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

by Steven Kotler

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.

Cannon had discovered the “fight-or-flight response” and this rewrote the rule book. Until then, performance enhancement had always been divine in origin. Want to write a sonnet? Talk to the Muses. Want a better time in the 100-yard dash? Hermes can help. But the fight-or-flight response changed the equation, turning a gift from the gods into a byproduct of standard biology. And biology was hackable.

Out of this work emerged one of history’s stranger movements: the epic quest to hack ultimate human performance—a giant, global, mostly underground, often DIY, 100-plus-year effort to decode the mysteries of the zone. Adventurers, artists, academics, bohemian outcasts, maverick scientists, credentialed scientists, the psychedelic underground, paranormal researchers, the military’s special forces, the Pentagon’s top brass, the CEOs of major Fortune 500 companies, all got involved. Yet out of this hodgepodge—for reasons that comprise the bulk of this book—action and adventure sport athletes have become the most advanced practitioners of this art, an elite cadre of zone hackers, masters of the state now known to scientists as flow.

He started out interviewing experts: rock climbers, dancers, artists, surgeons, chess players, and the like. Next, he expanded his search to include Italian farmers, Navajo sheepherders, Chicago assembly-line workers, rebellious Japanese teenagers, elderly Korean women—a gargantuan assortment in total. 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.

This was a fairly startling finding. It meant that while the things people found enjoyable varied completely—the Japanese teenagers liked to swarm around on motorcycles and the elderly Korean women preferred meditation—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 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.

In his interviews, to describe these optimal states of performance, flow was a term his subjects kept using. When everything was going right, the work was effortless, fluid, and automatic—flowy. So 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.”

“When we watch a live concert or a traditional sports event,” says former head of innovation at Yahoo and Singularity University global ambassador Salim Ismail, “we’re essentially paying to watch people in a flow state. Whether it’s Kobe Bryant, Roger Federer, Jay-Z, or a jazz crooner, they’ve all put in endless hours of work so that when performance time comes, they are fully present and in flow. An actor with screen presence is there, too. A great poet can deliver flow to the reader just through the power of words.

Flow is more than an optimal state of consciousness—one where we feel our best and perform our best—it also appears to be the only practical answer to the question: What is the meaning of life? Flow is what makes life worth living.

In fact, despite the ephemeral nature of the experience, so consistent are its various features that 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.

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.

As those electric responses occur in bursts, they create waves—technically “brain waves”—which is what an EEG actually measures. 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 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.

Since low alpha/high theta is the dominant brain wave produced by the implicit system, this frequency has long been considered the signature of both high performance and flow states. But this idea is now starting to change—and Sherlin is part of the reason why.

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. “That’s the secret,” says Sherlin, “extremely fluid brain control. Most people can’t make it through the whole cycle. They get hung up somewhere. They either can’t generate all the necessary brain states or they can’t control them. Elite performers can produce the right brain wave at the right time, vary its intensity as needed, then smoothly transition to the next step. Mentally, they just take total charge of the situation.”

Flow states, which can be considered elite performance on overdrive, take this process one step farther. “In the zone,” says Sherlin, “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, ...

The angel/devil argument was really about alpha versus beta. The angel was alpha. It was the implicit system saying ‘let’s go for it, we know what to do.’ The devil was beta—it was the explicit system saying ‘hold up a second, let’s just gather more data.’ But the angel won. Hamilton made the right decision, suppressed that beta wave and got himself to alpha/theta—the zone—and held himself there.”

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. It makes sense. Theta processes novel incoming stimuli; gamma is what happens when those stimuli snap together into new ideas. But it’s hard to do any of this on command. It takes meditators a long time to get that kind of control. This is where athletes in flow have a huge edge—their brain is already in alpha/theta. They’re holding themselves in the only state that can produce that gamma spike.”

Not only does it elevate our problem-solving abilities, but—by holding themselves in low alpha/high theta needed to produce that gamma spike—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.

By day’s end, he was racing around the river, playing in rapids, all of his senses remarkably heightened. “That gave me a lot of confidence,” he says now, “but it also gave me a glimpse of the superpowers, and my first memory of the Voice.” The Voice—the voice of intuition—the center of the zone’s mystery. Everybody who has ever been in a flow state has heard it—a voice very different from the mind’s normal chatter. Neuroscientist David Eagleman likes to quote Pink Floyd when describing this facet: “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me,” while the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti refers to this someone as “the Tyrant.” Certainly, both statements track with Potter’s experience: “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.”

So what is the Voice? Carl Jung defined intuition as “perception via the unconscious” and the Voice is the end result of that perception—the unconscious mind broadcasting its perceptions to the conscious mind.

Of course, it’s not always a voice. Some people see images; others get strong feelings. Occasionally, the information arrives by multiple channels....

Intuition is a permanent feature of standard brain function—meaning the Voice is always communicating with us—yet we can rarely hear it. The data is diluted and distorted by everything else the mind is considering. But in flow, for reasons we’ll explore in this chapter, the signal is stronger, the message clearer, and for those on the receiving end, the feeling accompanying that broadcast...

“I went to Patagonia to cultivate my intuition—to listen to the Voice. When I’m really in tune with it, really deep in the zone, I get to a place where I disappear completely, where I merge with the rock, when time slows down, my senses are unbelievably heightened, and I feel that oneness, that full-body psychic connection to the universe. It took risking my life to get there, but mission accomplished. And that’s why I climb. I crave these experiences. I certainly don’t climb to get on top of rocks.”

“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.”

So Dietrich started to wonder how the brain was eliminating this complexity—which is when it dawned on him: the brain wasn’t eliminating complexity, it was eliminating the very structures that created this complexity. “We had it backward,” he says. “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.”

