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

by Steven Kotler

Researchers recently coined the phrase “Twenty-First-Century Skills” to describe those myriad abilities our children need to thrive in this century–abilities not currently taught in school, but desperately needed in society. Action and adventure sports demand them all.

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.

Put differently, a recent Gallup survey found that 71 percent of American workers were “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about this for a moment: two out of three of us hate what we do with the majority of our time. This is a crisis of commerce, to say the least. Yet we already know where the solution lies. The other 29 percent of workers have jobs that generate flow. Flow directly correlates to happiness at work and happiness at work directly correlates to success. 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.”

how it massively accelerates mental and physical performance, how its allows these athletes to accomplish the impossible.

The great civil rights leader Howard Thurman once said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs most is more people who have come alive.”

an act of genius must also be defined as an act of redefinition–redefining what is possible for the human body.

Go back twenty-five years in skiing and the 360 was just about the hardest trick anyone could throw. These days, it’s the entry point to jib skiing–meaning kids age six are pulling them off routinely. On the other side of that coin, in 1998, when ski-industry giant Salomon introduced the 1080–their first twin-tip ski–they were given that name because three spins (1080 degrees) was jib skiing’s Holy Grail, an impossible. Well, been there, done that. In 2011, Bobby Brown threw the world’s first Triple Cork 1440–which is four spins and three flips, and all off-axis.

This means the sport of diving took more than a century to advance by 900 degrees of rotation.

Think about this for a moment. Diving took a century to add 900 degrees to its tally, but skiers somehow pushed their total up 1,640 degrees in slightly more than a decade?

Then both Travis Pastrana and Mike Metzger landed backflips during the 2002 X Games.

Just four years later, Pastrana doubled down on impossible and pulled off the world’s first double backflip.

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.

We’ve seen near-exponential growth in ultimate human performance, which is both hyperbolic paradox and considerable mystery. Somehow, a generation’s worth of iconoclastic misfits have rewritten the rules of the feasible, not just raising the bar but often obliterating it altogether. And this brings up one final question: Where–if anywhere–do our actual limits lie?

Thus the plot thickens. The theory of evolution says we exist to pass along our genes. Fundamental biology tells us that survival is the name of the game. So potent is this dictate that in 1973 the psychologist Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize for The Denial of Death, arguing that everything we think of as civilization–from the cities we build to the religions we believe in–is nothing beyond an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the awful knowledge of our own mortality. A chorus of researchers has since seconded this opinion. These days, scientists consider the fear of death the fundamental human motivator, the most primary of our primary drives.

In 1994, the number of big-wave riders in the world totaled less than a hundred. These days, it’s well into the thousands. The same holds for the extreme wing of every other action and adventure category. The phenomenon is ubiquitous. Right now, more people are risking their lives for their sports than ever before in history, and, as Thomas Pynchon wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow, “It is not often that Death is told so clearly to fuck off.”

“Nothing’s too gnarly.”

“Skateboarding is a game of failure,” says Way. “That’s what makes this sport so different. Skaters are willing to take a great deal of physical punishment. We’ll try something endlessly, weeks on end, painful failure after painful failure after painful failure. But for me, when it finally snaps together, when I’m really pushing the edge and skating beyond my abilities, 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.”

And if this were typical athletic fare, this is where our story would end. But the triumph of the podium is rarely what drives action-sport athletes. Way doesn’t skate to break records or win championships. He skates. Period.

Thus, with nothing left to prove and his life on the line, Danny Way drags his sorry ass up ten stories once again, this time throwing a perfect 360 over the gap. And just to make sure that one wasn’t a fluke, he did it three more times.

This, then, is our answer. This is our mystery: a rare and radical state of consciousness where the impossible becomes possible. This is the secret that action and adventure athletes like Way have plumbed, the real reason ultimate human performance has advanced nearly exponentially these past few decades. The zone, quite literally, is the shortest path toward superman. And this is a book about that zone.

Heim’s actual flight covered sixty-six feet and lasted no more than a few seconds, but that wasn’t his experience. 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.”

Heim’s work marks the first scientific investigation into the fact that high-risk activity can profoundly alter consciousness and significantly enhance mental abilities.

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.

But, James critically realized, people were not doomed to stay that way. “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.”

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.

“Danny Way single-handedly invented sports medicine for skateboarders,” says Jacob Rosenberg,

In 1907, William James challenged psychologists to explain why certain people can draw on deep reservoirs to accomplish significantly more than others. As an example, he reflected on the idea of the “second wind.”

“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.

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.

ubiquitous.

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. Moreover, this did not come down to chance or luck. The happiest people on earth worked hard for their fulfillment. They didn’t just have the most peak experiences, they had devoted their lives to having these experiences,

James Slavet, in a recent article for Forbes.com, called “flow state percentage”—defined as the amount of time employees spend in flow—the “most important management metric for building great innovation teams.”

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. We pay to watch, read, or be in the presence of a flow experience. If quantified, you’d find it’s a major chunk of the GDP.”

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.”

Corporations like Patagonia, Toyota, Ericsson, and Microsoft would make flow a critical piece of their strategy and culture. Entire industries would benefit: coders in flow built the Internet, gamers in flow built the video game industry, and, of course, the sports world has never been the same.

Or, as Danny Way explains: “It’s either find the zone or suffer the consequences—there’s no other choice available.”

To hold steady, he had to reach down, to the outside of his surfboard, and drag his right hand in the water. It was the perfect move and the only reason he’s alive today—but here’s the thing: no one had ever made that move before.

Flow, on the other hand, is always a positive experience. No one ever has a bad time in a flow state.

“When you’re in that moment, there’s no beginning and no end. It starts off where it left off. When you go to that place, there’s no time, and there’s definitely no thought. It’s just pure. You are and it is and that’s why we continually seek it out, and always search for it, and need it. We need it to feel alive and to feel complete and to bring it all into perspective—it just makes everything else fall in line, fall in place. It makes everything else tolerable.”

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.”

“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, sort of in suspended animation, shutting out the conscious mind and letting the implicit system do its stuff.”

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.

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 are talking to one another. This is known to experts as “lateral thinking” or, to the business executives who so crave this talent: “thinking outside the box.” It means that novel stimuli can combine with random thoughts and obscure memories and the result is something utterly new. Creativity has a brain wave signature as well: alpha waves pulsing out of the brain’s right hemisphere. This is considered the readiness state for sudden insight—meaning not the revelation itself,

as it now seems that without a calm, relaxed frame of mind, the brain is incapable of switching from beta-dominant localized networks to alpha-driven widespread webs. But this isn’t where the process ends. Whether we’re speaking about Hamilton’s hand drag on the Millennium Wave or his decision to jump out of the barrel at Jaws, that moment of sudden insight comes with a different brain wave signature. 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.” When you add these elements together it’s easy to see why flow is such an effective decision-making strategy. Not only does it elevate our problem-solving abilities, but—by holding themselve...