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