I don’t have mystical experiences.
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And I certainly don’t have them in the waves while surfing.
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The whole thing seemed ludicrous.
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Lyme is only fatal if it enters your brain.
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And I was pretty certain that the reason
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I was having these quasi-mystical experiences out
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in the waves was because I was dying.
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So where all this started for me was a giant quest
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to figure out what the hell was going on with me.
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What I discovered was this altered state of consciousness
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I was experiencing had a name, flow states.
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Now, you may know this by other names, being in the zone,
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runner’s high.
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If you happen to be a beatnik jazz musician,
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then you’re in the pocket.
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If you’re a stand-up comic, it’s called the forever box.
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The lingo goes on, and on, and on.
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The term researchers prefer is flow.
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And they prefer this term for a reason.
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It’s actually a technical term.
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And we’ll come back to why in a second.
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But in flow, what happens is attention
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becomes so focused on the task at hand
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that everything else disappears.
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Your sense of action or awareness merge together.
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So the doer and the beer become one.
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A sense of self, our sense of self-consciousness
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disappear completely.
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Time dilates.
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So that means it slows down like I mentioned.
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You can that freeze-frame effect, like in a car crash.
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Sometimes it speeds up.
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And five hours will go by in like five minutes.
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And throughout all aspects of performance,
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mental and physical go through the roof.
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I’m not going to dwell too much on it.
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I’m just going to kind of explain it.
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And we’re going to go on to a lot of things.
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But I want to talk about why flow actually healed me
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from Lyme disease, just so you guys understand
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what was going on.
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We’re going to talk later about the neurochemicals involved
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in flow.
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All of them significantly jack up the immune system.
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More importantly, they reset the nervous system back
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towards zero.
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So they calm you down.
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An autoimmune condition is essentially
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a haywire nervous system.
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So the fact that periodic flow states were calming my system
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back down is allowing me to form new neural nets.
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Neural nets that didn’t lead immediately back to illness.
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And this is what kind of gave me a toehold and possibility
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to get better.
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What I also discovered when I was
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researching flow and learning all this stuff
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is that the exact same state that
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helped me get from seriously subpar back to normal
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was helping a lot of other people
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go from normal up to superman.
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Another thing that I learned very quickly on
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is that I really was not the first person
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to come to this conclusion.
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Flow science dates back about 150 years, to the early 1870s.
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By the turn of the century, Harvard psychologist
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and philosopher William James was looking at the state.
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And he was the first person to figure out
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that the brain can radically alter consciousness
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to improve performance.
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More importantly was the work of one of James’ students,
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Walter Bradford for Cannon, who was a great physiologist.
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Bradford Cannon discovered the fight or flight response.
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And in doing so, he kind of give us our first window
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into where this accelerated performance
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might be coming from.
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This was a very, very big deal.
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Before that moment in time, performance enhancement
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was essentially a gift from the gods.
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You want a better time in 100-yard dash, Hermes can help.
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You want to write a better poem, talk to the muses.
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But Walter Bradford Cannon turned a gift from the gods
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into standard biology.
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He give us our very first toehold into the mystery.
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In 1940s, psychologist Abraham Maslow
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picked up on this thread.
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He discovered that flow was a commonality
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among all successful people.
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And then in the 1960s and ’70s, the real revolution began,
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a guy named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
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who is then the chairman of the University of Chicago
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psychology department.
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Csikszentmihalyi sort of– well, Maslow discovered the state
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in successful people.
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Csikszentmihalyi got curious about kind of everybody else
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in the world.
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So he made what is now considered
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one of the largest global psychological studies ever.
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He went around the world, asking people
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about the times in their life when I felt their best
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and they performed their best.
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And it was a huge group.
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He started out talking to experts.
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He talked to expert rock climbers,
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ballet dancers, artists, surgeons.
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It didn’t matter.
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They all said same thing.
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They felt their best.
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And they performed their best in the state he termed flow.
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Then he blew it out to everybody else.
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And by everybody else, I really mean everybody else.
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He talked to Navajo sheepherders.
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He talked to Italian grape farmers.
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He talked to elderly Korean women.
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He talked to Japanese teenage motorcycle gang members.
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He talked to Detroit assembly line workers.
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Everybody he talked to told him the same thing.
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They felt their best, they performed their best
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when they were in the state of flow.
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Csikszentmihalyi also came up with the term “flow.”
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One of the reasons was when he was talking to all these people
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and they describing this state, they always said,
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well, I’m using my skills to the utmost.
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I’m pushing myself as far as I possibly can.
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But it feels effortless.
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When I’m in this state, every decision,
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every action leads seamlessly, fluidly to the next.
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In other words, flow felt flowy.
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The other major finding that came out of this,
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as I hinted at a second ago, flow is ubiquitous.
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It shows up everywhere, in anyone, anywhere,
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provided certain initial conditions are met.
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What this means is that everybody from jazz musicians
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in Algeria, to software designers in Mumbai,
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to coders here in Silicon Valley are using flow
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to massively accelerate performance.
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And it is a considerable bit of acceleration.
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Flow amplifies all of our physical skills.
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So in this state, we are better.
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We are faster.
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We are stronger.
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We are more dexterous.
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And we are more agile.
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So our brains.
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Flow jacks up information processing.
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So when we’re in the state, our senses
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are actually taking in more information per second.
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We’re processing it more deeply.
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So that is using more parts of our brain at once.
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And while there’s a lot of debate about this,
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it does appear that we are processing it more quickly.
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And it’s not just information processing
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that is getting jacked up.
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Pattern recognition, future prediction, basically all
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the fundamental neuronal processes in the brain
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are amplified by flow.
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As a result of this, scientists now
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believe flow sits at the heart of every athletic championship.
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So almost every gold medal that has ever been won.
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But it also accounts for significant, significant
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progress in the arts and major scientific breakthroughs.
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In business, McKinsey did a 10-year study.
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They found that top executives report being five times more
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productive in flow than out of flow.
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So you got to stop and think about that.
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Normally, I have to explain to most audiences
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that five times is actually a 500% increase.
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I’m guessing you guys got it.
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But what that means is you can go to work on Monday,
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spend Monday in flow, take Tuesday through Friday off,
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and get as much done as your steady-state peers.
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So it is a huge, huge, huge amplification.
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And that 500% increase may sound ridiculous
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until you consider action-and-adventure sport
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athletes.
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So one of things McKinsey discovered
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is that average people, average workers, spend less than 5%
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of their work life in flow.
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One place where this is definitely not true
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is in action-and adventure sports.
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Action-and-adventure sport athletes,
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for reasons that Jamie is going to get into later,
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have essentially become the best flow hackers on Earth.
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And this has happened over about the past 25 years.
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And there are reasons for it.
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And we’ll talk about them later.
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But I want to tell you what this has produced.
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It has produced near exponential growth
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in what’s termed ultimate human performance, which
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is performance when life or limb is on the line.
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Nothing like this has ever happened before.
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Sports progression, it’s slow.
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It’s steady.
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It’s governed by the laws of evolution.
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At no point in history does it quintuple in a decade.
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Yet this is exactly what’s been happening in surfing, skiing,
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snowboarding, rock climbing, mountain biking, et cetera, all
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the action and adventure sports.
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I’ll give you a couple of examples.
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Surfing is a great one.
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This is a thousand-year-old sport.
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From 400 AD to 1996, the biggest wave anybody has ever surfed
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is 25 feet.
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Above that, it’s believed impossible.
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Scientists don’t think it’s possible.
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Surfers don’t think it’s possible.
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Today, we’re pushing into 100-foot waves.
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In snowboarding, in 1992, the biggest gap jump
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that anybody had ever cleared is 40 feet.
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Now, 40 feet is a big jump to clear on a snowboard.
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Today, as you can tell from this image,
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snowboarders are pushing into 230, 240 foot jumps.
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So near exponential growth in ultimate human performance.
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The better news, at the same time all this is going on,
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they solved a couple of problems.
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For a long time, one of the big problems in flow research
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was the subject of state.
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How the hell do know if your research subjects are in flow?
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The good news about action adventure sport athletes,
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sort of, is that the level of progression
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has advanced so much in recent years
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that if people are not in flow on their performing,
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they’re ending up in the hospital or dead.
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So this gives you a hard research set to work with.
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It’s a hard data set.
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If they lived through the experience,
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we know they’re in flow.
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Simultaneously, combined with this– flow science, as I said,
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goes back to 150 years.
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Most people are really aware of the first 130 years, which
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is when we figured out the psychology of the state.
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And we got really good at the psychology of the state.
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What’s happened since 1990ish is that our neurobiology
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has gotten very good.
