The Art of Impossible
Page 20
NEUROANATOMY
For most of the past century, the main thinking about peak performance has been what we now call “the 10 percent brain myth.”10 This is the idea that under normal conditions we’re only using a small portion of our brain, say 10 percent, so peak performance—a.k.a. flow—must be the full brain on overdrive.
Turns out, we had it exactly backward.
In flow, we’re not using more of the brain, we’re using less. The term for this is “transient hypofrontality.” Transient means temporary. Hypo is the opposite of “hyper”—it means to slow down, shut down, or deactivate. Frontality refers to the prefrontal cortex.11
The prefrontal cortex is a powerful place. As we’ve seen, it’s the seat of a lot of our higher cognitive functions. Executive attention, logical decision-making, long-term thinking, our sense of morality, our sense of willpower—they all reside here. Yet, in flow, this portion of the brain shuts down.
As we move into the state and our need for extremely focused attention heightens, the slower and energy-expensive extrinsic system—conscious processing—is swapped out for the far faster and more efficient processing of the subconscious, intrinsic system. “It’s [another] efficiency exchange,” says American University of Beirut neuroscientist Arne Dietrich, who helped discover this phenomenon. “We’re trading energy usually used for higher cognitive functions for heightened attention and awareness.”12
This is one reason time passes so strangely in flow. Time is a calculation performed in a number of different parts of the prefrontal cortex.13 It’s a network effect. But like any network, when too many nodes shut down, the whole system collapses. When this happens, we can no longer separate past from present from future and are instead thrust into “the deep now.”
And the deep now has a big impact on performance. Most of our fears and most of our anxieties don’t exist in the present. Either we’re concerned about horrible things that happened long ago—and we’re remembering them in the present so we don’t repeat those mistakes—or they’re scary things that might happen in the future and we’re trying to steer around them from the present. But remove past and future from this equation, and anxiety levels plummet. Stress hormones are flushed from the system, replaced by mood-boosting chemicals such as dopamine. And since a good mood increases our ability to find far-flung links between ideas, creativity spikes as well.
Something similar happens to our sense of self.14 Self is another network effect, created by a bunch of different structures in the prefrontal cortex. Once those structures start to shut down, that sense starts to disappear.
In 2008, we got a good look at this vanishing, when Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Charles Limb used fMRI to examine the brains of improv jazz musicians in flow.15 He found their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain best known for self-monitoring, almost completely deactivated.16 Self-monitoring is that voice of doubt, 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 quiet, those guesses are cut off at the source. The result is liberation. We act without hesitation. Creativity becomes more free-flowing, risk-taking becomes less frightening, and the combination lets us flow at a far faster clip.
NEUROELECTRICITY
Changes in brain-wave function further this process. In flow, we shift from the fast-moving beta wave of waking consciousness down to the far slower borderline between alpha and theta.17
Beta is where you are right now, as you’re reading this book. It’s the neurological signal of awake, alert, and paying attention. It typically means the prefrontal cortex is engaged, and the executive attention network is on the job. And if I quicken that wave a little more, amplifying it into “high beta,” this is too much attention: anxiety, a stress response, thinking on overdrive.
Alpha is slightly slower than beta. It’s the brain on pause, idling and in daydreaming mode, when we slip from idea to idea without much internal resistance. Alpha shows up when the default mode network is activated, which is why it’s frequently associated with creativity.
Theta, meanwhile, is slower still. This wave mostly shows up during REM or just before we fall asleep, in that hypnogogic state where ideas can combine in fantastical ways. In theta, the green sweater you’re thinking about suddenly becomes a green turtle, which becomes a green ocean and then a green planet.
While baseline flow appears to hover around the alpha/theta borderline (around 8 hertz), we don’t stay there all the time. Whenever we make a decision—and flow is an action state where we are continuously making decisions—we get pulled off baseline. This happens to all of us. One of the big differences between peak performers and everybody else is that peak performers can return to baseline, while most other people get hung up on the distraction.
Finally, there’s one more brain wave to consider: gamma. This is an extremely fast-moving wave that shows up when the brain makes connections between ideas, a process known as binding. It’s called binding because the act of making these connections actually changes the brain, binding neurons together in a novel network—literally the physical manifestation of the connection between ideas. Binding is exactly what happens when we experience a sudden breakthrough, when the solution to a problem simply pops into consciousness, the experience known as “aha” insight.18
Research by John Kounios and Mark Beeman shows that just before we have that insight, there’s a spike of gamma waves in the brain. But gamma is “coupled” to theta, meaning we can create a gamma wave only if we’re already creating theta waves. Since flow takes place on the alpha/theta borderline, the state perches us, perpetually, on the edge of aha insight. For this reason, when we’re in the zone, we’re always within striking distance of a major creative breakthrough.
