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

by Steven Kotler

When you tap into that much force while pushing the absolute limits of human performance, that’s more than just an imaginative breakthrough—that’s bending reality to your will. And when you do that frequently, which is what guys like Danny Way and Laird Hamilton can do, imagine what that does for your confidence.”

enticing.

“Put everything aside. There’s nothing to be afraid of except a little cold water. Just focus on the next steps you are taking.” Focus was the key to getting past the fear—and everything else as well.

The Voice—the voice of intuition—the center of the zone’s mystery.

“Right before I have to make a move, the Voice tells me what to do. And it’s never wrong.

So what is the Voice? 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. Of course, it’s not always a voice. Some people see images; others get strong feelings. Occasionally, the information arrives by multiple channels. And that information arrives constantly. Intuition is a permanent feature of standard brain function—meaning the Voice is always communicating with us—yet we can rarely hear it. The data is diluted and distorted by everything else the mind is considering. But in flow, for reasons we’ll explore in this chapter, the signal is stronger, the message clearer, and for those on the receiving end, the feeling accompanying that broadcast is often one of profound relief—a sense that finally, at long last, someone else is driving this bus.

“I was following the Voice,” he recounts, “and more focused than I’d ever been. I was doing everything I could to cultivate that heightened awareness. I was down there alone, sleeping under rocks, not talking to anyone, meditating—all to help strengthen my intuition. The Voice said climb, so that’s what I did.”

But I started following the footholds, listening to the Voice and not questioning.”

If we assume a three-foot height gain per move, getting to Fitz Roy’s apex meant the Voice would have to make 670 correct decisions in a row—and Potter could question none of them.

“I went to Patagonia to cultivate my intuition—to listen to the Voice. When I’m really in tune with it, really deep in the zone, I get to a place where I disappear completely, where I merge with the rock, when time slows down, my senses are unbelievably heightened, and I feel that oneness, that full-body psychic connection to the universe. It took risking my life to get there, but mission accomplished. And that’s why I climb. I crave these experiences. I certainly don’t climb to get on top of rocks.”

The experiences that Potter craves—the disappearance of self, the distortion of time, and that “psychic connection” to the universe—are among flow’s more famous qualities, also its most peculiar.

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 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—which is when it dawned on him: the brain wasn’t eliminating complexity, it was eliminating the very structures that created this complexity. “We had it backward,” he says. “In flow, parts of the PFC aren’t becoming hyperactive; parts of it are temporarily deactivating. It’s an efficiency exchange. We’re trading energy usually used for higher cognitive functions for heightened attention and awareness.”

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 hypofrontal determines the nature of the experience—with a quick rule of thumb being: the greater the deactivation of neuronal structures, the more profound (and bizarre) the experience.

In 2006, for example, a team of Israeli scientists discovered that when people lose themselves in a task—be it playing cards or having sex or climbing a mountain—a part of the brain called the superior frontal gyrus starts to deactivate. 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 d...

Another breakthrough occurred in 2008, when Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Charles Limb began using fMRI to examine the brains of improv jazz musicians and freestyle rappers immersed in flow. He found the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is also deactivated in the state. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is an area of the brain best known for self-monitoring and impulse control—both of which are important here. Self-monitoring is the voice of doubt and disparagement, that defeatist nag, our inner critic. Since flow is a fluid state—where problem solving is nearly automatic—second-guessing can only slow that process. When the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex goes quie...

Impulse control, meanwhile, is another enemy.

There’s also a flip side to these events: while parts of the prefrontal cortex are shutting down, others are ramping up—and this too shapes the experience. Limb, for example, found that flow also activates the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that governs creative self-expression. This is the reason that people in the zone still have individual styles.

Beyond these psychological impacts, hypofrontality also confers an equally important physical advantage. 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. Normally, people can access about 65 percent of their absolute strength; trained weight lifters can get this up to about 80 percent. But that’s usually the end of the line. If we could access all our strength on command, we could very easily overextend ourselves, pushing beyond our limits and doing serious damage along the way.