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Our brain imaging technology has gotten very good.
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EEG has gotten a lot better.
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And for the very first time in history,
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we can look under the hood and we
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can figure out what’s going on in flow.
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One of the first things that we discovered is there’s– the old
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idea about ultimate human performance was based
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on what’s called the 10% brain myth.
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It was actually a misinterpretation
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of William James.
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But it’s the idea– and I’m sure you’re all familiar with it–
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that most of us only use 10% of our brain.
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For ultimate performance, a/k/a flow,
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it has to be all of our brain firing on all of our cylinders.
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That was the idea.
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It turns out that’s exactly backwards.
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What’s happening in flow is the brain
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isn’t becoming hyperactive.
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It’s actually starting to deactivate.
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So this is happening for a number of reasons.
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The simple reason is it’s an inefficiency exchange.
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The brain is a giant energy hog.
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It’s 2% of our mass.
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It uses 20% of our energy.
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So one of the fundamental rules of the brain
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is how do I can conserve energy?
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So conscious processing is very slow
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and it’s extremely energy expensive.
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Subconscious processing, on the other hand, is very, very quick
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and it’s very, very energy efficient.
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So what’s happening in flow is we
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are trading conscious processing for subconscious processing.
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As this is happening, huge swatches of the brain
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are being shut off.
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The technical term for this is “transient,” meaning temporary,
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“hypofrontality,” hypo, H-Y-P-O, it’s the opposite of hyper.
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It means to deactivate, to slow down, to shut off.
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Frontality refers to the prefrontal cortex,
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the part of your brain that’s back here,
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that houses all of your higher cognitive functions.
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So why does time dilate in a flow state?
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Why does it speed up or slow down?
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Because time, as Baylor neuroscientist David Eagleman
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figured out, is calculated all over the brain, especially all
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over the prefrontal cortex.
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As parts of it start to wink out,
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we can no longer separate past, from present, from future.
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So we’re plunged into what researchers
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call the “deep now.”
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To give you another example of what goes on in flow,
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another portion of the brain that goes off– we
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talked earlier about how self and self-consciousness
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disappears.
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Why does self-consciousness disappear in flow?
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Because a portion of the brain known as the dorsal lateral
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prefrontal cortex, which sort of is
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responsible for self monitoring and impulse control,
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shuts down.
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So self-monitoring, that’s your inner critic, your inner Woody
17:05
Allen.
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That’s that nagging, defeatist voice
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that’s always on in your head.
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In flow, it’s turned off.
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When it turns off, we experience this as liberation.
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We are literally free from ourselves.
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Creativity goes up.
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Risk taking goes up.
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Performance goes up.
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We are much more open to experience.
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So what we’ve just been talking about
17:29
is neuroanatomy, where in the brain
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something is taking place.
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If you really want to kind of map an experience in the brain,
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you have to talk about neuroanatomy,
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where in the brain it’s taking place, neurochemistry,
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and neuroelectricity, which are the two
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ways the brain sends signals.
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I’m going to talk a little about neurochemistry.
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Then Jamie’s going to pick it up and talk a little bit
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about neuroelectricity.
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In flow, we get five of the most potent neurochemicals
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the brain can possibly produce.
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So all of these are performance enhancing neurochemicals.
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Norepinephrine and dopamine enhance focus.
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They tighten focus.
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They drive us more into the now.
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It also speeds up muscle reaction time.
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They lower signal to noise ratios in the brain
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also so we have more pattern recognition.
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Anandamide is a pain reliever.
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But it also speeds up or increases lateral thinking,
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thinking outside the box.
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So pattern recognition is defined
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as the linking of similar ideas together.
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Lateral thinking is the linking of disparate ideas together.
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That goes up in flow.
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Endorphins, very, very potent painkillers
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and very, very powerful social bonding chemicals.
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And serotonin keeps us calm throughout.
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That’s the chemical at the heart of the Prozac revolution.
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So the thing you need to know about all
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of these neurochemicals, besides the fact
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that they up performance, is how they impact motivation.
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So for those of you who don’t know much about neurochemistry
18:58
and drugs, all of these chemicals
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are incredibly potent reward chemicals.
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Let’s talk about dopamine for a second.
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Cocaine is widely considered the most addictive substance
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on Earth.
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When someone snorts cocaine, all that actually happens
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is dopamine floods into their brain
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and then the brains blocks its re-uptake.
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So the substance is in your brain for longer.
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Norepinephrine– let me go back– norepinephrine is
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speed or Ritalin.
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Anandamide is the same psychoactive
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that’s inside of marijuana, THC.
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Endorphins are opiates.
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And just to give you an example, there
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are about 20 different endorphins
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in the brain and the body.
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The most common one is 100 times more potent
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than medical morphine.
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And serotonin is essentially MDMA.
19:43
The point here is that when all five of these chemicals
19:46
flood into your brain, it produces
19:48
an extremely, extremely, extremely addictive experience.
19:51
Flow is arguably the most addictive experience on Earth
19:54
because it’s probably the only time, or the only time
19:56
that we know of, when all five of these chemicals
19:58
get flooded into your brain at once.
20:01
Researchers don’t like the word “addictive.”
20:03
It has very negative connotations.
20:05
So they prefer “autotelic,” which means an end in itself.
20:08
What this basically means is that once an experience starts
20:11
producing flow, we will go extraordinarily far
20:14
out of our way to get more of it.
20:18
Which is why researchers talk about flow
20:20
as the source code of intrinsic motivation.
20:22
So why does this apply in daily living?
20:26
One reason is, as a recent Gallup survey pointed out,
20:29
71% of American workers are disengaged
20:32
or actively disengaged on the job.
20:35
The other 29% have jobs that produce flow.
20:37
So we really know what the solution is to this problem.
20:40
The other thing I want to talk about,
20:42
flow doesn’t just amp up motivation.
20:44
It also massively jacks up creativity.
20:49
It’s hard to put numbers on this.
20:50
We did a kind of a loose study at the Flow Genome Project.
20:53
And I say loosen loose and preliminary.
20:55
And people reported a 7x improvement in creativity.
20:58
To give you another example of this,
21:01
an Australian study– it’s a neat study–
21:02
they took 40 people.
21:03
They give everybody a really tricky brain teaser to solve.
21:06
Nobody could solve it.
21:08
They induced flow artificially using transcranial stimulation.
21:11
They literally took an electric pulse
21:13
and knocked out the prefrontal cortex
21:15
and basically induced transient hypofrontality.
21:17
23 people solved the problem in record time.
21:21
So creativity goes massively through there.
21:23
Again, this comes down to neurochemistry.
21:26
So creativity as a skill is usually,
21:29
not always, but usually recombinatory.
21:31
It’s the product of a novel idea bumping into an old thought
21:35
to create something startling new.
21:38
So if you want to increase creativity,
21:40
you have to increase all of those things.
21:42
Well, norepinephrine and dopamine, they tighten focus.
21:46
The brain is taking in more information for a second.
21:48
So it’s heightening our access to novelty,
21:51
which is on the front end of the creativity equation.
21:54
Because they lower signal to noise ratios in the brain,
21:57
they are also upping pattern recognition,
21:59
so our ability to link ideas together.
22:01
And then anandamide is increasing lateral thinking
22:03
or our ability to link disparate ideas together.
22:05
So literally the state of flow surrounds creativity.
22:09
And what’s really interesting here is creativity,
22:12
as most of you I’m sure are aware,
22:14
is a quality that’s really, really desirable.
22:17
IBM did a global survey.
22:18
I think it was 1,500 CEOs.
22:20
Of the quality most necessary in a CEO
22:23
today, creativity was the number one answer.
22:25
Yet how to teach creativity?
22:27
How do we teach people to be more creative, a big problem.
22:30
Teresa Amabile at Harvard did a study
22:33
where she discovered that not only are people
22:35
more creative in the state of flow,
22:37
but that heightened creativity actually
22:39
outlasts the state by a couple of days.
22:41
Which suggests– and more work needs to be done–
22:43
but it suggests that the state of flow
22:45
actually trains the brain to be more creative.
22:48
The other things these neurochemicals do
22:51
is they exist to kind of tag experiences.
22:55
So a quick shorthand for learning and memory, the more
22:58
neurochemicals that show up during experience, the greater
23:01
chance that experience moves from short-term holding
23:03
into long-term storage.
23:05
Neurochemicals are essentially a big tag on experience.
23:07
It says, important, save for later.
23:10
So flow is a gigantic dump of potent neurochemicals.
23:14
So this has a radical impact on learning.
