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

by Steven Kotler

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.”

Thus, when decisions are being made, EEG can help determine the structure of the network involved in the process. In fact, it was this network detection ability that gave us our first neurological insights into flow. 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. This may seem surprising. Chess is a game of reasoning, planning, and strategy,

This system relies on skill and experience, is not consciously accessible, and cannot be described verbally (i.e., try to explain a hunch).

“Think of a factory,” says Sherlin. “If all the workers are broken into little pods and they’re all doing unique things at unique times, that’s the explicit system. On an EEG, it shows up as beta. Replace those pods with a giant assembly line, one where the work is extremely rhythmic, fluid, and collaborative—aimed at a collective goal—that’s the implicit system. It’s usually denoted by a low alpha/high theta wave.”

There are two advantages to the brain using the implicit system. The first is speed. “When the brain finds a task it needs to solve,” writes Baylor neuroscientist David Eagleman in Incognito, “it rewires its own circuitry until it can accomplish this task with maximum efficiency. The task becomes burned into the machinery.… Automatization permits fast decision making. Only when the slow system of consciousness is pushed to the back of the queue can rapid programs do their work. Should I swing forehand or backhand at the approaching tennis ball? With a ninety-mile-per-hour projectile on its way, one does not want to cognitively slog through the different options.” Efficiency is the second advantage. Our brain is 2 percent of our body by weight, yet consumes 20 percent of our energy.

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. While he runs a number of different companies and holds four different academic appointments, Sherlin also serves as chief science

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.”

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.”

Not surprisingly, 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

Hmmm ... really

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.”

According to research done by Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile, 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.

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,”

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.

Neuroanatomy for starters. The brain is specialized. Different areas do different jobs. So understanding how the brain produces an experience requires understanding what parts of the brain are involved in that production and, for most of the past century, our imaging technologies weren’t up to the task.

Says who?

“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—

The technical term for this exchange is transient hypofrontality, with hypo (meaning slow) being the opposite of hyper (i.e., fast). In flow, which parts of the brain become

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. Impulse control, meanwhile, is another enemy. In normal life, our ability to resist temptation is critical to survival, but flow is an action state: the Voice tells us what to do and we do it. If we are trying to control our impulses, hesitation would creep into the process. The end result would be much less

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.

Why this happens, as Baylor neuroscientist David Eagleman discovered, also comes down to hypofrontality. The same events that erase our sense of self also distort our sense of time. In a series of elegant fMRI experiments, Eagleman found that temporal awareness is not centralized in any one location in the brain; rather, it is calculated by multiple areas working together. This means that time, much like self, is a summary judgment, a democratic conclusion reached by a vast prefrontal caucus. But this also makes temporal awareness vulnerable to interruption. “Because flow deactivates large parts of the neocortex,” says Eagleman, “a number of these areas are offline—thus distorting our ability to compute time.”

With hypofrontality, attention is narrowing. Parts of the brain are shutting down. Oneness is the result of the narrowing of the doors of perception, not throwing them wide open. Huxley had it exactly backward. Newberg and D’Aquili also discovered that what you focus on matters. Surfers with their attention entirely on a wave become one with the wave. Meditating Franciscan nuns had God’s love in mind so their experience was oneness with God’s love. And Dean Potter, at the bottom of the Cellar of Swallows, had his attention entirely upon a dying bird so he did, in fact, become that dying bird.

Since flow is a fluid action state, making better decisions isn’t enough: we also have to act on those decisions. 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.

Simply put: if you’re infinite and atemporal, you cannot die. This is also why the Voice comes through so clearly in a flow state. 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.

But mainly, because this was the hardest urban wingsuit flight ever attempted and their survival so clearly depended upon it, they practiced ESP—which, as it turns out, is actually a thing you can practice. PATTERN RECOGNITION AND ESP In 2011, a team of researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois decided to play a little Frogger. Actually, they decided to play a big Frogger. Life-size big. Their goal was to see how normal college students fared against Division I athletes in a few rounds of “cross a busy city street; don’t get splatted.”

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. This was a radical revelation. The old idea was interpretation: the senses gather data and then decide what’s actually happening in the world. The new idea means the senses gather data and the brain uses that information to make predictions about what’s happening in the world before it’s happened.

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. This is learning and it leads to “chunking.” When the pattern recognition system correctly identifies a pattern, it’s stored not as a series of steps, rather as a whole—a chunk. Chunks get added to chunks get added to chunks, until seeing the front edge of a tiny pattern allows us to make very complicated predictions about the future.

learn very subtle patterns—like, say, when JT’s heal twitches slightly left and down, he’s a second away from initiating a steep dive. The goal is to cut out consciousness. Swanson doesn’t have time to see Holmes’s twitch, decide what it means, and initiate his own dive.

