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

by Steven Kotler

virtually all of this massively accelerated performance has occurred within the world of action and adventure sports.

when it comes to riding 100-foot waves and hucking 100-foot cliffs, most of us see daredevil magic: unfathomable stunts, insane athletes–enough said.

Behind each of these feats is a litany of small steps: history, technology, training–and not just physical training, mental training as well. Success in these danger-fueled activities requires incredible psychological and intellectual talents: grit, fortitude, courage, creativity, resilience, cooperation, critical thinking, pattern recognition, high-speed “hot” decision making–on and on, and all under some of the most extreme conditions imaginable.

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 naturally catapults you to a level you’re not naturally in,” explains Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Ned Hallowell. “Flow naturally transforms a weakling into a muscleman, a sketcher into an artist, a dancer into a ballerina, a plodder into a sprinter, an ordinary person into someone extraordinary. Everything you do, you do better in flow, from baking a chocolate cake to planning a vacation to solving a differential equation to writing a business plan to playing tennis to making love. 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 is an optimal state of consciousness, a peak state where we both feel our best and perform our best. It is a transformation available to anyone, anywhere, provided that certain initial conditions are met. Everyone from assembly-line workers in Detroit to jazz musicians in Algeria to software designers in Mumbai rely on flow to drive performance and accelerate innovation. And it’s quite a driver.

As CNN recently reported: “A decade of research in the business world proves happiness raises nearly every business and educational outcome: raising sales by 37 percent, productivity by 31 percent, and accuracy on tasks by 19 percent, as well as a myriad of health and quality-of-life improvements.”

Knowing that survival demands flow gives us a hard data set with which to work. We don’t have to wonder if our research subjects are really in flow: if they live through the impossible, we can be certain. Moreover, by mapping this new science onto these extreme activities,

Is that really true..?

The thinking needs to be novel, so the results need to be beyond what most can envision. As it takes courage to push past the confines of culture, the thinking must also be brave.

So decoding these phenomena tells us something deep and important about accelerating

human potential, creativity, and innovation–but it tells us more than that.

The past three decades have witnessed unprecedented growth in what researchers now term ultimate human performance. This is not the same as optimal human performance, and the difference is in the consequences. Optimal performance is about being your best; ultimate performance is about being your best when any mistake could kill. Both common sense and evolutionary biology tell us that progress unde...

These days, scientists consider the fear of death the fundamental human motivator, the most primary of our primary drives.

I am not afraid to die pet say

That commanding lead has been erased. It’s down to Kerri Strug, but hers is a difficult trick, and she underrotates, lands awkwardly, and hears a loud snap. Her ankle is now badly sprained. She is limping, in considerable pain, but if she doesn’t stick her next attempt, the Russians will take home gold. The United States is in a tough spot. Strug, a four-foot-nine gymnast from Tucson, Arizona, has always been their weakest link. As ESPN The Magazine once wrote: “Strug…does not possess the fearlessness, the toughness, the aggressiveness, the heart and the threshold of pain as her teammates.” All of this changes on her second attempt. She tears down the runway, nails her back handspring, flawlessly flips over the vault, and perfectly lands a difficult twisting dismount. On impact, she hears another snap. Gingerly, like a dancer, Strug tucks that leg behind her, never losing her balance. She hops in one direction, then another, both times raising her arms in the traditional judges’ salute. An instant later she collapses, but not before scoring a 9.712 and taking home the hardware.

Motivation

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.”

That feeling

Well, to start where most start, the psychological: the undisputable fact that the ghosts that hunt for Danny Way are unremitting. They are legion. The ghosts of his injured brother, his alcoholic mother, his dead father, his dead stepfather, his first coach, the man who saved him from himself, T-boned at a stoplight and dead also, his best friend in jail for murder, his broken neck, his broken back, his umpteen surgeries, his anger, his pride—a relentless roar only truly silenced by the salvation of the edge.

Rage

it’s always a meditation in the zone.”

The zone, quite literally, is the shortest path toward superman. And this is a book about that zone.

The first thing Heim noticed was that he’d dropped into another dimension. His senses were exquisitely heightened, his vision panoramic. Time had slowed to a crawl. He could see his brother and his friends and the horrified look on their faces, but—as he explained later—felt “no anxiety, no trace of despair or pain…rather calm seriousness, profound acceptance and a dominant mental quickness.” With his life unfolding in slow motion, Heim had time to survey the territory and begin making rescue plans. He imagined scenarios for slight injuries, others for serious injuries: where would he land, how would he bounce, and how his companions would make it down to his body. Then he realized he was never going to survive this fall and thus would be dead and unable to deliver the lecture he was supposed to give in five days. At Oxford University, no less, his first major Oxford lecture. He’d have to find a substitute. Then again,

he’d be dead, so someone else was going to have to find a substitute. Next he tried to take off his glasses—to protect his eyes, of course—but was unable to reach them. Instead, he said goodbye to his family and his friends, and was that heavenly music he heard? But wait, if he did survive the fall, then he probably would be stunned by the impact. Since he didn’t want to go stumbling off another cliff, the first thing he needed to do was revive his senses. A few drops of vinegar on his tongue should do the trick, and on and on until, as he later recounted: “I heard a dull thud and my fall was over.”