23:17
In studies run by the US military
23:19
by DARPA in advanced brain monitoring, which
23:21
is a team in Carlsbad, California,
23:24
they again induced flow artificially,
23:25
two different ways.
23:26
They used transcranial direct stimulation
23:28
and they also used neural feedback.
23:29
And they found that snipers in flow
23:32
learned an average of 230% faster than normal.
23:36
They then repeated this same study
23:38
with novices, nonmilitary personnel.
23:41
And they found that the time it took
23:43
to get from novice to expert by artificially inducing flow
23:46
could be cut in half.
23:48
So what this tells us is that Malcolm Gladwell’s
23:50
famous 10,000 hours to mastery, flow cuts them in half.
23:55
So this is where I’m going to stop with learning,
23:59
and creativity, and motivation because I think
24:04
those are three big categories that apply in everybody’s life.
24:08
As a way of kind of transitioning into Jamie, what
24:11
I want to say is what has also come out of all this research
24:15
is not just what’s going on in flow.
24:17
And because we’ve had these athletes as a data set,
24:19
we can figure out what they are doing
24:21
to get into flow so successfully and we can work backwards.
24:24
And we can apply this knowledge across all domains
24:27
in societies.
24:28
So what we’ve discovered is that flow states have triggers.
24:30
These are preconditions that lead to more flow.
24:33
I’m going to turn it over and let Jamie talk about this
24:36
and why they’re so important.
24:37
JAMIE WHEAL: Thank you.
24:39
[APPLAUSE]
24:40
24:45
So about 2,000 years ago, there was this epic, “Old Testament”
24:49
rap battle between Rabbi Hillel and the pharisees.
24:52
And the pharisees challenged him.
24:53
They said, OK, Rabbi Hillel, you think you’re a hot shot.
24:56
Can you stand on one leg and recite all of scripture?
25:00
And he said yes, I can.
25:01
And he did it.
25:02
And he stood on one leg.
25:03
And he said do unto others as you
25:07
would have them do unto you.
25:10
The rest of scripture is mere commentary.
25:15
And here at Google, it’s your guys’ world
25:18
to be organizing the world’s information.
25:21
And while that is ambitious and noble,
25:24
you guys know, too, that it’s the insights
25:26
we gain, it’s not simply the data we gather,
25:28
that makes a difference.
25:30
And where we are today is truly drowning
25:33
in information and just as we always
25:35
have been, starving for motivation.
25:38
We know better.
25:39
We know we’re supposed to eat real foods, mostly plants,
25:43
not too much.
25:44
We know we’re supposed to do work that matters.
25:46
We know we’re supposed to practice gratitude.
25:48
We know that meditation is supposed to be amazing
25:50
if we ever get around to it and can sit still long enough.
25:53
We know all this stuff.
25:55
But if you just– a quick glance at the stats behind me.
25:59
Look at the toll.
26:01
We are less healthy.
26:03
We are more obese.
26:05
There’s higher workplace injuries.
26:06
There’s dollar values attached to this stuff.
26:09
Lifetime fitness, arguably the kind
26:11
of access to embodiment and wellness
26:14
for like the suburban masses, 75% attrition rate.
26:21
And that’s an internal statistic.
26:23
75% of the people that say yes, I
26:26
want you to take my $150 a month, I want the outcome,
26:30
never show up again.
26:33
And most chillingly, a study at Harvard conducted–
26:38
that, hey, when you are faced with a chronic lifestyle
26:41
disease, diabetes, heart disease, smoking
26:45
chronic stress, and your doctor says, hey, look, here’s
26:48
the deal.
26:49
You really have to change your ways
26:51
and if you don’t, it might kill you.
26:54
This is what we’re left with.
26:56
Seven out of eight of us would rather die than change.
27:01
27:04
Mind boggling.
27:05
27:08
So back to these guys.
27:09
[INAUDIBLE] is not just kind of noodling around on the sides.
27:12
They actually have a full-bore research project.
27:14
It is global.
27:15
It is interdisciplinary.
27:16
It’s called the Quantified Warriors.
27:18
So forget you’re kind of Quantified Self meet-ups
27:20
here in the Valley.
27:21
These guys are building these supersoldiers of 2030.
27:25
And what they’re doing is sort of alternately
27:27
fascinating and horrifying, depending
27:28
on your point of view.
27:30
But there’s something really interesting
27:32
that’s been going on.
27:32
And Steven talked a little bit about there’s
27:34
a 150 years of research.
27:37
The last 10 to 20 years has been getting super-interesting.
27:40
And if I was in your seats, I’d be saying, OK,
27:42
this sounds OK, cool.
27:43
But how come I don’t know about it?
27:44
If it was really all that, we’d know about it right now.
27:48
And there’s actually a problem.
27:49
There’s a reason why we don’t have
27:52
this as shared working knowledge.
27:53
Which is really how do we take information and translate it
27:57
into motivation?
27:59
Because as Steven said, flow is autotelic.
28:01
Flow has this massive neurochemical dump.
28:03
It encodes and rewards us to do more of it.
28:07
And if we could unlock that, intrinsic human motivation,
28:12
what’s possible next?
28:14
Because these guys, the Special Operations forces,
28:17
Yale is working with Delta Force and the Rangers,
28:20
and Red Bull is working with the Coronado SEAL Team Six,
28:24
these guys are getting way into the fine details.
28:27
But they are explicitly disincented
28:30
to share this knowledge.
28:33
One of them wants to stay a step ahead of the bad guys.
28:36
And the other guys want to step up on the podium.
28:40
So what they’ve been learning has not been shared yet.
28:43
And certainly part of our mission
28:45
is to actually take this extreme, the folks who
28:48
risk their lives for a living, and bring it
28:51
more into the mainstream.
28:53
Bring it to impact entrepreneurs.
28:54
Bring it to communities of innovation
28:56
where we can harness the same rocket fuel.
28:59
29:02
So to go back and just kind of shake out
29:05
three of the more practical takeaways of what–
29:08
if you remember nothing else from today,
29:11
please think through these ones.
29:13
Number one is what we were just talking about.
29:16
Flow is the source code of intrinsic motivation reinforced
29:21
with the most potent neurochemical set
29:23
we have access to.
29:25
Next, it shortens learning.
29:27
Which means either I get to spend a lot more time
29:30
on the couch or I can actually go further
29:34
in my domains of inquiry.
29:35
I can learn more.
29:36
What happens to human progression
29:38
when we can double its efficacy?
29:41
And lastly, again Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
29:44
the godfather of flow, did a 10-year global study.
29:47
And one of the additional benefits
29:50
was that the people who have the most flow in their lives
29:53
are in fact the happiest.
29:55
So as far as the bottom line in optimal psychology,
29:57
that is the “so what” at the end of it.
30:00
30:04
So to go back to these action sports athletes as a case study
30:07
because they’ve been kind of a fringe population.
30:09
People don’t pay much attention to them.
30:11
The notion ski bum and surf bum aren’t exactly warm
30:16
embraces of people who have dedicated
30:18
their lives in these domains.
30:20
But they really have come up with three
30:22
very good and transferable ways for all of us
30:26
to get more flow in our life.
30:28
And the three re deep embodiment.
30:31
When they are doing things, they are
30:32
feeling the forces of gravity.
30:35
So their proprioceptive sense, like where
30:37
are my limbs in space, my vestibular sense,
30:40
where is my inner ear in relationship to my hips,
30:44
compression, weightlessness, rotation, all of these things
30:49
are giving very strong sensory motor inputs
30:53
into our body and brain.
30:54
And as Steven was mentioning, cells that fire together,
30:57
wire together and we create richer and more robust
31:02
neural networks.
31:04
So we’ve some fascinating studies.
31:05
They did a sort of human life-sized Frogger experiment
31:09
with college athletes versus just
31:11
frat boys and sorority girls.
31:13
And they said, OK, who’s going to do better
31:15
at this life-size Frogger game and who would you
31:18
put your money on?
31:19
Well, the athletes and the athletes won.
31:21
But not for the reasons we would think.
31:23
They didn’t win because they had faster reaction time.
31:26
They didn’t win because they could– explosive box jumps.
31:29
They won because they could process complex multivariable
31:33
equations faster and then act on that information.
31:36
So the notion of the dumb jock was also absolutely wrong.
31:40
And in comparison– so this goes back
31:43
to the sort of ancient Shaolin temple– mastery
31:45
and control of body yielding mastery and control of mind.
31:50
So you go from basically going on
31:52
a dial-up modem– I’m just a brain on a stick, disembodied,
31:57
disconnected, only perceiving and receiving information
31:59
through one data feed– into broadband or even satellite.