NEUROCHEMISTRY
The neurochemistry of flow has become one of science’s better detective stories. The mystery arose in the late 1970s, when “runner’s high” replaced “flow” as the hip descriptor of peak performance. Researchers decided that endorphins, then a new discovery, were the secret sauce behind this high.
Endorphins are an extremely powerful reward chemical. They’re a pleasure-producing painkiller, a form of internal opioids, meaning they bond to the same receptor sites as external opioids such as heroin and OxyContin. The issue is that endorphins are tricky to measure in the brain and no one conclusively could prove the point. This frustration reached a crescendo in 2002, when then president of the Society for Neuroscience, Huda Akil, told the New York Times that endorphins in runners “is a total fantasy of the pop culture.”19
The detectives had reached an impasse.
This lasted for a few years. Then Arne Dietrich uncovered a different clue. Dietrich, the first neuroscientist to propose transient hypofrontality as a mechanism for flow, was doing research on endurance athletes. He discovered anandamide in their brains during runner’s high.20
Anandamide comes from ananda, the Sanskrit word for bliss. It’s another pain-killing, pleasure-inducing neurotransmitter, only in this case it acts like and binds to the same receptor as THC—the molecule that drives marijuana’s high. Dietrich’s discovery has been confirmed, and extended, and we now know that while anandamide is produced during flow in sports, it also shows up during singing, chanting, dancing, and most likely will be found whenever the state is present.
In 2007, German neuroscientists used PET scans to prove Huda Akil wrong, finding endorphins in the brain during flow, and settling that issue once and for all.21 Next, Emory University psychologist Greg Berns suggested that dopamine was present in flow,22 and other researchers have since seconded that opinion.23 And since the salience network is active in the state, other researchers realized that norepinephrine must be involved.24 Finally, it’s also been suggested that serotonin and oxytocin are present in flow, though there’s not yet enough evidence to say for sure.25
What we can say for sure: all
of these neurochemicals help explain why flow tends to show up when the impossible becomes possible. The reason? It’s because of how these neurochemicals impact all three sides of the high-performance triangle: motivation, learning, and creativity.
On the motivation side, all six of these chemicals are reward drugs, making flow one of the most rewarding experiences we can have. This is why researchers call the state “the source code of intrinsic motivation” and why McKinsey discovered that productivity is amplified 500 percent in flow—that’s the power of addictive, pleasure chemistry.26
Learning is also chemically driven. The more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, the better chance that experience moves from short-term holding into long-term storage. Since flow produces an enormous neurochemical cocktail, our ability to retain information skyrockets. In research conducted by Advanced Brain Monitoring and the Department of Defense, in flow, learning rates soar by 230 percent.27
Finally, creativity takes an even larger jump, as these same chemicals surround the brain’s creative process. When they’re in our system, we take in more information per second, pay more attention to that incoming information, and find faster connections between that incoming information and older ideas—so data acquisition, salience, and pattern recognition all spike. We also find farther-flung connections between those ideas, so lateral thinking rises, too. Then, because it’s not enough to simply have that neat idea, you also have to introduce it to the world, risk-taking is also required by creativity. And risk-taking, thanks to all of the dopamine in our system, gets amplified as well. Even better, Harvard’s Teresa Amabile found that the heightened creativity produced by flow can outlast the flow state itself, by a day, sometimes two.28
This neurochemical combination punch is what makes flow so crucial to paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. Equally important: tackling high, hard goals often involves teamwork, and here neurochemistry plays an added role.
Flow comes in two varieties. Since most of this book has been concerned with individual performance, our focus has often been on individual flow. But there’s also group flow, the shared, collective version of the state. These same neurochemicals help drive that shared state. All six of the neurochemicals that have been linked to flow are “pro-social” chemicals, or chemicals that reinforce social bonding. Falling in love is the combination of norepinephrine and dopamine. Endorphins create maternal bonding, oxytocin promotes trust, while serotonin and anandamide increase our openness to others and promote calm in social situations. This cocktail is why cooperation and collaboration spike in flow.
NETWORKS
Networks are where flow science starts to get a little fuzzier, but this should be expected, as the connectome—the network wiring diagram of the brain—is one of neuroscience’s latest frontiers. Let’s start with what we think we know.
There’s an increasing pile of research showing that flow involves a complicated interplay among the salience network, the executive attention network, and the default mode network. But there are conflicting findings. A mountain of evidence indicates that flow activates both the salience and executive attention networks while deactivating the default mode network. The problem is that flow heightens creativity, and creativity is associated with increased activity in the default mode network. In other words, there’s more work to be done.
And more work has been done.
Additional research conducted by the Flow Research Collective and Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman indicates that the brain’s fight response, which involves a circuit between the thalamus and the medial prefrontal cortex, gets involved at the front edge of a flow state.29 We also know that every other aspect of our fear system is deactivated, while almost every aspect of the dopamine-producing reward system comes online. Additionally, thanks to transient hypofrontality, the network that creates our sense of self deactivates.
