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

by Steven Kotler

“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.

Ironically, this is very good news. Scientists have lately made enormous progress on flow. Advancements in brain-imaging technologies like fMRI and consumer “quantified self” devices like the Nike

“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 it. That’s why we’re seeing so much progression in action sports today. It’s the natural result of a whole lot of people starting to expect the impossible.” THE GODFATHER OF FLOW It was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Me-high, Chick-sent-me-high),

Csikszentmihalyi read philosophy, studied religion, got involved in the arts—all the things that supposedly gave life meaning. Nothing quite satisfied. Then, one Sunday afternoon in Zurich, he attended a free lecture by Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. Csikszentmihalyi enjoyed the talk, started reading Jung’s books, and pretty soon decided

Maslow began his career in the 1940s on staff at Brooklyn College, where he was mentored by anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer.

The experience lingers in one’s consciousness and gives a sense of purpose, integration, self-determination and empathy.” These states, he concluded, were the hidden commonality among all high achievers, the source code of intrinsic motivation:

Peak experiences can make life worthwhile by their occasional occurrence.

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.

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.

A ten-year study done by McKinsey found top executives reported being up to five times more productive when in flow.

Leslie Sherlin

Sherlin became obsessed with figuring out the exact nature of this “something.” He changed directions, replacing baroque and classical with psychology and neuroscience, specifically focusing on qualitative electroencephalography (EEG)—which had

“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 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.”

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.

Human beings have evolved two distinct systems for processing information. The first, the explicit system, is rule-based, can be expressed verbally, and is tied to conscious awareness. When the prefrontal cortex is fired up, the explicit system is usually turned on. But when the cold calculus of logic is swapped out for the gut sense of intuition, this is the implicit system at work. This system relies on skill and experience, is not consciously accessible, and cannot be described verbally (i.e., try to explain a hunch). These two systems are often described as “conscious” versus “unconscious,” or “left brain” versus “right brain,” but neither comparison is entirely accurate.

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.”

required to solve problems. This is also why Csikszentmihalyi found little activity in the prefrontal cortex of chess masters.

“But the interesting thing about a gamma spike,” explains Leslie Sherlin, “is that it always happens inside of theta oscillations.

DEAN POTTER

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,”

So what is the Voice? Carl Jung defined intuition as “perception via the unconscious”

For the first time in history, scientists had a concrete picture of neurological structure and function—

The PFC is the heart of our higher cognitive abilities. It’s the place we collect data, problem solve, plan ahead, assess risk, evaluate rewards, analyze thoughts, suppress urges, learn from experience, make moral decisions, and give rise to our normal sense of self.

The superior frontal gyrus helps produce our sense of self, that introspective feeling of self-awareness, which, as the study’s lead researcher, Ilan Goldberg, told New Scientist, is not always useful: “If there is a sudden danger, such as the appearance of a snake, it’s helpful not to stand around wondering how one feels about the situation.”

Penn State kinesiologist Vladimir Zatsiorsky uses the terms maximal strength and absolute strength to distinguish between the amount of force one can generate through acts of will and the amount of force our muscles can theoretically produce.

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.

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.”

Energy normally used for temporal processing is reallocated for attention and awareness.

It is all this data that actually elongates the current moment. 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. And the longer the moment lasts, the better quantity and quality of information we have at our disposal. More data gives us a shot at sudden insights. Better data leads to more creative solutions. Both allow us to fine-tune our reactions. This is the reason Potter could make the leap from “glowing orange” to

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

This is a somewhat startling reversal. Ever since Aldous Huxley told the world about his experiments with mescaline, the idea has been that the doors of perception needed to be opened for cosmic unity to be revealed. Newberg and D’Aquili discovered the inverse. 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.

with a triumvirate approach—neuroelectricity, neuroanatomy, and neurochemistry

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. In

too. The most commonly produced endorphin is 100 times more powerful than medical morphine.

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.

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.

appears (more research needs to be done) that the brain releases serotonin, the neurochemical now associated with SSRIs like Prozac. “It’s a molecule involved in helping people cope with adversity,”

an end, not just beginning.” These five chemicals are flow’s mighty cocktail.

Finally, the trouble with marshmallows. In 1972, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel performed a fairly straightforward study in delayed gratification: he

hard. Zen walking meditation teaches an open-senses/all-senses awareness. Balance and agility training (like playing hopscotch or running ladder drills) enhance proprioception and vestibular awareness.

Krack had uncovered a technique for triggering the mammalian diving reflex, a reflex that optimizes respiration and, like dolphins, whales, and some birds, allows us to operate underwater for extended periods of time. Here’s how it works: When the nerves of the human face come in contact with water, our heartbeat begins to slow (10 to 30 percent in amateurs; up to 50 percent in professionals). A slower heart rate requires less oxygen, leaving more left over for other organs.

the mammalian diving reflex was

Cruickshank has trained herself to keep attention right here, right now—which is the only time flow can show up and the only time we’re capable of extraordinary.

Simon’s “invisible gorilla experiment” has since been repeated dozens of times—most recently with radiologists looking at radiological screens and a cartoon gorilla—and always with the same result. Not many people see the gorilla. In the radiologist’s version (a 2012 study run at Brigham and Woman’s Hospital in Boston), 83 percent of doctors tested failed to spot the animal.

Those with “growth mindsets” believe abilities are gained through dedication and hard work, that natural-born talents are merely starting points for a much longer learning process.

challenge/skill ratio.

information. “For a businessperson,” writes Benson in his book The Breakout Principle,

“No question about it,” says Flow Genome Project executive director Jamie Wheal, “there’s a dark night of the flow. In Christian mystical traditions, once you’ve experienced the grace of God, the ‘dark night of the soul’ describes the incredible pain of its absence.