32:05
I am now picking up all channels available to me
32:08
as a sensing cognition machine.
32:11
And those neuron nets are now fired and wired together.
32:16
Next, rich environments.
32:18
Think about the difference in a surfer
32:20
or a skier, big mountain skier, any of these things,
32:23
between just playing ping-pong.
32:24
And every day that ping-pong table is exactly the same.
32:27
And my paddle is.
32:28
And the ball bounces the same way.
32:29
It all works.
32:30
And I can kind of check out.
32:32
But in a situation where the environment
32:33
is so rich it’s overwhelming and stimulating,
32:37
it actually sort of can knock out my waking sense of self
32:41
and forces me to pay explicit, acute attention
32:45
because if I don’t, I get knocked down.
32:48
And lastly, high consequences, which
32:50
I just kind of foreshadowed.
32:53
In fact, Oscar Wilde I think famously said,
32:55
there’s nothing like the prospect
32:57
of being hung in the morning to clear one’s mind.
32:59
33:02
So immediate high consequences have this wonderful effect,
33:06
which is very hard in this day and age.
33:08
We’re always elsewhere and elsewhen.
33:10
I’m thinking about tomorrow.
33:11
I’m on my phones.
33:12
I’m pitching this.
33:13
I’m posting that.
33:15
Like high consequences bring me back into the incontrovertible
33:19
now.
33:20
It is the only place that flow can happen.
33:22
And if I get out of it, if I drift, I get spanked.
33:26
And it hurts and I learn.
33:28
Now, think about how much of our learning and experiences
33:31
these days are disconnected from those kind of tight feedback
33:34
loops.
33:35
So let’s translate this to your guys’ world
33:37
a little bit because that’s the beauty.
33:39
And this would just be kind of a curiosity
33:41
if it didn’t matter to us as well.
33:43
So think about rich environments.
33:45
You guys are obviously in one.
33:47
The cross pollination– a lot of the sort
33:49
of cutting edge organizational design of workplaces,
33:53
whether it’s at Pixar with the atrium
33:55
and the serendipitous meetings.
33:56
Whether it’s your guys’ cafeterias and restaurants,
33:58
with the lines and the management
34:00
and all of your commons areas explicitly
34:02
designed to create novel, changing
34:05
environments, high consequences.
34:08
I mean obviously, next door Facebook’s got the shit fast,
34:11
break stuff, lean and agile design and development.
34:15
The entrepreneurial mentalities that you guys
34:17
have where failure is expected because if you’re not failing,
34:21
you’re not learning as rapidly as you might.
34:25
And deep embodiment, I mean it’s no mistake I think that you
34:31
guys here at Google, with founders who
34:34
were both Montessori children– which in the flow research
34:39
is the most flow-prone educational method
34:42
in the world, with sensorial, manipulative children sweeping
34:45
and cutting and actually using body and brain simultaneously,
34:51
as well as the founders’ passion for all things action
34:55
sports and adventure, the DNA of this place
34:58
is pretty much set up to be about an optimal an environment
35:02
for cultivating this as anywhere you could think of.
35:04
35:07
So Steven described the five neurochemicals
35:11
and described the neuroanatomy a little bit.
35:14
But let’s put this in motion.
35:16
Let’s actually put this in time, through time
35:19
as we might experience it.
35:21
Because what this is, what we’re calling the flow genome
35:25
matrix, which is literally what’s the genome?
35:27
What are the core components?
35:29
How do they work.
35:31
And if we have that knowledge, what can we do with it?
35:34
And just so you guys kind of track
35:36
the research, the lineage behind this model,
35:38
this comes largely out of Herbert Benson’s work
35:42
at Harvard, as well as Dr. Lesley Sherlinis, who
35:44
is the sort of mad scientist, EEG guy
35:47
behind a lot of the SEAL team and Red Bull
35:50
work that we just mentioned earlier.
35:52
But let’s just take a look at this process
35:54
because the first thing to dispel is that flow is a state.
35:58
So it comes and it goes.
36:00
It’s not an ever on kind of thing.
36:02
But it’s not like a light switch.
36:04
It’s not just, it’s on and I’m in it, or it’s off
36:06
and I’m someplace else.
36:07
It’s a cycle.
36:08
And it has at least four distinct stages.
36:11
So if we take a look at how those progress,
36:14
the first– whether you’re a more of a fan of M. Scott
36:17
Peck and “The Road Less Traveled” or Buddha
36:20
and his Noble Truths, either way, life’s a bitch.
36:24
Life is struggle.
36:26
And that’s how it starts.
36:27
And we start by being in over our heads.
36:29
We start by finding ourselves in a situation or a condition–
36:32
and this could be late night code delivery.
36:34
This could be some new, big business problem.
36:36
It could be relational, whatever it is.
36:38
And we start out of our depth.
36:41
And we end up with a bit of a sort of angel
36:43
and a devil dialogue on our shoulder.
36:45
So our prefrontal cortex that houses our executive function,
36:48
what we normally think as me and the thing we’ve
36:51
been rewarded in school and rewarded in work
36:54
for being smart and controlled and precise
36:55
and delivering things on time, we try and solve it
36:58
full frontal assault.
36:59
But the problem is bigger than that.
37:01
It’s bigger than our capabilities.
37:03
So we start toggling back to kind
37:06
of our primitive sense of self, our amygdala,
37:08
and is this a fight or flight situation?
37:10
Do I need to pull the rip cord?
37:12
And meanwhile, my brain waves are in quite rapid beta.
37:16
This is me trying to solve binary problems
37:18
and this may not be one.
37:20
And then I start getting cortisol
37:22
and I start getting adrenaline in my system.
37:25
And I’m really starting to get jacked.
37:27
And it’s either I’m going to collapse at this point,
37:29
right, it’s going to be a fetal position or–
37:31
or has anybody ever like put on boxing gloves at the gym
37:34
or tried to do something like that
37:36
and then you get like Mike Tyson?
37:37
You say everybody’s got a plan until they get hit?
37:39
Have you guys ever experienced an adrenalized response
37:42
where your knees are wobbly?
37:43
Or even if it’s just like cop lights in the car behind you
37:46
and it drives by.
37:47
And it just pools in your legs and you’re like grrh.
37:49
And you still feel like you need to like puke
37:51
on the side of the road.
37:52
That’s the adrenaline response.
37:54
So that’ll take most of us out.
37:56
Unless, either through just sheer fatigue, or dumb luck,
38:01
or knowing that there’s this actually loop on then,
38:04
I get into the next phase, which is the relaxation response.
38:08
And typically, and sort of pro tip,
38:10
when they did the research with the darker snipers,
38:13
as well as Olympic archers and everybody else,
38:15
the way they got into this, the way
38:16
they made that shift was focusing on breath.
38:19
So tip of the hat to all your guys’ meditation practices.
38:22
Focus on breath, lower your respiratory rate.
38:26
And you start approaching equilibrium.
38:28
Nitrous oxide enters the bloodstream
38:31
and flushes away the fight or flight chemicals,
38:34
flushes away the cortisol, flushes away
38:36
the norepinephrine.
38:38
And then brings in the dopamine, the endorphins,
38:43
and the anandamide.
38:45
At that point, my brain waves go from faster beta
38:48
into a slower alpha wave.
38:52
And I’m right there on the doorstep of the flow state.
38:57
I move into the flow state.
38:58
And again, there are four gradations.
39:01
I mean you can have what Steven had,
39:02
which was this sort of spontaneous, healing,
39:04
quasi-mystical experience, like, ah, man, I’m
39:06
one with everything.
39:07
Or you could just have it, hey, all the lights were green
39:09
and I got to work five minutes early.
39:11
How’s it going?
39:12
So the point here is that if you go into the deeper flow state,
39:16
you don’t just hang out in that alpha where I’m resourceful,
39:19
I’ve got insights.
39:21
I actually move into an even deeper, slower state
39:24
known as theta.
39:25
And typically, that’s one that only shows up
39:28
in lifetime meditators.
39:30
Any of the studies at Madison on Tibetan meditators, that’s
39:34
what you would see those guys be able to get into way
39:36
more often than us.
39:38
And the other time is kind of in that threshold between waking
39:41
and sleeping.
39:42
So if you’ve ever been lying on the couch
39:44
and you’re watching TV– “West Wing” used to do this to us all
39:46
the time, just soporific, grrh.
39:48
But in that moment before you’re unconscious,
39:50
you’re in a hypnogogic state.
39:52
And it’s so deeply relaxed, most of us just miss it.
39:56
We just go to sleep.
39:57
We nod off.
39:58
But if you’ve got discipline and training,
40:00
you can actually stay there and be alert and aware.