This puzzle, of course, goes on and on. Yet, while we don’t know everything, we definitely know enough to be dangerous—which brings us to flow’s triggers and the question of how, exactly, we can get more flow in our lives.
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Flow Triggers
Back in the 1970s, when Csikszentmihalyi was first exploring flow, he described the state as having nine core characteristics, rather than the six introduced earlier. Those three extra characteristics were clear goals, immediate feedback, and the challenge-skills balance. In the years following this work, it became clear that while, yes, these characteristics did show up whenever flow was present, there was a different reason for this. Rather than being characteristics of the state, they were its causes, or what Csikszentmihalyi later termed “proximal conditions for flow” and we now know as “flow triggers.”1
Since then, we’ve identified nineteen more flow triggers, for our current total of twenty-two.2 There are probably more, but this is as far as the research has taken us. All of these triggers work by driving attention into the present moment.3 And they do this in some combination of three ways. Either they push norepinephrine and/or dopamine into our system, which are both focusing chemicals, and/or they lower cognitive load, which frees up extra energy that can then be repurposed for attention.
In The Rise of Superman, I placed these triggers into four broad categories: psychological, environmental, social, and creative. Since then, I’ve changed the names of a few of those categories to more accurately reflect their function, and also moved some of the triggers into different categories. Apologies for the update, but this is the way science tends to go.
We’ve already explored many of these triggers, but here we’ll expand on these ideas, and snap the pieces together, creating a practical, tactical bigger picture. But the most important point: These triggers are your toolbox. If you want more flow in your life, then build your life around these triggers.
INTERNAL TRIGGERS
Internal triggers are conditions in our inner, psychological environment that create more flow. Back in the 1970s, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified clear goals, immediate feedback, and the challenge-skills balance as the three most critical conditions. He also listed complete concentration as a flow characteristic—which it remains—but it’s since been added to the list of triggers (for obvious reasons). Meanwhile, psychologists who study intrinsic motivation have placed another two triggers on the list: autonomy and the trinity of curiosity-passion-purpose.
We’ll start with autonomy.
AUTONOMY
Autonomy is a flow trigger because autonomy and attention are coupled systems. When we’re in charge of both our mind (freedom of thought) and our destiny (freedom of choice), our whole being gets involved. In his 2014 paper “Attention and the Holistic Approach to Behavior,” Csikszentmihalyi explains it this way:
If attention is the means by which a person exchanges information with the environment . . . then voluntary focusing of attention is a state of optimal interaction. In such a state, a person feels fully alive and in control, because he or she can direct the flow of reciprocal information that unites person and environment in an interactive system. I know that I am alive, that I am somebody, that I matter. . . . The ability to focus attention is the most basic way of reducing ontological anxiety, the fear of impotence, of nonexistence. This might be the main reason why the exercise of concentration, when it is subjectively interpreted to be free, is such an enjoyable experience.4
This quote also gives us a look at the mechanisms beneath the process. Attention, depending on what we’re focused on, can be produced by both dopamine and norepinephrine. The feeling of being fully alive is the excitement and pleasure created by these chemicals, while that sense of control comes from their heightening of the brain’s information-processing machinery.
Simultaneously, what Csikszentmihalyi describes as “ontological anxiety” is both our fear of death and our desire for this life to matter. It is a form of persistent cognitive load, what psychologist Ernest Becker called “the denial of death.”5 When we focus attention in the present, w
e are taking attention off these forms of anxiety. This lightens the load and lets us repurpose the extra energy for focus.
So how much autonomy do we really need to pull this trigger?
We addressed this question earlier, when we broke down the different approaches taken by Google, 3M, and Patagonia. We saw that devoting 15 to 20 percent of your time is more than enough, whereas the minimum requirements are the autonomy needed to do four things: get enough sleep at night; get regular exercise; be able to work during periods of maximum alertness; and be able to chase flow when desired.
And, truthfully, when in pursuit of a high-flow lifestyle, this is one of the better places to start. But that idea was covered earlier. Here, I want to add one more component: the art of saying no.
Peak performers routinely turn down opportunities, even fantastic ones, if those opportunities reduce autonomy. Typically, this involves money. Writers, for example, have a notoriously tough time paying their bills. Websites, magazines, and newspapers sometimes offer these same writers the opportunity to solve that problem, become editors, and get a regular paycheck. The safety and security are tempting. The prestige as well. Yet, one of the main differences between writers who are successful and writers who are not? The successful ones said no to temptation. The others said yes, lost their ability to control their schedules, lost their ability to write regularly, and are now, well, editors.
There are similar outs in almost any profession. If you’re truly interested in consistent high achievement, then you have to learn that the art of no is woven through the art of impossible. Why? Because the art of flow demands the art of autonomy.