More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 27 - October 31, 2018
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 the doorway to the ‘more’ most of us seek. Rather than telling ourselves to get used to it, that’s all there is, instead learn how to enter into flow. There you will find, in manageable doses, all the ‘more’ you need.”
Flow is an optimal state of consciousness, a peak state where we both feel our best and perform our best.
From a quality-of-life perspective, psychologists have found that the people who have the most flow in their lives are the happiest people on earth.
When you’re pushing the limits of ultimate human performance, the choice is stark: it’s flow or die.
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs most is more people who have come alive.”
Because an athlete’s canvas is nothing more than his body moving through space and time, then an act of genius must also be defined as an act of redefinition–redefining what is possible for the human body.
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.”
Did we somehow slip through a wormhole to another universe where the laws of physics don’t apply? Where gravity is optional and common sense obsolete?
the term impossible means anything here, it means the barriers being shattered exist beyond the confines of both biology and imagination.
Optimal performance is about being your best; ultimate performance is about being your best when any mistake could kill.
Where–if anywhere–do our actual limits lie?
relentless roar only truly silenced by the salvation of the edge. The edge is the one place these ghosts can’t follow.
The zone, quite literally, is the shortest path toward superman.
Heim survived the impact, but the mystery never left him. Panoramic vision? Time dilation? Heavenly music? None of this made any sense.
high-risk activity can profoundly alter consciousness and significantly enhance mental abilities.
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.”
“Great emergencies and crisis show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”
was a trail of mechanism: mindset impacts emotion, which alters biology, which increases performance. Thus, it seemed, by tinkering with mindset—using everything from physical to psychological to pharmacological interventions—one could significantly enhance performance.
[F]atigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed.
Mental activity shows the phenomenon as well as physical, and in exceptional cases we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points.
Way’s performance demonstrates the depth of our ignorance. We really have no idea how deep our reservoir runs, no clear estimate of where our limits lie.
“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.
It was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Me-high, Chick-sent-me-high), the former chairman of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology and now at Claremont Graduate University, who first coined the term flow.
High achievers, he came to see, were intrinsically motivated. They were deeply committed to testing limits and stretching potential, frequently using intensely focused activity for exactly this purpose.
“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.”
the feeling the activity produced, the why behind the enjoyment, was globally ubiquitous.
In fact, 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 li...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
It was clear from talking to them, that what kept them motivated was the quality of the experience they felt when they were involved with the activity. The feeling didn’t come when they were relaxing, when they were taking drugs or alcohol, or when they were consuming the expensive privileges of wealth. Rather, it often involved painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person’s capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery.
“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.”
while finding flow may be the goal of every athlete on the planet, for action and adventure sports athletes it’s a necessity.
In all other activities, flow is the hallmark of high performance, but in situations where the slightest error could be fatal, then perfection is the only choice—and flow is the only guarantee of perfection.
properties of flow: the profound mental clarity provided by the state (note the calm, rational nature of the mental argument); the emotional detachment that tends to accompany this clarity (Hamilton watched his own mind debate itself from a removed position); and a hint of its automatic nature—how one right decision always leads to the next right decision.
flow exists on a continuum, so not all of the remaining seven elements need to be present at the same time.
In microflow, only a few of his categories are fulfilled—say clear goals, concentration, and absorption, or what would happen if Laird Hamilton paddled out for an afternoon of mellow Malibu surf. Macroflow, on the other hand, is what occurs when all of Csikszentmihalyi’s conditions arrive at once—it’s the full Teahupoo.
Psychedelics, meditation, and dreams may bring fresh insight, but none requires that knowledge be immediately acted upon.
There are five major brain-wave types, each correlating to a different state of consciousness. “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
...more
This is also why Csikszentmihalyi found little activity in the prefrontal cortex of chess masters. After years of playing, they’d internalized board patterns and move sequences and didn’t have to rely on their conscious mind to work through every option.
In the beginning, they examined resting states, but beyond more low alpha/high theta in the baseline of experts—which, for the aforementioned reasons, was to be expected—there wasn’t much to see. Once they got those athletes moving, though, that story started to change.
“you still see this same fluidity in the transitions between states, but you also see even more control. Instead of producing all these other brain waves, 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.”
But when Jaws walled, Hamilton didn’t get pitched into the impact zone or sucked over the falls. Instead, with his feet still in his footstraps, he did something no one has ever done before: jumped forward, hopping the board clear out of the wave and then dropping fifteen feet straight down. He did this while still inside that roaring barrel. Stuck the landing too. Absorbed the impact and rode off clean.
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.
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.
Theta processes novel incoming stimuli; gamma is what happens when those stimuli snap...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
people in the zone are already “neurologically” poised on the brink of breakthrough. This means flow packs a double punch: it doesn’t just increase our decision-making abilities—it increases our creative decision-making abilities.
not only are creative insights consistently associated with flow states, but that amplified creativity outlasts the zone.
People report feeling extraordinarily creative the day after a flow state, suggesting that time spent in the zone trains the brain to consistently think outside the box.
When you tap into that much force while pushing the absolute limits of human performance, that’s more than just an imaginative breakthrough—that’s bending reality to your will.