40:04
And there and only there can come these lightning bolts
40:08
of gamma.
40:10
And that becomes these gestalt integrations.
40:13
That become sort of your chocolate and my peanut butter
40:15
and yee-haw, we got some Reese’s.
40:17
It becomes those moments of massive lateral integration
40:23
that absolutely change the game.
40:26
And finally– and this is a critical stage that most of us
40:29
forget about.
40:30
We just don’t– oops, I just did that.
40:32
There we go.
40:34
Most of us forget about the recovery phase.
40:36
But I’m sure you guys have come across all this stuff
40:39
within the learning theory, which
40:40
is that when we think we’re learning,
40:42
we’re not really learning.
40:43
When we’re doing stuff, all we’re doing is collecting data.
40:46
And that most of our pattern consolidation
40:48
and actually annexing of new skills
40:50
is happening as we sleep, and specifically
40:53
when we sleep, in delta waves.
40:55
So by no means are we just have camping out for the week
40:58
after a flow state in delta.
41:00
We wanted to highlight that a lot of that integration, a lot
41:03
of my level up to what’s possible
41:06
for me now occurs in the delta frequencies of deep sleep.
41:10
So that in a nutshell is the cycle.
41:15
And think about what this means?
41:16
Because now that we know this we can hack it.
41:21
And what’s so interesting and exciting about that
41:25
is that think about the entire there sort of human development
41:29
track, including mindfulness, including optimal psychology,
41:31
including tons of the wonderful stuff that’s
41:34
both present inside this organization
41:36
and kind of happening more and more in the world, most of it
41:39
is trying to get our waking, conscious selves, our egos,
41:43
to go quiet, back to Steven’s slide
41:45
with our inner Woody Allen.
41:48
But that’s a real tar baby experience.
41:51
Because if I’m reading a book on how
41:52
to get rid of the very part of me that’s reading the book,
41:56
it’s kind of like hiding your own Easter eggs.
41:58
It’s pernicious.
41:59
It’s sticky.
42:00
And the more I struggle with it, the stucker I get.
42:04
That’s why you see so many uptight baby boomers at Esalen.
42:08
I mean it’s one of those situations.
42:09
I’m trying so hard that I cannot actually decouple from
42:13
the thing I’m trying to release.
42:15
So what this lets you do is back into it.
42:18
Don’t worry about who you are now and trying to change it.
42:22
Just optimize your bio, neuro self system and then
42:28
see what your subjective inner experience is.
42:30
And that’s potentially game changing and that’s kind
42:32
of right where we are on the verge of these days.
42:36
So I want to leave you guys with Steven,
42:40
on just kind of a sense of the direction of things,
42:42
where things are going next.
42:44
And then we’d love to invite your questions or queries
42:46
and potentially just have a conversation of what’s
42:48
possible.
42:49
Thank you very much guys.
42:51
[APPLAUSE]
42:52
42:57
STEVEN KOTLER: So two things.
43:00
Jamie gave you a look, high consequence, deep embodiment,
43:03
rich environment.
43:04
These are three flow triggers.
43:06
There are, we believe, 17 total flow triggers.
43:11
There are these three environmental triggers.
43:13
They’re external triggers.
43:14
There are three internal triggers.
43:16
These are psychological triggers.
43:17
There are 10 social triggers.
43:19
There is a shared version of a the flow state,
43:21
a collective version known as group flow.
43:23
There are 10 triggers that bring that on.
43:25
And as far as we know, there is one creative trigger.
43:28
There is also the flow cycle, which we just broke down.
43:30
So the flow cycle sort of functions
43:32
as a map for the experience.
43:34
And the triggers tell you what to do,
43:36
where you are in that map.
43:38
The really important thing and the thing
43:39
that I want to leave you with is that we
43:42
are at the very, very front edge of this research.
43:47
We have a pretty solid understanding
43:49
of the psychology of flow.
43:51
We understand the neurobiology.
43:53
What we don’t know is huge.
43:55
We don’t know, for example, the order of the cascade.
43:57
Neural chemicals proceed.
43:59
Neuroanatomical changes proceed.
44:01
Brain waves, we don’t know.
44:03
Nobody has a clue.
44:04
And the physiological questions, right?
44:06
We’ve got mind.
44:06
We’ve got brain.
44:07
But what’s actually going on in the body,
44:09
we’re at the front, front edge of that revolution.
44:12
We’re just starting to answer those questions.
44:14
And we’re not going to really get all this done until we have
44:17
what we’re calling a heat map of flow which
44:19
maps the psychology onto the neurobiology,
44:21
onto the physiology.
44:23
And the reason I’m telling you all this
44:24
is we know from the McKinsey study
44:27
that top executives are five times more productive in flow.
44:29
We know that action-and-adventure sports
44:31
athletes have produced near exponential growth
44:33
in ultimate human performance.
44:35
But we are just asked getting started.
44:36
If you talk to a lot of people in this world
44:39
and ask them what percent of our capabilities
44:42
do you think we’ve actually used,
44:44
even with all this kind of flow hacking stuff that we’re doing,
44:47
the answer you get is 1%, 2%, 3%, 4% 5%.
44:50
I’ve never actually heard anybody
44:52
give an answer above 5%.
44:54
Which is to say we are at the very
44:55
front end of this revolution.
44:57
The near exponential growth in ultimate human performance
45:00
showing up in action-and-adventure sports
45:02
may not be the endpoint.
45:03
It may be the starting point for possibility.
45:06
So that’s where I want to leave you guys.
45:08
And then we’ll open it up.
45:09
We’ll take questions.
45:10
We’ll have a discussion, whatever you want.
45:11
But thank you so much for listening.
45:14
[APPLAUSE]
45:15
45:20
AUDIENCE: So thanks a lot for the talk.
45:22
I’m a snow boarder, a kite surfer, a motorcycler.
45:25
And now I realize why I like those things so much.
45:29
I guess it was pretty evident.
45:30
But there was also research that showed
45:33
that people who ride motorcycles regularly kind of live longer.
45:39
[INAUDIBLE]
45:41
Your research–
45:42
STEVEN KOTLER: It definitely– I mean it certainly
45:45
jives with what we know about flow and the immune system.
45:47
But I would just assume that most who ride motorcycles
45:50
actually probably die younger.
45:52
AUDIENCE: That’s OK.
45:54
Accidents aside, yes.
45:55
But what I wanted to ask is generally
45:59
like in the computer world– or we also
46:01
have several courses at Google here
46:02
that claim that if you overclock your processor,
46:06
the lifespan decreases.
46:08
And what you claiming with your research or some
46:11
of the research you mentioned is that it actually improves
46:15
various aspects and creates long-term positive effects.
46:22
Is that true?
46:23
STEVEN KOTLER: Flow?
46:24
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
46:24
Yeah.
46:25
Having more flow in your life, which
46:26
means overclocking your processor.
46:28
And you mentioned about the release state
46:30
and the importance of that.
46:32
And I think we have several courses.
46:34
And [INAUDIBLE] and that talk about that and how important
46:37
it is to take breaks and stuff like that and so on.
46:40
But what I’m interested in is let’s
46:43
say I find a way to induce more flow in my life.
46:45
Is it actually going to also produce like long term–
46:49
or am I going to die early, like Steve Jobs?
46:52
STEVEN KOTLER: OK.
46:53
So there’s two kind of answers to this question.
46:58
The first is that the research shows
47:03
that the people with the most flow in their lives
47:05
are quote, unquote “the happiest people on Earth.”
47:07
That is something of a misnomer.
47:10
So flow always, always, always, always includes
47:15
kind of pushing yourself to the utmost.
47:19
You’re rising to the challenge.
47:20
One of the psychological triggers
47:22
is known as the challenge/skills ratio.
47:24
So all of these flow triggers that we
47:26
talk about, high consequence, deep embodiment, et cetera,
47:28
flow follows focus.
47:29
So all of these flow triggers are
47:32
ways of driving attention to the now.
47:34
So one of the ways we know we pay the most attention when
47:38
the skills we bring to the task are slightly less
47:42
than the challenge at hand.
47:43
It’s known as the challenge/skills ratio.
47:45
Flow exists when we are stretching, but not snapping.
47:49
You are constantly rising to meet your challenge.
47:53
The studies show that flow correlates directly
47:55
to life satisfaction.
47:56
You get more meaning.
47:57
You get more purpose.
47:58
Happiness is fleeting.
48:00
It’s in the moment.
48:01
It’s I feel really good right now.
48:03
That may not always be the case with flow
48:04
because rising to challenges are difficult.
48:07
It’s uncomfortable.
