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

by Steven Kotler

We move to, ‘That’s crazy, far out, unreal.’ Pretty soon, we accept this new reality and shift our paradigm further and this engages imagination. We start imagining the impossible as possible. What does impossible feel like, sound like, look like. And then we start to be able to see ourselves doing the impossible—that’s the secret. There is an extremely tight link between our visual system and our physiology: once we can actually see ourselves doing the impossible, our chances of pulling it off increase significantly.”

It was Harvard physiologist Edmund Jacobson who first discovered this link. Back in the 1930s, Jacobson found that imagining oneself lifting an object triggered corresponding electrical activity in the muscles involved in the lift. Between then and now dozens and dozens of studies have born this out, repeatedly finding strong correlations between mental rehearsal—i.e., visualization—and better performance. Everything from giving a speech to running a business meeting to spinning a 1080 are all significantly enhanced by the practice.

Study subjects were divided into four groups. One group tried to strengthen their finger muscles with physical exercise; one tried to strengthen their finger muscles by only visualizing the exercise; another tried to increase arm strength through visualization; while the last group did nothing at all. The trial lasted twelve weeks. When it was over, those who did nothing saw no gains. The group that relied on physical training saw the greatest increase in strength—at 53 percent. But it’s the mental groups where things got curious. Folks who did no physical training but merely imagined their fingers going through precise exercise motions saw a 35 percent increase

The educational philosophy pioneered by Maria Montessori in the early portion of the twentieth century is built around self-directed learning, long periods of intense concentration, and deep physicality (it’s often called “embodied education”) and has been repeatedly shown to produce far greater amounts of flow than more traditional methodologies.

When professors Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of the globe-spanning business school INSEAD surveyed over 3,000 executives and interviewed 500 people who had either started innovative companies or invented new products, they too found a Montessori connection. As Gregersen told the Wall Street Journal: “A number of the innovative entrepreneurs also went to Montessori schools, where they learned to follow their curiosity. To paraphrase the famous Apple ad campaign, innovators not only learned early on to think different, they act different (and even talk different).”

magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which had been primarily used to study the body, gave way to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures blood-flow activity in the brain.

McKinsey established that executives in flow are five times more effective than their steady-state peers.