The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

by Steven Kotler

If you’ve ever lost an afternoon to a great conversation or gotten so involved in a work project that all else is forgotten, then you’ve tasted the experience.

In flow, we are so focused on the task at hand that everything else falls away. Action and awareness merge. Time flies. Self vanishes. Performance goes through the roof.

Flow is an optimal state of consciousness, a peak state where we both feel our best and perform our best.

the people who have the most flow in their lives are the happiest people on earth.

Think about this for a moment. Diving took a century to add 900 degrees to its tally, but skiers somehow pushed their total up 1,640 degrees in slightly more than a decade?

When, in the history of sport, has athletic performance quintupled in fifteen years?

It took riders decades to close in on the back flip. To get to double backflips four years later? It’s hard to wrap your head around that.”

Optimal performance is about being your best; ultimate performance is about being your best when any mistake could kill.

“If you want to ride the ultimate wave,” said Foo–as often as possible, always when there were journalists around– “you have to be willing to pay the ultimate price.”

when I’m really pushing the edge and skating beyond my abilities, there’s a zone I get into. Everything goes silent. Time slows down. My peripheral vision fades away. It’s the most peaceful state of mind I’ve ever known. I’ll take all the failures. As long as I know that feeling is coming, that’s enough to keep going.”

If you want to talk about pushing limits, most people can’t even stand on a broken ankle. Danny not only stood, he withstood four Gs of pressure going into that quarterpipe—five times in a row.”

“Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.”

Cannon was interested in the strange physiological changes produced by powerful emotions. In all mammals, rage, anger, and fear produce an assortment of peculiarity: heart rates speed up, pupils dilate, nostrils flare, muscles tighten, digestion ceases, senses perk and sharpen—the list goes on. Around 1916, Cannon decided these disparate reactions were actually a global response by the nervous system to extreme stress, a response with a purpose: increase strength and stamina. Cannon had discovered the “fight-or-flight response” and this rewrote the rule book.

mindset impacts emotion, which alters biology, which increases performance.

“Every good athlete can find the flow,” continues Pastrana, “but it’s what you do with it that makes you great. If you consistently use that state to do the impossible, you get confident in your ability to do the impossible. You begin to expect it.

“During a peak experience,” Maslow explained, “the individual experiences an expansion of self, a sense of unity, and meaningfulness in life. The experience lingers in one’s consciousness and gives a sense of purpose, integration, self-determination and empathy.”

Surprisingly, and regardless of culture, level of modernization, age, social class, or gender, all of these people told him the same thing: when they were at their best and felt their best was when they were experiencing sensations very similar to Maslow’s peak experiences.

when Csikszentmihalyi dove deeper into the data, he discovered that the happiest people on earth, the ones who felt their lives had the most meaning, were those who had the most peak experiences.

The happiest people on earth worked hard for their fulfillment. They didn’t just have the most peak experiences, they had devoted their lives to having these experiences, often,

Csikszentmihalyi, in keeping with tradition, renamed “peak experiences,” instead calling them “flow states.” He defined the state as “being so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” And those skills are significantly magnified. Physical skills, mental skills, psychological skills, social skills, creative skills, decision-making skills—the list goes on.

“Imagination,” says futurist and philosopher Jason Silva, “allows us to conceive of delightful future possibilities, pick the most amazing one, and pull the present forward to meet it.”

Csikszentmihalyi was able to sift through the data and isolate ten core components which demarcate the state. Here’s his list: Clear goals: Expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities. Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high. Concentration: A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness: The merging of action and awareness. Distorted sense of time: One’s subjective experience of time is altered. Direct and immediate feedback: Successes and failures are apparent, so behavior can be adjusted as needed. Balance between ability level and challenge: The activity is neither too easy nor too difficult. A sense of personal control over the situation. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so action is effortlessness. A lack of awareness of bodily needs. Absorption: narrowing of awareness down to the activity itself.

out of this total, three of the components—clear goals, immediate feedback, and the challenge/skill ratio (all of which we’ll explore in greater detail later)—are considered “conditions for flow.” They do not actually describe the state itself.