Another breakthrough occurred in 2008, when Johns Hopkins 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—both of which are important here.

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. When the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex goes quiet, those guesses are cut off at the source. The result is liberation. We act without hesitation. Creativity becomes more free-flowing, risk taking becomes less frightening.

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

Normally, people can access about 65 percent of their absolute strength; trained weight lifters can get this up to about 80 percent. But that’s usually the end of the line. If we could access all our strength on command, we could very easily overextend ourselves, pushing beyond our limits and doing serious damage along the way.

Flow changes this entire dynamic. 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 (more on this in the next chapter). Simultaneously, 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.

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. In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi explains further: “One of the most common descriptions of optimal experience is that time no longer seems to pass the way it ordinarily does. 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.… [I]n general, most people report that time seems to pass much faster. But occasionally the reverse occurs.”

It was Jefferson University neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and University of Pennsylvania neuropsychologist Eugene D’Aquili who gave us our first real insight into this experience. Back in 1991, they were investigating a different version of oneness—the kind produced by meditation. In deep contemplative states, Tibetan Buddhists report “absolute unitary being,” or the feeling of becoming one with everything, while Franciscan nuns experience unia mysica, or oneness with God’s love. So Newberg and D’Aquili put both Buddhists and nuns inside a single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) scanner to try to figure out if there was biology beneath this spirituality.

The SPECT scan revealed biology all right, and hypofrontality to be exact. In moments of intense concentration, the same efficiency exchange that erases our sense of self and distorts our sense of time begins to impact our relationship to space.

Instead of taking place in the prefrontal lobes, this hypofrontality occurs farther back in the cortex, in the superior parietal lobe, a portion of the brain that Newberg and D’Aquili dubbed the orientation as...

When functioning normally, the OAA is a navigation system. It judges angles and distances, maps course trajectories, and keeps track of our body’s exact location. But to do this last part, the superior parietal lobe must also produce a boundary line: the border of self, the division between finite “us” and the infinite “not us” that is the rest of the universe. Obviously, drawing this border is no simple task. So the OAA depends on a constant stream of incoming messages. All of our senses send data here. Incredible calculations occur. But all of this takes a lot of energy. When that energy is needed elsewhere—like during moments of intense focus—the OAA stops performing those calculations because it stops receiving those signals. Without this data stream, this part of the brain is temporarily blinded—it too becomes hypofrontal—and to incredible result. “Once this happen...

The next neurotransmitter is anandamide, which takes its name from the Sanskrit word for “bliss”—and for good reason. Anandamide is an endogenous cannabinoid, and similarly feels like the psychoactive effect found in marijuana. Known to show up in exercise-induced flow states (and suspected in other kinds), this chemical elevates mood, relieves pain, dilates blood vessels and bronchial tubes (aiding respiration), and amplifies lateral thinking (our ability to link disparate ideas together). 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.

These five chemicals are flow’s mighty cocktail. Alone, each packs a punch, together a wallop. Consider the chain of events that takes us from pattern recognition through future prediction. Norepinephrine tightens focus (data acquisition); dopamine jacks pattern recognition (data processing); anandamide accelerates lateral thinking (widens the database searched by the pattern recognition system). The results, as basketball legend Bill Russell explains in his biography Second Wind, really do feel psychic:

To this end, flow’s neurochemistry performs an added function: it accelerates social bonding. Ever fall in love? That high—the sleeplessness, giddiness, hyperactivity, loss of appetite, etc.—that’s dopamine and norepinephrine at work. These are the neurochemicals that reinforce romantic love. Endorphins serve a similar function, only showing up in maternal love (in infants) and general attachment (in adults). Serotonin, as well, further reinforces love and attachment (alongside oxytocin). And anandamide, as any pot smoker will attest, makes one feel open, expansive, and empathetic—all of which further improves connection.

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, situational awareness is essentially the ability to keep cool when all hell breaks loose. Because attention and pattern recognition are so heightened by flow, training in the state radically increases situational awareness.

Prodigies, it seemed, were made, not born. As Bloom later told reporters: “We were looking for exceptional kids, but what we found were exceptional conditions.”

After three decades of research, Zimbardo found that the healthiest, happiest, highest performers blend the best of both worlds. The optimal time perspective combines the energy, joy, and openness of Presents, with the strength, fortitude, and long-term vision of the Futures.

“Studies have shown that each time a flow state is disrupted it takes fifteen minutes to get back into flow, if you can get back at all.”

Evolution hardwired humans to pay attention to certain stimuli more than others and, as these athletes have discovered, nothing catches our attention quite like danger.

extreme athletes use risk as a “flow hack” because flow follows focus and consequences catch our attention.

Once danger becomes its own reward, risk moves from a threat to be avoided to a challenge to be risen toward. An entirely new relationship with fear begins to develop. When risk is a challenge, fear becomes a compass—literally pointing people in the direction they need to go next (i.e., the direction that produces more flow).

“If you’re interested in mastery,” says University of Cambridge, England, neuropsychologist Barbara Sahakian, “you have to learn this lesson. To really achieve anything,

you have to be able to tolerate and enjoy risk. It has to become a challenge to look forward to. In all fields, to make exceptional discoveries you need risk—you’re just ...

“To reach flow,” explains Harvard psychiatrist Ned Hallowell, “one must be willing to take risks. The lover must lay bare his soul and risk rejection and humiliation to enter this state. The athlete must be willing to risk physical harm, even loss of life, to enter this state. The artist must be willing to be scorned and despised by critics and the public and still push on. And the average person—you and me—must be willing to fail, look foolish, and fall flat on our faces should we wish to enter this state.”