48:07
I always say that people who get really good at flow hacking,
48:10
get really, really good at being uncomfortable.
48:14
The other thing I wanted to say to kind of go back this
48:16
is– and I want to talk about why this is not self-help.
48:20
And it’s not self-help for a couple of reasons.
48:22
On the positive side, self-help is
48:24
about 5% increase, 10% increase.
48:26
It’s about three things I can tell you today
48:28
that you can start doing tomorrow
48:30
and your life is going to get better.
48:32
Flow is not like that at all.
48:34
It is not 5%.
48:35
It’s not 10%.
48:35
It is a step function-worth of change.
48:38
It is a big shift forward.
48:40
But it comes at a price.
48:42
Flow is dangerous.
48:44
These neurochemicals are very addictive.
48:46
So you’re playing with fundamentally
48:48
addictive neurochemistry.
48:49
Flow always requires what we call
48:52
an escalating ladder of risk.
48:53
You’re going to keep taking greater and greater chances,
48:56
pushing yourself farther, and farther, and farther.
48:58
That can get dangerous as well.
49:00
And you’re also playing with very fundamental
49:03
human motivations, autonomy, mastery, and purpose, which
49:06
is sort of what passion looks like under the hood.
49:08
These are all big flow triggers.
49:09
These all show up in flow.
49:11
They all produce more flow.
49:12
You don’t get to play with addictive neurochemistry
49:15
and these kind of fundamental human motivations
49:17
without danger.
49:18
People find themselves– they join a startup.
49:21
They get into lots of flow.
49:22
Startups are great at producing flow
49:24
for a lot of different reasons.
49:25
A lot of the flow triggers are kind of concentrated
49:27
in startups.
49:29
And then the startup phase ends and they’re sort of
49:31
locked out of flow.
49:33
There is a depression that can come from this.
49:35
If you get a lot of flow in your life
49:37
and some day are locked out, you can get very, very, very
49:39
deeply depressed.
49:40
JAMIE WHEAL: Just to speak specifically
49:42
to your overclocking the processor piece as well,
49:44
which is that the action sports athletes, when the swell is
49:47
breaking for [INAUDIBLE] in Maui,
49:49
like they all sit and do nothing.
49:51
It’s kind of almost a hunter/gather style.
49:52
We sit around, we tell stories, we talk shit,
49:54
and then something big and crazy happens.
49:55
We go and do it.
49:56
And then the swell has come.
49:58
The big storm has gone.
49:59
And I have a natural downtime.
50:01
And so that’s my life as an action sports
50:03
athlete cultivating flow.
50:05
But what’s my life in your guys’ world as knowledge workers
50:08
cultivating flow?
50:09
I do it.
50:10
I crush the project.
50:11
I come up with a novel solution.
50:12
What happens to me then?
50:14
I get promoted.
50:15
And so the pressure in our controlled environments
50:19
to continue to do it and to continue to tap and to go back.
50:22
And now, I’m just revving at a higher level.
50:25
And I’ve got all kinds of obligations and commitments
50:27
to do this on command, I think is real.
50:30
And that– which we don’t have up now, but back
50:32
to that recovery phase– becomes vital to ensure that I’m fully
50:37
replenishing that very expensive state I’ve just produced.
50:40
That I’m annexing the information and that
50:42
I’m stably integrating it into my both psychology
50:45
and physiology.
50:47
AUDIENCE: And the question is, for example,
50:50
all these sport or energy drinks can boost your adrenalin
50:56
and stuff.
50:56
It looks like it doesn’t go really well with flow.
50:59
Like you can’t release because your body
51:01
is like filled with chemicals that actually boost you up.
51:05
And so, for example, Red Bull and all these pro athletes,
51:08
how does it go together?
51:10
STEVEN KOTLER: It’s a tricky question.
51:11
And part of the answer is we don’t know.
51:14
But one of the things that it does appear
51:17
is that at the front end of the flow state,
51:19
you’ve got cortisol rising, that norepinephrine rising.
51:23
If there’s too much of that stuff– and a lot
51:25
of these energy drinks flood the body
51:28
with more of these chemicals– it
51:31
does appear that that can block the relaxation response.
51:34
So essentially what’s happening when
51:36
you go from kind of the heightened focus
51:39
and the struggle phase into the relaxation
51:41
sometimes, that’s when the switch
51:43
from conscious to subconscious processing is taking place.
51:47
Norepinephrine sort of, when you have too much of it,
51:51
it functions sort of like OCD.
51:52
You can’t let go.
51:53
You’re holding on to the problem and you’re thinking it,
51:56
you’re thinking it, and you’re thinking it.
51:58
And that could absolutely block the release state.
52:00
It could block the rest of the flow state.
52:03
That said, there’s caffeine.
52:04
There’s a whole bunch of other things in Red Bull.
52:07
You can say that Red Bull is a flow precursor in some cases.
52:10
It can be a flow blocker.
52:12
It’s very individual.
52:13
And neurochemistry appears to be individual.
52:17
All of our receptors, our receptors
52:20
for these neurochemicals are essentially coded genetically,
52:22
how receptive they are.
52:24
So it really could differ at an individual level.
52:27
And we just don’t now.
52:29
JAMIE WHEAL: And on the healthy side,
52:30
if you really are looking for something like what
52:32
might I take or do, the most interesting stuff– and I
52:34
just down at Red Bull on Friday and was talking with a Ph.D.
52:37
candidate specializing into this, which is– nitric oxide,
52:40
we talked about, right, was the neurotransmitter
52:42
that prompts you go from struggle to release.
52:45
The best exogenous form of it is high concentrate beet juice.
52:49
It’s high nitrate.
52:50
Most pro-endurance athletes in the world are using it.
52:53
It sort of debuted in between Beijing and maybe even
52:55
London as far as the Olympic stuff.
52:57
And there’s a company, James Smith,
52:59
which we have no affiliation with.
53:00
But they’re out of England.
53:01
They’re royal insignia stuff.
53:03
And they do the both high nitrate, measured
53:06
in joule shots, as well as placebo ones.
53:09
So all the academic community globally uses them.
53:12
So two or three hours after ingestion of high nitrate beet
53:16
juice, it can transform into nitric oxide.
53:18
And that’s potentially, as far as healthy.
53:20
And actually has some mechanical impact on this.
53:23
It’s probably one of the best things to look at.
53:26
AUDIENCE: Sorry.
53:26
I don’t want to talk too much.
53:28
And omega-3 might have some positive influence
53:30
on like getting into flow.
53:32
Is it like research some behind it?
53:36
JAMIE WHEAL: What might?
53:37
AUDIENCE: Omega-3.
53:38
JAMIE WHEAL: That’s a mixed bag, man.
53:40
I mean in the last six months, there’s
53:42
been a fair amount of sort of not so positive stuff
53:45
on omega-3’s, and just questions on prostate cancer in men,
53:49
and various other sort of ancillary things.
53:51
That said, the chief physician for the Coronado SEAL teams
53:57
gave a presentation specifically on the role of fish oils
54:00
and high-grade fish oils, on depression,
54:03
on physiological recovery, on sort
54:05
of stability of mental states, all kinds of things.
54:07
And their evidence, at least with the data
54:10
sets they were working with, was overwhelmingly positive.
54:14
So I don’t know right now.
54:16
And I kind of wish I did because I like that certainty.
54:20
AUDIENCE: So you mentioned the researcher
54:22
who had done a lot of work on the brain waves and then
54:26
with your diagram.
54:26
Can you tell us a little bit more
54:28
about him or her and how they came up
54:31
with their research, et cetera?
54:33
STEVEN KOTLER: Yeah, Dr. Leslie Sherlin.
54:35
He is probably the world’s leading researcher
54:38
on kind of the brain waves, neuroelectricity
54:41
of high performance.
54:42
He– five years ago, six years, I
54:44
don’t know when they actually started the project–
54:46
he teamed up with Red Bull.
54:48
So there was at guy Red Bull, whose name
54:49
is Andy Walshe, a friend of ours,
54:51
who’s the head of high performance.
54:53
His job is to take the best athletes in the world
54:55
and make them better.
54:56
He teamed up with Leslie and they
54:58
built essentially a neuroscience skunkworks.
55:00
So the problem with EEG has been noise.
55:05
So I can put an EEG on your head and I can look at brain waves.
55:09
But if you yawn, if you blink, all that stuff
55:13
is going to register as static, as noise.
55:15
It’s going obscure the signal.
55:18
So motion, which is if you want to look
55:20
at action-and-adventure sport athletes, it’s a real problem.
