So I lit out on a giant quest to figure out what the hell was happening to me. I didn’t know what was going on in the waves, but I knew that one part of that experience—the becoming-one-with-everything part—was classified as “mystical.” Could science tell me anything about the mystical? Could anyone tell me why the mystical was showing up in surfing?
Turns out, there was a lot to tell.
Mystical experiences are actually fairly common in action sports. The historical literature is packed with the stories. Surfing, for sure, but also hiking, skydiving, skiing, snowboarding, rock climbing, ice climbing, and mountaineering. One of those books, Bone Games, written by Rob Schultheis, played an important role in my search.2 Schultheis suggested that the mystical experiences that mountaineers were reporting might be related to the then-new idea of flow. It was the first time I can remember hearing that term. Schultheis spoke my language. He talked about neurobiology. He linked flow to endorphins, the popular explanation for “runner’s high,” and to our fight-or-flight hormones and a number of mood-boosting reward chemicals.
The inkling of an idea began to form. It was more of a question: If this shift in neurobiology called “flow” helped me go from seriously subpar back to normal, could flow help normal people—like those early action and adventure sports athletes I had encountered—go all the way up to Superman?
I had no idea. I wasn’t even sure who to ask. But then I caught another break. I was still on my quest to decode the science of mystical experiences, which had led me to the University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Andrew Newberg.
Newberg had gotten curious about “cosmic unity,” which is the term for that feeling I got out in the waves, that feeling of becoming one with everything. To try to understand it better, he used single-photon emission computerized tomography to take pictures of the brains of Franciscan nuns and Tibetan Buddhists during “ecstatic meditation”—with ecstatic meaning the meditation produces that feeling of cosmic unity.
Newberg discovered biology beneath these experiences. Ecstatic meditation creates a profound shift in brain function. It comes down to extreme focus, which ecstatic meditation requires, which, in turn, requires a ton of energy. But the brain has a fixed energy budget, which means it’s always trying to conserve. During ecstatic meditation, to provide the extra energy required by that extreme focus, the brain performs an efficiency exchange. It shuts down noncritical structures and repurposes that energy for attention.
One structure that gets shut down is the right posterior superior parietal lobe.3 Under normal conditions, this is a part of the brain that helps us navigate through space. It creates a boundary line around the body, separating self from other, a feeling that tells us this is where we end and the rest of the world begins. If you’re trying to cross a crowded room, you need this felt-sense of self so you don’t bump into other people. Conversely, if you have brain damage to this area, you have difficulty sitting down in a chair because you’re not sure where you end and the chair begins.
In meditation, once this structure deactivates, the boundary line we draw around ourselves dissolves. We lose the ability to separate self from other. “At that moment,” Newberg explains, “the brain concludes, it has to conclude, that you are one with everything.”
Newberg’s discovery led me to another question: Surfers need extreme focus to ride waves. Could this be the same kind of attention required by ecstatic meditation? Could this same extreme focus be what was triggering flow in surfers and producing that feeling of being one with the waves that I experienced?
I didn’t know, which is when I called Andrew Newberg for the first time. That phone call led to a second, then a third. Over about eight months, we pieced it together.4 The upshot: Newberg suspected I might be right. “Focus is focus,” he’d said. “There’s probably not that much difference between the pinpoint attention required by surfers and the pinpoint attention required by meditators.”
I’d also asked if he thought the object of one’s attention mattered. The nuns were focused on God’s love, so they became one with love. The Buddhists, focused on cosmic unity, became one with everything. And the surfers had their attention on the waves, so they merged with the ocean. Could it be that you become one with the thing you’re focused on?
“These are good questions,” said Newberg. “You should keep asking them.”
And for the next two decades, that’s what I did. Over the rest of Part Four, we’ll unpack what I discovered, seeing how flow works in the brain and learning to put this information into practice in our lives. But before we do that, a little history is helpful. And the best place to start is where the story first starts, in the late nineteenth century, with Friedrich Nietzsche, the world’s first high-performance philosopher.
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Flow Science
THE ÜBERMENSCH ERA
“I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?”
Nietzsche wrote these words in 1883, in his masterwork, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.1 It’s worth mentioning here because Nietzsche was the original high-performance philosopher, the first truly modern thinker to consider the question of peak performance. That’s the “superman” in the above quote, the “Übermensch” in the original German, and how to become this “Übermensch” was Nietzsche’s core concern.
Nietzsche earns this title not because he’s the first philosopher to ponder peak performance. There’s a lot of history here: the Stoic creed of the ancient Greeks, the perfectibility of man of the Enlightenment thinkers. But Nietzsche was the first philosopher to care about the issue after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species—which means he was the first to believe that peak performance came down to biology.2
In 1859, Darwin rewrote the rulebook on peak performance. On the Origin of Species brought the house of God crumbling down. Before this point, high achievement had been a gift from the gods. Want to defeat your enemies in combat? Try asking Mars. Want to write a sonnet? Maybe the muses can help.