“Whenever you encounter stimuli or have a thought,” explains Sherlin, “the brain has an electrical response. EEG measures those responses down to the 1/1000 of a second range, which allows us to track how the brain changes across time. When someone is decision making—and this can be an athlete solving a physical problem or an artist solving an aesthetic one—we can see everything that leads up to a decision, the decision itself, and everything that happens as a result. No other technology can do that.”

“Delta,” the slowest brain wave (meaning the one with the longest pauses between bursts of electricity), is found between 1 Hz and 3.9 Hz. When someone is in a deep, dreamless sleep, they’re in delta. Next up, between 4 Hz and 7.9 Hz, is “theta,” which correlates to REM sleep, meditation, insight, and (as is often necessary for insight) the processing of novel incoming stimuli. Between 8 Hz and 13.9 Hz hovers “alpha,” the brain’s basic resting state. People in alpha are relaxed, calm, and lucid, but not really thinking. Beta sits between 14 Hz and 30 Hz, and signifies learning and concentration at the low end, fear and stress at the high. Above 30 Hz there’s a fast-moving wave known as “gamma,” which only shows up during “binding,” when different parts of the brain are combining disparate thoughts into a single idea.

Back in the 1970s, Csikszentmihalyi used EEG to examine the brains of chess masters midgame. He found a significant decrease in activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain housing most of our higher cognitive functions.

When any of us make decisions, our brains go through a six-stage cycle. Before the novel stimuli shows up (which is what starts the whole process), we’re in a baseline state. Then we move to problem-solving analysis, pre-action readiness, action, post-action evaluation, and back to baseline. Each of these stages requires different parts of the brain and produces different brain waves: theta for processing novel stimuli, beta for analysis, alpha for action, etc. When Sherlin and his team examined the data, what became clear was that the best athletes moved through this entire cycle fluidly, seamlessly transitioning from step to step.

really great athletes can transition smoothly into the zone, creating that low alpha/high theta wave, and then hold themselves there, sort of in suspended animation, shutting out the conscious mind and letting the implicit system do its stuff.”

our creativity lies deeply rooted in the right side of the brain: the side dominated by the implicit system. The reason has to do with the structure of neural networks. When the explicit system (mostly on the left side of the brain) handles a problem, the neurons involved are very close to one another. This much proximity leads to linear connections, logical deductions, and all the other keystones of standard reasoning. When the implicit system is at work, its reach is much broader—far-flung corners of the brain are talking to one another. This is known to experts as “lateral thinking” or, to the business executives who so crave this talent: “thinking outside the box.” It means that novel stimuli can combine with random thoughts and obscure memories and the result is something utterly new.

Creativity has a brain wave signature as well: alpha waves pulsing out of the brain’s right hemisphere. This is considered the readiness state for sudden insight—meaning not the revelation itself, rather its precursor condition.

without a calm, relaxed frame of mind, the brain is incapable of switching from beta-dominant localized networks to alpha-driven widespread webs.

Exactly thirty milliseconds before the breakthrough intuition arrives, EEG shows a burst of gamma waves. These ultrafast brain waves appear when a bunch of widely distributed cells—i.e., novel stimuli, random thoughts, and obscure memories—bind themselves together into a brand-new network. It is the brain-wave signature of the “Aha!” moment.

“But the interesting thing about a gamma spike,” explains Leslie Sherlin, “is that it always happens inside of theta oscillations. The two waves are coupled.

Theta processes novel incoming stimuli; gamma is what happens when those stimuli snap...

“The prefrontal cortex is where thinking happens,” he explains. “It’s where we take simple ideas and add all kind of layers of complexity to them. But I was slipping into flow of a regular basis and always amazed by the clarity of the state. All that complexity was gone. Decisions were easy and automatic. It was like the opposite of thinking.”

“In flow, parts of the PFC aren’t becoming hyperactive; parts of it are temporarily deactivating. It’s an efficiency exchange. We’re trading energy usually used for higher cognitive functions for heightened attention and awareness.”