55:22
And we’ve only recently gotten to the point
55:25
that our algorithms can actually filter out the noise of motion.
55:29
So Leslie has developed what they call Brain Sport.
55:31
It’s a wireless, portable EEG.
55:33
And I think they’ve looked at 5,000 athletes.
55:37
They’ve compared the top 1% athletes,
55:40
the elite of the elite, with the top 5%, with the top 20%.
55:44
And just kind of looked at them across the board.
55:46
So that’s where a lot of this research came from.
55:48
JAMIE WHEAL: Yeah.
55:49
And actually just to finish on that,
55:50
the interesting thing they found was there was not a default MO.
55:53
There wasn’t a consistent pattern.
55:54
It wasn’t like the action-and-sports athletes
55:56
all performed like Tibetan monks or something like that.
55:58
But what they realized was it was
55:59
almost like the shock absorber on a motorcycle.
56:01
It was resilience and the ability to– they
56:03
could come into the flow state from a bunch
56:05
of different locations, depending on sports-specific,
56:09
genealogy, training, whatever.
56:10
But it was their resilience and their adaptiveness
56:14
that distinguished the elite from even the advanced right
56:17
below them.
56:18
AUDIENCE: A quick question on audio stimuli.
56:20
I know there are software programs, CDs out there,
56:23
that can supposedly bring your mind down
56:27
to these different wave patterns.
56:30
Have you done any research on that?
56:32
If those things actually work or if they
56:33
can help advance the flow?
56:35
STEVEN KOTLER: I’m going to let Jaime talk
56:37
about this in a second.
56:37
But there’s one thing I really want
56:39
to say because it’s a pet peeve.
56:41
It makes me crazy.
56:43
There are a lot of companies out there
56:45
who are, hey, this produces flow.
56:47
And its single correlate research.
56:49
It’s we can get your brain waves to alpha-theta.
56:52
Or there’s some data that says cardiac coherence produces
56:57
flow, and blah, blah.
56:57
So there’s a lot of companies, a lot of widgets,
56:59
and a lot of things that trigger one of these things.
57:04
Flow is a huge cascade.
57:05
It’s a full body/brain reaction.
57:08
There is nothing out there that produces–
57:10
except some of the work that we’re
57:12
doing at the Flow Genome Project.
57:13
And we’re not there yet.
57:14
But we’re sure trying to map it.
57:16
But most everything’s that’s out there is a single correlate
57:18
thing.
57:19
So we’ve got music that can drive your brain
57:22
waves towards alpha, towards alpha-theta.
57:25
That’s great.
57:25
That’s neat.
57:26
It’s going to produce parts of this experience.
57:29
But it is a full-on, deep flow experience
57:32
with a full neurochemical dump?
57:33
No.
57:34
There’s nothing that says that it can happen.
57:37
And there’s not any evidence of it.
57:40
So these single correlate fixes, they’re getting at it.
57:43
They’re moving in the right direction.
57:45
But the truth claims make me pretty nervous.
57:47
JAMIE WHEAL: Yeah.
57:48
And simply from the research I’ve
57:51
seen, bineural beats, which is what you’ll see a lot of those.
57:53
And they stagger themselves slightly
57:55
and it’s supposed to entrain your brain.
57:57
I haven’t seen a lot of corroborating research
58:00
to actually support all of those truth claims.
58:02
The stuff that has had a little bit stronger evidence based
58:05
on backing is isochronic brain wave entrainment.
58:08
And the nice thing about it is you
58:10
don’t have to have headphones on.
58:11
You can actually just listen to it.
58:13
But even beyond that– I mean there’s a reason
58:15
that the whole electronic scene has blown up
58:17
so hugely in the last five to 10 years.
58:19
There’s a reason, Burning Man culture,
58:21
all of those bits and pieces, is that very high fidelity, loud,
58:25
cleanly separated sounds absolutely
58:27
have a psychodynamic effect.
58:29
And you can take that to West Africa.
58:30
I mean there’s ancient traditions on that.
58:33
So even without the fancy technology under the hood
58:35
that someone may be selling you, clearly music
58:38
has a powerful psychosomatic effect.
58:42
AUDIENCE: How do the sympathetic and parasympathetic
58:45
nervous systems come into play in all this?
58:48
JAMIE WHEAL: Well, can you go ahead
58:50
and just take another couple of steps into that and give us a–
58:53
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
58:54
So specifically in the struggle, release, recovery– or sorry,
59:00
struggle, release, flow recovery phases you showed earlier,
59:08
the struggle phase kind of reminded me
59:10
of what I had heard very anecdotally and
59:12
unscientifically about the sympathetic nervous system.
59:15
And then the alpha waves kind of reminded me
59:17
of the parasympathetic nervous system.
59:19
And I was wondering if that’s true?
59:22
JAMIE WHEAL: Yeah.
59:22
I mean the short answer is don’t know.
59:26
And I think it’s the tracking– I
59:27
mean being able to track the neurotransmitters
59:30
in a live human, right, tricky, as well as to be
59:34
able to have multivariable sensing.
59:36
So just to give you guys an understanding,
59:38
like where is the marketplace?
59:39
Where’s the cutting edge?
59:40
So we mentioned that darker, Quantified Warrior project.
59:43
They love the Red Bull guys because the Red Bull guys
59:46
are just trying real stuff with people.
59:48
They’re actually out there with their athletes
59:50
and trying to get them better.
59:51
Where government and military projects are much more
59:53
kind of– just the way they move, and innovate, and think
59:56
is just distinct.
59:57
And so they love the Red Bull guys
59:59
because they’re trying stuff.
60:00
We go to the Red Bull guys and we’re
60:02
talking with the scientists.
60:02
And we’re like, hey, have you put this together with that?
60:04
Well, what about these three things?
60:06
And even those guys, bless their hearts,
60:08
aren’t actually doing an integrated, multivariable
60:11
metrics and management.
60:13
So the short answer is we don’t know yet.
60:15
And I would picture that those are
60:16
the kind of fascinating questions that
60:18
hopefully in the next five years or so we’ll be starting
60:21
to help facilitate those conversations and those
60:23
[INAUDIBLE].
60:23
AUDIENCE: Is the fight or flight response,
60:25
would that be an example or symptom of that struggle phase?
60:29
60:32
STEVEN KOTLER: So the fight or flight is.
60:33
It’s one example.
60:34
60:41
It’s one extreme example.
60:43
But when you talk to the action-and adventure sport
60:45
athletes about it, what they will tell
60:47
you is that they ride the heightened focus of the fight
60:53
or flight response in the flow.
60:56
They sort of get into the gap before actually the fear
60:59
becomes an emotion.
61:00
They see it kind of rising and they just
61:03
ride that focus into flow and block that response.
61:08
Flow is flowy because its choice is wide open.
61:13
One of the reasons you can make almost picture-perfect decision
61:17
making is because you have lots of options.
61:18
You’re taking in more information, et cetera,
61:20
et cetera.
61:21
In the fight or flight response, your options
61:23
are fight, flight, or flee.
61:25
It’s totally the opposite.
61:27
So you are right, it is totally the opposite.
61:28
But you can ride one into the other.
61:31
JAMIE WHEAL: So the first thing is, yeah,
61:33
anyone in their right mind should be afraid
61:35
when you’re rolling the dice on 16 feet per second per second.
61:39
So natural and healthy.
61:41
And then the question is, is it back to Steven’s point
61:44
about the challenge and skills?
61:46
Is it enough out of my comfort zone that I am nowhere else?
61:50
In fact, I have a friend who is the CEO of a big company.
61:53
He says I don’t like road biking because when I’m on the road,
61:57
I’m still in my day.
61:59
I love that trail that we ride because I am nowhere else
62:03
for the three minutes it takes to get down it.
62:06
And so the beauty is can I find that place where I’m nowhere
62:09
else, but not in the hospital?
62:11
[LAUGHTER]
62:13
STEVEN KOTLER: Most people have had tons of flow experiences.
62:16
You probably have them almost on a daily basis
62:18
and you don’t actually realize it.
62:20
And here’s why.
62:21
Flow exists on a spectrum.
62:23
It like any emotion, like anger, right?
62:25
You can be a little irate or you can be homicidally murderous.
62:29
So there’s micro-flow when action and awareness start
62:33
to mere, maybe time starts to dilate,
62:34
and you’re paying attention to the [INAUDIBLE].
62:36
Macro-flow, where you get all of the various conditions of flow
62:39
at once.
62:39
If you’ve ever lost yourself in a great conversation,
62:42
the whole afternoon disappears.
62:44
If you’ve ever gotten so sucked into a work project
62:46
that nothing else seems to matter for a little while,
62:49
those are all micro-flow experiences.