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.

canopy

clamped

torn

The technical name for Potter’s experience is “time dilation.” Normally, in the zone, after self-awareness starts to fade, temporal awareness tends to follow. 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. The objective, external duration we measure with reference to outside events like night and day, or the orderly progression of clocks, is rendered irrelevant by the rhythms dictated by the activity.… [I]n general, most people report that time seems to pass much faster. But occasionally the reverse occurs.”

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.” Underlying this loss of time is another efficiency exchange. As focus tightens, the brain stops multitasking. Energy normally used for temporal processing is reallocated for attention and awareness. Instead of keeping time, we are taking in more data per second, processing it more completely, and, perhaps—though great debate rages around this point—processing more of it per second. 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.

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 single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) scanner to try to figure out if there was biology beneath this spirituality.

In moments of intense concentration, the same efficiency exchange that erases our sense of self and distorts our sense of time begins to impact our relationship to space. Instead of taking place in the prefrontal lobes, this hypofrontality occurs farther back in the cortex, in the superior parietal lobe, a portion of the brain that Newberg and D’Aquili dubbed the orientation association area (OAA) because it helps us orient in space. When functioning normally, the OAA is a navigation system. It judges angles and distances, maps course trajectories, and keeps track of our body’s exact location. But to do this last part, the superior parietal lobe must also produce a boundary line: the border of self, the division between finite “us” and the infinite “not us” that is the rest of the universe. Obviously, drawing this border is no simple task. So the OAA depends on a constant stream of incoming messages. All of our senses send data here. Incredible calculations occur. But all of this takes a lot of energy. When that energy is needed elsewhere—like during moments of intense focus—the OAA stops performing those calculations because it stops receiving those signals. Without this data stream, this part of the brain is temporarily blinded—it too becomes hypofrontal—and to incredible result. “Once this happens,” says Newberg, “we can no longer draw a line and say this is where the self ends and this is where the rest of the world begins, so the brain concludes, it has to conclude, t...

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.

There’s little difference between the amount of concentration needed by a meditator to achieve “ecstasy” and the amount required by a BASE jumper leaping into a cave. Danger heightens attention. Thus the big mountains and big waves allow us to cheat this process, a fact Potter openly acknowledges: “I take the easy way,” he says. “I can sit on my ass and meditate for two hours to get a fifteen-second glimpse of this state. Or I can risk my life and get there instantly—and it lasts for hours.”

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. With time gone, there is no yesterday to regret or tomorrow to worry about. And when our sense of space disappears, so do physical consequences. But when all three vanish at once, something far more incredible occurs: our fear of death—that most fundamental of all fears—can no longer exist. Simply put: if you’re infinite and atemporal, you cannot die.

Without any frame of reference, the bizarreness of the experience tends to dominate. By consistently putting themselves in flow, action and adventure athletes have gained familiarity with terra incognita.

Change came in the 1990s. Frenchman Patrick de Gayardon copied the wing design of flying squirrels, stretching pliable, nonporous fabric into three triangular wings: two running wrist to armpit, a third forming a giant inverted V between the legs. His revolutionary insight was to stitch a series of ribs across these wings. When aloft, ram air inflated the ribs much like modern square parachutes, providing pilots a three-to-one glide ratio (three feet forward for every one-foot drop) and an astounding level of in-flight control. In 1999, Finnish company Birdman International brought a safer version of this design to market, then established the world’s first wingsuit flying school to train potential customers. Interest was immediately high. In the first year alone, 2,000 skydivers took the training. The real tipping point came in 2005, when a group of Norwegian BASE jumpers released Super Terminal, a DVD containing footage of proximity flying, piloting a wingsuit a few feet above a cliff face. Proximity flying was the real deal: flying, just like the birds do. And seriously, who doesn’t want to fly like a bird?

Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The plot? Well, never mind the plot.

Normals made it to the other side 55 percent of the time, athletes 72 percent of the time.

It wasn’t that the athletes were quicker or more agile. They didn’t dodge and weave through traffic better than the normal students. Instead, they could assimilate and apply incoming information with more speed and accuracy than nonathletes.