But Darwin said different, and Nietzsche agreed.3
Nietzsche realized that, if the body evolves, the mind evolves, consciousness evolves, and if you’re interested in human performance, then you have to take these facts into account. Nietzsche started calling for a new science, one that used the framework of evolution and the tools of the scientific method to examine the workings of the human mind. He picked up the then-popular term for this field, psychology, and made his opinions clear: any philosopher who didn’t understand this new science wasn’t worth understanding. Or, as Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo: “Who among the philosophers before me was in any way a psychologist? Before me there simply was no psychology.”4
The first thing this new psychology taught Nietzsche was that those Enlightenment thinkers, his intellectual predecessors, were wrong. They’d argued that humanity was evolving toward perfection, that evolution was directed and had a purpose. Nietzsche saw culture through Darwin’s lens: as an assortment of random success stories. Culture was stuff that helped people survive, encoded in our biology, hardwired into our brains, shaping behavior through the inaccessible workings of our unconscious. Rather than being the pinnacle of evolution, humans are just an aggregation of random parts, a pastiche of instincts, drives, habits, histories, and more. “The past of every form and way of life,” Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, “of cultures that formerly lay right next to or on top of each other, now flow into us ‘modern souls’; our drives now run back everywhere; we ourselves are a kind of chaos.”5
But Nietzsche felt we could escape that chaos. We could replace the struggle for survival with the “will to power,” the battle for self-actualization, for self-creation and self-overcoming, for mastery, excellence, and meaning. In other words, all the things that used to come from God must now come from us.
Okay, Nietzsche, so how to do that?
And this is where the story gets interesting, because Nietzsche had a plan, a fairly p
ractical plan for tapping one’s will to power and becoming the Übermensch—and his plan should sound awfully familiar.
Nietzsche’s first step toward Superman: find your passion and purpose, what he called “an organizing idea.” An organizing idea is a mission, a central theme for one’s life, and it doesn’t emerge all at once. “The organizing idea that is destined to rule [our lives] keeps growing deep down. It begins to command, slowly it leads us back from side roads and wrong roads; it prepares single qualities and fitnesses that will one day prove to be indispensable.”
Nietzsche was also very clear about the next step: learn to suffer. Peak performance demands grit, and suffering, the philosopher maintained, was the fastest way to acquire that skill. “To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities. . . . I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.” Or, as he bragged in The Will to Power: “I am more a battlefield than a man.”
This takes us to Nietzsche’s step three: learning and creativity. Take it all in, transform it into art. Learning and creativity are about self-expression, self-overcoming, and the discovery of meaning. Nietzsche felt art was the antidote to nihilism. If God is dead, and there’s no divine meaning to life, then we need to make meaning on our own. This is the will to power, the existentialist mandate. We take responsibility for our choices, we act, we create, and we alone bear the responsibility of our creation.
And this brings us to the final step in Nietzsche’s process: flow—though he didn’t use that word.
Nietzsche’s word was rausch, a word originally coined by Johann Goethe that translates to “the acceleration of movement leading to a flowing joy.”6 In The Will to Power, Nietzsche describes rausch as “the great stimulus to life,” both an unconscious, biological process and a higher mode of being, characterized by power, strength, and vision, where our modern pondering self is replaced by the “animal vigor” of an older, primal self.
Nietzsche thought rausch was one of the most powerful experiences we could have, and a foundational requirement for tapping our inner creative genius. “For there to be art,” he wrote in Twilight of the Idols, “for there to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological precondition is indispensable: Rausch. Rausch must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine, else there is no art.”7
Nietzsche started his career calling for a science-based approach to peak performance and ended up with the same blueprint used in this book.
Step one: Find a passion and purpose.
Step two: Fortify passion with grit and goals.
Step three: Amplify the results with learning and creativity.
Step four: Use flow to turbo-boost the whole process.
And there’s a reason for this as well. This is exactly where the science leads. Let’s take a closer look.
FLOW PSYCHOLOGY
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the word flow, and he did so for a reason. In the 1970s, he embarked on one of the largest optimal performance studies ever undertaken, going around the world asking tens of thousands of people about the times in their life when they felt their best and performed their best. He started out with experts—chess players, surgeons, dancers, and so on—and moved on to everyone else: Italian grape farmers, Navajo sheep herders, Chicago assembly line workers, elderly Korean women, Japanese teenage motorcycle gang members . . . this list goes on.8
Everyone he spoke to, regardless of culture, class, gender, or age, said they feel their best and perform their best when they’re in an altered state of consciousness, a state where every decision, every action, flows seamlessly, perfectly, from the last. Csikszentmihalyi chose the term “flow,” because that’s how the state itself feels. Flow feels flowy; it’s a literal description of experience itself.
