More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 27 - October 31, 2018
Without ropes or gear in the way, there is only the climber and the rock, as intimate and personal a relationship as can be had with big nature.
“I’d be running and it would be hard and then I’d check out for a little while. I saw early on that being exhausted made it easier to quiet the mind and get to the zone.”
“Right before I have to make a move, the Voice tells me what to do. And it’s never wrong. When the Voice tells you to do something, you do it: right then, don’t think, no questions asked. Not listening to the Voice is what’ll get you killed. I learned that really early in my climbing career.”
the Voice is the end result of that perception—the unconscious mind broadcasting its perceptions to the conscious mind.
for those on the receiving end, the feeling accompanying that broadcast is often one of profound relief—a sense that finally, at long last, someone else is driving this bus.
If we assume a three-foot height gain per move, getting to Fitz Roy’s apex meant the Voice would have to make 670 correct decisions in a row—and Potter could question none of them.
The experiences that Potter craves—the disappearance of self, the distortion of time, and that “psychic connection” to the universe—are among flow’s more famous qualities, also its most peculiar.
Like many endurance athletes, he found long runs were an easy entrance to the zone—and this led to questions.
“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.”
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.
Self-monitoring is the voice of doubt and disparagement, that defeatist nag, our inner critic. Since flow is a fluid state—where problem solving is nearly automatic—second-guessing can only slow that process.
frightening. In fact, without this structure deactivated, there would have been no way for Potter to “follow the Voice, no questions asked.” The job of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is to ask those questions, to start the process of second-guessing. It is the enemy of flow junkies everywhere.
Instead, a hyperactive medial prefrontal cortex ensures that even with self-awareness out of the way, our personal preferences still leak through.
For starters, in the zone, the brain releases a number of powerful painkillers that deaden us to the damage being done and allow us to push our maximal strength closer to its absolute boundary
With parts of the prefrontal cortex deactivated, there’s no risk assessor, future predictor, or inner critic around to monitor the situation.
This is another reason why flow states significantly enhance performance: when the “self” disappears, it takes many of our limits along for the ride.
The technical name for Potter’s experience is “time dilation.” Normally, in the zone, after self-awareness starts to fade, temporal awareness tends to follow.
The objective, external duration we measure with reference to outside events like night and day, or the orderly progression of clocks, is rendered irrelevant by the rhythms dictated by the activity.…
The same events that erase our sense of self also distort our sense of time.
This means that time, much like self, is a summary judgment, a democratic conclusion reached by a vast prefrontal caucus.
“Because flow deactivates large parts of the neocortex,” says Eagleman, “a number of these areas are offline—thus distorting our ability to compute time.”
Our sense of how long “the now” lasts is directly related to information processing: The more stuff we’re processing, the longer the moment appears to last.
“Once this happens,” says Newberg, “we can no longer draw a line and say this is where the self ends and this is where the rest of the world begins, so the brain concludes, it has to conclude, that at this moment you are one with everything.”
Oneness is the result of the narrowing of the doors of perception, not throwing them wide open. Huxley had it exactly backward.
Danger heightens attention.
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.”
The problem is fear, which stands between us and all actions. Yet our fears are grounded in self, time, and space. With our sense of self out of the way we are liberated from doubt and insecurity. With time gone, there is no yesterday to regret or tomorrow to worry about. And when our sense of space disappears, so do physical consequences. But when all three vanish at once, something far more incredible occurs: our fear of death—that most fundamental of all fears—can no longer exist. Simply put: if you’re infinite and atemporal, you cannot die.
With self, time, and space erased from the picture, all that complexity that Dietrich mentioned is edited out. It’s not that the Voice is turned up louder in the zone, it’s that everything that stands between us and the message is removed from the picture.
Holmes is both a professional big-mountain skier and a member of the Red Bull Air Force, arguably the greatest assembly of skydivers, BASE jumpers, wingsuit flyers, and paraglider pilots in the world.
“They didn’t move faster, but it looks like they thought faster.”
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.
Correct predictions result in understanding. Incorrect predictions result in confusion and prompt you to pay attention.
We are making continuous low-level predictions in parallel across all our senses.
Once we do the hard work of identifying that first pattern, the dopamine dumped in our system primes us to pick out the next. And the next.
Neurons that fire together wire together. The more times a particular pattern fires, the stronger the connection between neurons becomes, and the faster information flows along this route.
Sports usually involve making calculations about approaching objects and reaction times.
He needs to have learned the patterns so well and trust his predictions so much that even before JT’s foot begins to twitch, his implicit system has already identified the chunk and triggered the reaction.
Emotionally, we feel dopamine as engagement, excitement, creativity, and a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world.
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.
Endorphins, our third flow conspirator, also come with a hell of a high. These natural “endogenous” (meaning naturally internal to the body) opiates relieve pain and produce pleasure much like “exogenous” (externally added to the body) opiates like heroin.
More critically, anandamide also inhibits our ability to feel fear, even, possibly, according to research done at Duke, facilitates the extinction of long-term fear memories.
Training in high-stress situations increases what psychologists call “situational awareness.” Defined as the ability to absorb information accurately, assess it calmly, and respond appropriately,
But unlike the dead-end highs currently plaguing public health, flow doesn’t sidetrack one’s life; it revitalizes it.
flow is the telephone booth where Clark Kent changes clothes, the place from where Superman emerges.
that if we really want to be our best, we don’t just have to rethink the path toward mastery; we need to reconsider the way we live our lives.
“We were looking for exceptional kids, but what we found were exceptional conditions.”
And what’s more, the people at the top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.”
The ability to delay gratification at four is twice as good a predictor of later SAT scores as IQ. Poor impulse control is also a better predictor of juvenile delinquency than IQ.”
The horrors and sheer ugliness of the past they have experienced become a permanent filter through which they view all their current experiences.”
While presents avoid work…futures consider work a source of special pleasure. For them, tomorrow’s anticipated gains and losses fuel today’s decisions and actions.