A staggering 95 percent reported similar anomalous events. What was causing them would remain a matter of long debate, but Heim’s work marks the first scientific

Many of Heim’s subjects reported these profoundly altered states without being in actual jeopardy—they only thought they were in life-threatening situations. This was a key detail. These experiences seemed mystical. If they only arose solely in dire straights, then perhaps they really were communiqués from beyond the beyond. Yet if perception and psychology were the triggers, then the puzzle was more physiological than paranormal—and that opened the door to considerably more interesting possibilities.

James also noted two more key details. The first was that these experiences were profound—people were radically different on the other side. Happier, more content, significantly more fulfilled. The results were undeniable. No matter the seemingly fantastic nature of the events, James was certain they produced changes that were undeniably psychologically real.

The work of Heim and James laid the foundation for a deeper inquiry into human potential, but it was the discovery of one of James’s students, Walter Bradford Cannon, that truly changed the nature of the game. 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.

It 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.

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 ...

“I’ve gotten really good at pulling the veil down,” says Way, “at camouflaging reality, locking out my conscious mind and riding my focus into the zone.”

Danny Way has spent his life pushing past obstruction. Skating gave him a family and a sense of belonging, and he feels strongly that the only way to honor that debt is to continue progressing his sport. To that point, the medical staff checks out his ankle. It’s clearly destroyed. They tell him he needs to go to the hospital, that he should seriously consider calling it a day. Way shakes his head against the idea. “That’s not my style,” he says.

“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

Then, one Sunday afternoon in Zurich, he attended a free lecture by Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology.

What????

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. But this focused activity, Maslow also noticed, produced a significant reward of its own: altering consciousness, creating experiences very similar to those James had dubbed “mystical.” Except, the key difference: few of Maslow’s subjects were even religious. So Maslow secularized James’s terminology. “Mystical experiences” were out; “peak experiences” were in—the sensation, though, was the same. “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 peak experience is felt as a self-validating, self-justifying moment.… It is felt to be a highly valuable—even uniquely valuable—experience, so great an experience sometimes that even to attempt to justify it takes away from its dignity and worth. As a matter of fact, so many people find this so great and high an experience that it justifies not only itself, but even living itself. Peak experiences can make life worthwhile by their occasional occurrence. They give meaning to life itself. They prove it to be worthwhile. To say this in a negative way, I would guess that peak experiences help to prevent suicide.

in his 1996 book Creativity, going to extreme lengths to seek them out: 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.

wrote Csikszentmihalyi, alongside psychologist Susan Jackson, in Flow in Sports. “In many ways, one might say that the whole effort of humankind through millennia of history has been to capture these fleeting moments of fulfillment and make them part of everyday existence.”

Temple University sports psychologist Michael Sachs, who made an extensive study of these states, summed this up nicely: “Every gold medal or world championship that’s ever been won, most likely, we now know, there’s a flow state behind the victory.”

Thus, flow is the only way to survive in the fluid, life-threatening conditions of big waves, big rivers, and big-mountains. Without it, equipment like the MegaRamp remain a pipe dream or a death sentence. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. Or, as Danny Way explains: “It’s either find the zone or suffer the consequences—there’s no other choice available.”

“People always ask me if I feel fear in the big waves. Of course, I’m afraid. If I was out in fifty-foot surf and I’m not feeling fear, then I’m not properly assessing the situation.

In the middle of that maelstrom how did his mind say this is what I have to do? No one had ever ridden as Laird rode on that wave before. He couldn’t practice. So it was his imagination dealing with that unimaginable energy and coming up with the plan spontaneously.”

“Laird’s wave at Teahupoo was the…single most significant ride in surfing history,” continues George. “More than any other ride.… [W]hat it did was completely restructure our entire, collective perception of what was possible.”

Flow tends to be the psychic signature of world-class performance and paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, and clearly Hamilton’s effort falls into both categories. Moreover, as Danny Way pointed out, there’s just no other way to survive such a situation.

Our next general concern is the definition of terms. What is flow exactly? Scientists describe it either as a “state of consciousness” or an “altered state of consciousness,” though neither phrase completely satisfies. Consciousness itself is a slippery subject. There is no agreed upon definition of the term, nor accurate taxonomy of its various states. Traditionally, researchers divide consciousness into sleeping, waking, and dreaming,

Hamilton was hypervigilant and totally unresponsive and both at the same time. So unlike most other states of consciousness, which are defined by a singular type of attention, flow breaks boundaries, straddling multiple categories at once. Nor does flow fit comfortably into the standard definition of an “altered state of consciousness,”

Within this experience, we discover three of the more curious and basic 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. Within the zone, all of these elements are standard fare, turning up in thousands upon

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.

Flow is an extremely efficient and effective decision-making strategy. But this does raise an additional question: How does flow enable us to make such good decisions?

Leslie Sherlin studies the brains of people making decisions—very, very good decisions. He’s one of the world’s leading experts in the neuroscience of high

performance, having spent his career trying to figure out what separates guys like Laird Hamilton from the rest of us. “It’s not just talent and training,” says Sherlin, “it’s something else. And, whatever that something else is, I sure don’t have it.”

He changed directions, replacing baroque and classical with psychology and neuroscience, specifically focusing on qualitative electroencephalography (EEG)—which had the benefits of being cheap, easy, reliable, and the exact right tool for the job. “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