“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. Imagine, for example, approaching a door. “ ‘Prediction’ means that the neurons involved in sensing your door become active in advance of them actually receiving sensory input,” writes Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee in On Intelligence:

When your predictions are all met, you walk through the door without consciously knowing these predictions were verified. But if your expectations about the door are violated, the error will cause you to take notice. Correct predictions result in understanding. Incorrect predictions result in confusion and prompt you to pay attention. The door latch is not where it is supposed to be. The door is too light. The door is off center. The texture of the knob is wrong. We are making continuous low-level predictions in parallel across all our senses.

So important is prediction to survival, that when the brain guesses correctly—i.e., when the brain’s pattern-recognition system identifies a correct pattern—we get a reward, a tiny squirt of the feel-good neurochemical dopamine. Dopamine feels really good. Cocaine, widely considered one of the most addictive substances on earth, does little besides cause the brain to release dopamine and then block its reuptake. This same rush reinforces pattern recognition—it’s why learning happens. But dopamine actually does double duty. Not only does this neurotransmitter help us learn new patterns, it also amps up attention and reduces noise in neural networks, making it easier for us to notice more patterns. And noticing patterns actually prepares the brain to notice more patterns. It’s why creative insights tend to snowball. Once we do the hard work of identifying that first pattern, the dopamine dumped in our system primes us to pick out the next. And the next. 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.

The athletes already had these patterns down. Thus their brains could take in a tiny bit of information—a very quick glance at that cityscape—and use it to make a very complicated prediction: a safe path across the street.

As most researchers describe basic brain function with a triumvirate approach—neuroelectricity, neuroanatomy, and neurochemistry (i.e., the two ways the brain communicates internally and the places where those communications take place)—we

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).

At a very simple level, neurochemicals are “information molecules” used by the brain to transmit messages. Mostly, these messages are either excitatory or inhibitory: Do more of what you’re doing or Do less of what you’re doing.

Flow is an extremely potent response to external events and requires an extraordinary set of signals. The process includes dopamine, which does more than tune signal-to-noise ratios. Emotionally, we feel dopamine as engagement, excitement, creativity, and a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world. Evolutionarily, it serves a similar function. Human beings are hardwired for exploration, hardwired to push the envelope: dopamine is largely responsible for that wiring. This neurochemical is released whenever we take a risk or encounter something novel. It rewards exploratory behavior. It also helps us survive that behavior. By increasing attention, information flow, and pattern recognition in the brain, and heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle firing timing in the body, dopamine serves as a formidable skill-booster as well.

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 the brain, norepinephrine increases arousal, attention, neural efficiency, and emotional control. In flow, it keeps us locked on target, holding distractions at bay.

Endorphins, our third flow conspirator, also come with a hell of a high. These natural “endogenous” (meaning naturally internal to the body) opiates relieve pain and produce pleasure much like “exogenous” (externally added to the body) opiates like heroin. Potent too. The most commonly produced endorphin is 100 times more powerful than medical morphine.

The 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. Known to show up in exercise-induced flow states (and suspected in other kinds), this chemical elevates mood, relieves pain, dilates blood vessels and bronchial tubes (aiding respiration), and amplifies lateral thinking (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.

Lastly, at the tail end of a flow state, it also 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,” Oxford University’s Philip Cowen told the Ne...

Consider the chain of events that takes us from pattern recognition through future prediction. 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:

To this end, flow’s neurochemistry performs an added function: it accelerates social bonding. Ever fall in love? That high—the sleeplessness, giddiness, hyperactivity, loss of appetite, etc.—that’s dopamine and norepinephrine at work. These are the neurochemicals that reinforce romantic love. Endorphins serve a similar function, only showing up in maternal love (in infants) and general attachment (in adults). Serotonin, as well, further reinforces love and attachment (alongside oxytocin). And anandamide, as any pot smoker will attest, makes one feel open, expansive, and empathetic—all of which further improves connection.