This was the first in a series of foundational discoveries Csikszentmihalyi made about the state. His second discovery built off the first. Flow showed up everywhere he went. Why? Because the state is universal. Evolution shaped the brain to perform at its best by getting into flow. So the state shows up in anyone, anywhere, provided certain initial conditions are met.
His third discovery was that flow was definable. The state has six core psychological characteristics, and if all six show up, we call that experience flow. Here’s the full list:
Complete Concentration: More specifically, complete concentration on a limited field of information. Attention locked onto the task at hand. Engagement, enjoyment, and total absorption in the right here, right now.
The Merger of Action and Awareness: This is the front edge of that feeling of oneness with everything. It means that duality, the sense of being both an outside observer in your life and an active participant, melts away. You can no longer distinguish the self from the thing that the self is doing.
Our Sense of Self Vanishes: In flow, our sense of self disappears. Our sense of self-consciousness vanishes as well. The inner critic is quiet. The voice of doubt is silenced. And we experience this as liberation, as freedom; we are finally getting out of our own way.
An Altered Sense of Time: Technically, “time dilation.” Either time slows down, and we get that freeze-frame effect, or time speeds up and five hours pass by in five minutes. Past and future vanish, and we are plunged into an elongated present, what is sometimes called “the deep now.”
Paradox of Control: We have a powerful sense of control over the situation—often in a situation that is normally not controllable. In this moment, we are captain of our ship, master of this small slice of our destiny.
Autotelic Experience: The experience is intensely and intrinsically rewarding or, in technical parlance, “autotelic”—meaning the activity is its own reward. The thing we’re doing is so pleasurable and meaningful that we will go to great lengths to do it again, even at enormous personal risk and expense.
Csikszentmihalyi’s fourth breakthrough follows from his third: Because flow is describable, it’s measurable. Psychologists now have a number of extremely well-validated methods for doing just that. All measure these six attributes, and the depth to which they appear during a given experience.
The fifth thing Csikszentmihalyi realized was that the experience we call flow is actually a spectrum of experiences.9 In a sense, the state is like any other emotion. Take anger. You can be a little irked or homicidally murderous: same emotion, just opposite ends of a spectrum. The same is true for flow. You can be in a low-grade “microflow” state on one end of this spectrum or a full-blown “macroflow” state on the other.
In microflow, all or most of flow’s six core characteristics show up, just dialed down super-low. This is when you sit down to write a quickie email, only to look up, an hour later, and realize you’ve written an essay. Along the way, you had no idea time was passing and your sense of self faded a bit—maybe you really had to go to the bathroom but didn’t notice until after you finished writing that email.
Macroflow is the other end of the spectrum. This is when all of flow’s characteristics show up at once, dialed up to eleven. Macroflow is the quasi-mystical, my experience surfing away Lyme disease, for example, and one of the most potent experiences we can have on this planet. In macroflow, not only does the impossible become possible, it becomes just another thing we do, like eating breakfast, like tying our shoelaces.
The sixth discovery that Csikszentmihalyi made about flow is maybe the most important. In his research, the people who scored off the charts for overall well-being and life satisfaction were the people with the most flow in their lives. The state is the source code.
The next question: What’s the source of that source code?
And this is where neuroscience comes into this story. In the years since Csikszentmihalyi did this foundational work, brain imaging technology has advanced by leaps and bounds. This has allowed us to look deep under the hood of flow, to see where the state is coming from, and why it’s coming
. And it’s this map, arguably more than any other discovery, that has made training flow a very real possibility.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Let’s start with cognitive literacy: an understanding of exactly what’s going on in our brains and bodies when we’re performing at our best.
FLOW NEUROSCIENCE
To understand flow, we want to understand how changes in the four categories of brain activity introduced earlier—neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, neuroelectricity, and networks—conspire to create the state.
Two of these areas, neuroanatomy and networks, answer the question of where in the brain something is taking place. Neuroanatomy is a way of talking about localized structures, such as the amygdala and the hippocampus. Yet, as things rarely happen in only one place in the brain, we also have to discuss networks. The salience network, the default mode network, the fear network: these are all examples. These are areas in the brain linked by high-speed connections or areas that tend to co-activate.
Our next two categories, neurochemistry and neuroelectricity, are about communication. These are the two ways the brain sends messages, both to itself and to the rest of the body. Neurochemicals—a.k.a. dopamine, serotonin, and all the rest—are signaling molecules, typically telling the brain to do more of something or less of something. Neuroelectricity is the same thing, except the signals are electric instead of chemical.
To explore flow, we’re going to go category by category, starting with neuroanatomy, or where in the brain flow is taking place. However, if you want to know where, you actually have to start with when. And not, “When is this particular flow experience taking place?” Rather, “When in history are you asking this question about where flow is taking place?”
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