In 2006, for example, a team of Israeli scientists discovered that when people lose themselves in a task—be it playing cards or having sex or climbing a mountain—a part of the brain called the superior frontal gyrus starts to deactivate. The superior frontal gyrus helps produce our sense of self, that introspective feeling of self-awareness,

neuroscientist Charles Limb began using fMRI to examine the brains of improv jazz musicians and freestyle rappers immersed in flow. He found the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is also deactivated in the state. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is an area of the brain best known for self-monitoring and impulse control

flow also activates the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that governs creative self-expression.

transient hypofrontality removes our sense of self. With parts of the prefrontal cortex deactivated, there’s no risk assessor, future predictor, or inner critic around to monitor the situation. The normal safety measures kept in place by the conscious mind are no longer. This is another reason why flow states significantly enhance performance: when the “self” disappears, it takes many of our limits along for the ride.

As focus tightens, the brain stops multitasking. Energy normally used for temporal processing is reallocated for attention and awareness. Instead of keeping time, we are taking in more data per second, processing it more completely, and, perhaps—though great debate rages around this point—processing more of it per second.

Focus is focus. There’s little difference between the amount of concentration needed by a meditator to achieve “ecstasy” and the amount required by a BASE jumper leaping into a cave. Danger heightens attention. Thus the big mountains and big waves allow us to cheat this process, a fact Potter openly acknowledges: “I take the easy way,” he says. “I can sit on my ass and meditate for two hours to get a fifteen-second glimpse of this state. Or I can risk my life and get there instantly—and it lasts for hours.”

Normals made it to the other side 55 percent of the time, athletes 72 percent of the time. The more interesting part was why. The assumption was that physical fitness accounted for the athletes’ success. But this wasn’t what the researchers discovered. It wasn’t that the athletes were quicker or more agile. They didn’t dodge and weave through traffic better than the normal students. Instead, they could assimilate and apply incoming information with more speed and accuracy than nonathletes. Neuroscientist Art Kramer, who oversaw this work, told the New York Times: “They didn’t move faster, but it looks like they thought faster.”

Over the past few decades, neuroscientists have discovered that the main job of the neocortex is to predict the future.

the senses gather data and the brain uses that information to make predictions about what’s happening in the world before it’s happened.

When the sensory input does arrive, it is compared with what was expected. As you approach the door, your cortex is forming a slew of predictions based on past experience. As you reach out, it predicts what you will feel on your fingers, when you will feel the door, and at what angle your joints will be when they actually touch the door. As you start to push the door open, your cortex predicts how much resistance the door will offer and how it will sound. When your predictions are all met, you walk through the door without consciously knowing these predictions were verified. But if your expectations about the door are violated, the error will cause you to take notice. Correct predictions result in understanding. Incorrect predictions result in confusion and prompt you to pay attention. The door latch is not where it is supposed to be. The door is too light. The door is off center. The texture of the knob is wrong. We are making continuous low-level predictions in parallel across all our senses.

Flow’s two defining characteristics are its feel-good nature (flow is always a positive experience) and its function as a performance enhancer.

level, neurochemicals are “information molecules” used by the brain to transmit messages. Mostly, these messages are either excitatory or inhibitory: Do more of what you’re doing or Do less of what you’re doing. But these small signals add up quickly, changing emotions, altering thoughts, fine-tuning reactions—essentially shaping our response to external events.

Emotionally, we feel dopamine as engagement, excitement, creativity, and a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world. Evolutionarily, it serves a similar function. Human beings are hardwired for exploration, hardwired to push the envelope: dopamine is largely responsible for that wiring. This neurochemical is released whenever we take a risk or encounter something novel. It rewards exploratory behavior. It also helps us survive that behavior. By increasing attention, information flow, and pattern recognition in the brain, and heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle firing timing in the body, dopamine serves as a formidable skill-booster as well.

Norepinephrine provides another boost. In the body, it speeds up heart rate, muscle tension, and respiration, and triggers glucose release so we have more energy. In the brain, norepinephrine increases arousal, attention, neural efficiency, and emotional control. In flow, it keeps us locked on target, holding distractions at bay. And as a pleasure-inducer, if dopamine’s drug analog is cocaine, norepinephrine’s is speed, which means this enhancement comes with a hell of a high.