What’s being presented here is more than the “minimum viable flow” (i.e., enough information to get everyone on the same page), yet less than a complete picture (i.e., there is over 100 years of scientific research to cover). For niggling particulars, potential caveats, and larger possibilities, check out the endnotes. And if you want more, go to the website for the Flow Genome Project (www.flowgenomeproject.co).

Flow’s two defining characteristics are its feel-good nature (flow is always a positive experience) and its function as a performance enhancer. The chemicals described herein are among the strongest mood-boosters and performance-enhancers the body can produce.

Mostly, these messages are either excitatory or inhibitory: Do more of what you’re doing or Do less of what you’re doing.

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.

“A lot of people associate serotonin directly with flow,” says high performance psychologist Michael Gervais, “but that’s backward. By the time the serotonin has arrived the state has already happened. It’s a signal things are coming to an end, not just beginning.”

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:

This is why the Red Bull Air Force trained in Switzerland. Whenever the team entered a flow state together, these five neurochemicals were tightening the bonds between them, amping up trust, giving them extraordinary confidence in one another and their ability to understand one another. “By the time we left Europe,” says Andy Farrington, “I could read emotion in the back of JT’s shoe.”

But their gaze is already spoken for. In the southwest corner, a black ramp over the side, a pirate’s plank into a yawning abyss. What the fuck was I thinking? JT wants to know. And that’s when the adrenaline hits him. Hits all of them. A pulse-pounding wash, the thrill ride before the thrill ride. None care too much for this feeling. In fact, despite the frequency with which many dismiss these athletes as “adrenaline junkies,” the term is actually one of the greatest misnomers in sport. Of the hundreds of athletes interviewed for this book, very few enjoy this rush.

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But they are all flow junkies—the difference is critical. And chemical. The fight-or-flight response—a.k.a. the adrenaline rush—cocktails adrenaline, cortisol (the stress hormone), and norepinephrine. It’s an extreme stress response. The brain switches to reactive survival autopilot. Options are limited to three: fight, flee, or freeze. Flow is the opposite: a creative problem-solving state, options wide open.

This means that the fight-or-flight response primes the body—chemically and psychologically—for the flow state.

Once JT’s pattern recognition system recognizes that his wing’s are powered up, he can relax and—according to experiments run by Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson—that’s flow’s real trigger.

But it was too late to abort. Farrington had a choice—he could either give in to the fight-or-flight response, allowing himself to be swept away in the tide of adrenaline, cortisol, and norepinephrine, or he could use the enhanced focus these chemicals provided to redirect his attention to the problem at hand. This is where all that flow time in Switzerland came in handy. Training in high-stress situations increases what psychologists call “situational awareness.”

This was a ninety-degree turn at 150 miles per hour, and my experience was this voice in my head saying, ‘Oh look, you’re turning again.’

The pattern recognition and information chunking that took place in Switzerland would not

have led to instinctive behavior in Chicago. Muscle

Flow is the rush of possibility: a product of radical neurochemical, neuroelectrical, and neuroanatomical function triggering whole-body transformation. As Devore concludes: “I really think we’re the next stage in human evolution.”

Over the past century, the science of expert performance has gotten rigorous and codified. Thousands and thousands of experiments have been run; plenty of conclusions reached. Three dominate. Call them: mothers, musicians, and marshmallows. This famed trilogy—details in a moment—represent our best ideas about the path to mastery. Yet there’s a wrench in these works: most action and adventure athletes took a radically different path.

Instead, the one commonality was encouragement, a lot of encouragement. In each case, there was a parent or close relative who rewarded any display of talent, and ignored or punished the opposite. Prodigies, it seemed, were made, not born. As Bloom later told reporters:

Bloom wasn’t wrong—“mothers” matter—but too many of these super athletes came up sideways, backward, and feral for this to be the single deciding factor. Something else is going on. And that something else is where the musicians come into play.

By surveying elite violinists at Berlin’s Academy of Music—a.k.a. musicians—Ericsson found that while one’s early environment was helpful, what truly distinguished excellent players from good players from average players was hours of practice. By the time they were twenty years old, expert violinists had put in 10,000 hours of “deliberate, well-structured practice.” The others had not. As Malcolm Gladwell famously explained in Outliers: “[The] research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. 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.”