62:51
They’re on the same spectrum leading up
62:54
to these giant, deep flow experiences.
62:56
So, as I said, there are 17 flow triggers.
63:00
The more flow triggers that get packed into an event,
63:03
the greater the chance you’re going
63:04
to move into a really like truly deep flow
63:07
experience rather than a micro-flow experience.
63:09
But we have these micro-flow experiences.
63:11
We recognize deep flow.
63:12
We know it immediately, time dilated or something.
63:15
Like you’re like, oh, my god, I’m in that state.
63:17
But what we miss is that we’re in micro-flow all the time.
63:21
And if you actually can start watching for it,
63:23
you can start extending it and deepening it.
63:25
You can play with it and really start to utilize it.
63:29
STEVEN KOTLER: By the way, when they do flow studies,
63:31
as a manager, one of the most common flow
63:34
experiences among middle managers in conversation
63:36
at work.
63:37
Why?
63:38
Work usually involves money.
63:40
So it’s high consequence.
63:41
It’s a higher consequence environment.
63:42
And then you start looking at the social triggers, group
63:45
flow.
63:45
Work conversations tend to drive them.
63:47
You don’t have them in casual conversations at home
63:49
when you’re hanging out with your friends.
63:50
But work conversations tend to produce this more often.
63:53
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
63:53
Can you tell us a bit more about the flow dojo?
63:56
And is there a physical space that exists?
63:59
What are you doing there?
64:00
When do you plan to do with the dojo?
64:02
JAMIE WHEAL: What I’ll do is I’ll just describe it to you.
64:04
But yes, I mean our answer really
64:06
is what would it be like to sort of combine
64:09
a Montessori-prepared environment, but for grown-ups,
64:12
and exploratory style, interactive, sort of
64:16
exhibits in installations?
64:17
But instead of for science, have it be for embodied cognition,
64:22
with a sprinkling of X-games.
64:25
So you have fun, safe ways to give people the sensorimotor
64:29
inputs that these athletes typically use themselves
64:32
and then put a layer of quantified self on top of it.
64:34
So giant geodesic dome playground training centers,
64:38
whereby we can all train our games.
64:40
We can all burn and fuse additional neural pathways.
64:44
And we can put ourselves into that nonseeking
64:48
state of hyperperformance.
64:51
And ultimately back to the drowning
64:53
in information, starving for motivation.
64:55
At least our assessment of most developmental technologies–
64:59
there’s so much great stuff out there.
65:01
Most of us fail in long-term practice.
65:04
So if we can go back to that autotelic piece
65:06
and harness flow states in service of whatever
65:09
my goals in life and work are, but ultimately even
65:12
the following of well-worn lineage paths in the wisdom
65:15
traditions or whatever else is up, if we can do that,
65:18
it’s something pretty amazing.
65:19
And certainly communities with you guys,
65:21
places like this where there’s such sort
65:24
of high-value human capital, the ability
65:27
to optimize that, both in the moment and longitudinally,
65:32
feels really useful.
65:33
It feels like a way to help impact it.
65:36
STEVEN KOTLER: Let me add two quick things to that.
65:38
One, the more flow you have, the more flow you have.
65:42
So this all about attention.
65:45
You’re training the brain go into the flow.
65:48
So you can train the brain on the ski slope to go into flow.
65:52
It’s going to bleed into your work at the office.
65:55
You’re going to find yourself getting to flow more easily.
65:58
If you can learn how to do this one area, it transfers over.
66:01
And I want to just kind of give you
66:03
an ephemeral look at the flow dojo.
66:05
I want to give you just kind of like this is the gear,
66:07
this is what we’re doing, this is what it looks like.
66:09
One of things we have– and there’s lots and lots of toys–
66:12
but one thing is we have is a 20-foot looping surf swing.
66:15
So you stand on a surfboard.
66:17
Your feet are strapped in.
66:18
Your writs are strapped in.
66:20
And you can be upside down, 25 feet off the ground or pulling
66:24
3 and 1/2 gees at the bottom of the loop.
66:26
So you’ve got high consequence, novelty, unpredictability,
66:30
and complexity, our rich environment,
66:32
lots of those things as well.
66:35
All of those flow triggers are there.
66:37
So we’ve got that.
66:39
Simultaneously, you are wearing Leslie Sherline and the Brain
66:43
Sport helmet, the EEG helmet.
66:45
So we know flow exists near alpha-theta.
66:48
So the entire giant surf swing is lined in LED lights.
66:53
So it is real-time neurofeedback.
66:55
So you’re wearing this thing.
66:56
You’re pulling all these flow triggers.
66:58
But you can also drive your brain.
67:01
If you are in alpha-theta, it glows red.
67:04
If you are in beta, it’s blue.
67:05
So you have real-time neurofeedback.
67:07
And to solve the mystery– because our real goal– well,
67:10
one of our real goals is to really advance
67:12
flow science and culture– you are wired head to toe
67:15
with all the quantified self, data-gathering stuff.
67:18
So not only are we using these flow triggers and neurofeedback
67:22
to drive you into flow, we are data capturing along the way.
67:25
And I hate the term “big data.”
67:27
I don’t think it means anything.
67:29
But hopefully, this allow us to take a big data approach
67:31
to flow, which hasn’t been done before.
67:34
Csikszentmihalyi did it at psychological level.
67:35
Nobody has done it at the neurobiological level.
67:37
And that’s what this is about.
67:41
AUDIENCE: Have you considered looking
67:42
into the personalization aspect of flow?
67:46
Because I’m not sure that everybody
67:47
experiences flow in the same way.
67:48
I mean not for the same activities.
67:50
For example, some people this you studied are like athletes.
67:55
But– I don’t know.
67:57
I mean there are scientists who think
67:59
that differently, et cetera.
68:01
There’s all this research about personality types, et cetera.
68:05
The Gallup organization itself, to solve their problem
68:08
of 71% of engagement, developed their own system,
68:12
which is called StrengthsFinder.
68:13
STEVEN KOTLER: Yeah.
68:14
Sure.
68:15
AUDIENCE: And I think people who use their talents according
68:17
to them are a kind of like in the flow states
68:20
because they are using their talents.
68:22
JAMIE WHEAL: Yes.
68:23
Exactly.
68:23
So what is my typology?
68:24
What kind of a person am I and what
68:26
is my unique signature and entry points?
68:29
Absolutely.
68:29
We’ve actually been doing, again,
68:31
a very preliminary, but intriguing initial flow
68:34
profile.
68:34
And we’ve had several thousand folks
68:36
take it just in the last three or four weeks.
68:38
And interestingly– the categories we had was
68:41
hard-charger, so the classic action sports profile we just
68:44
described and most of what you just described; a deep thinker,
68:47
someone a little bit more introspective,
68:49
potentially doing coding or creative work;
68:52
one more socially oriented; and then potentially one more sort
68:55
of— the quintessential kind of [? Loewe Haas ?] personality
68:58
types, sort of the yoga, meditation, et cetera.
69:01
And 50% of the respondents were deep thinkers.
69:06
They actually found themselves more
69:07
introverted, quiet, reflective avenues into flow.
69:11
And again, to Steven’s point, what
69:12
we anticipate– I mean I would be stunned if it didn’t show up
69:15
this way– is that there is no such thing as a monolithic flow
69:18
state, as we really get into it.
69:20
There will be kind of a scatter plot on a heat map.
69:23
And it will depend on the person,
69:25
it will depend on the environment,
69:27
and it will depend on the tasks at hand,
69:29
how exactly they get in there, which cascade they trigger
69:33
and to what extent.
69:35
And we will see probably areas of clustering.
69:38
But probably a much broader, complex equation than we
69:43
first talk about.
69:44
STEVEN KOTLER: And the one thing I want to add
69:45
is we talk about the action-and-adventure sports
69:47
athletes as this great example of flow hacking.
69:49
But we’re in Silicon Valley.
69:52
The three things that built this Valley
69:54
are network design, circuit design, and software design
69:57
pretty much.
69:58
And you can’t do any of those things well,
70:01
really, really well, without flow.
70:03
Coding and flow goes hand in hand.
70:05
The research goes all the back.
70:06
The same thing with all those categories.
70:08
So if you’re looking for a nonathletic example of what
70:10
happens when groups of people start getting into flow
70:12
on a regular basis, Silicon Valley
70:14
is not a bad place to start.
70:16
MALE SPEAKER: Big hand for Steven and Jamie.
70:18
Thank you.
70:18
STEVEN KOTLER: Thanks guys.
70:20
[APPLAUSE]
70:22
