MALE SPEAKER: I'm
really happy to welcome our two guests and my
friends here today, Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal. As you know, wellness,
optimum living have been big topics
at Google for a while. And they are complex issues. I know my colleagues wrestle
with these issues a lot, trying to figure out solutions. And today, what they
will be presenting and what we'll learn
more about, flow, I think is a big part
of this complex puzzle. And so I want to give you
a little bit of background with both of these folks
before we get started. So Steven is a "New York
Times" best-selling author. He's an award-winning
journalist and co-founder of the Flow Genome Project. And he has many books,
including "Abundance." And his new book,
"The Rise of Superman" will be the focus on today. His books have been translated
in many different languages. Articles have appeared in
more than 70 publications, including "New Times Magazine,"
"Atlantic Monthly," "Wired," and "Forbes." Jamie Wheal is the
executive director of the Flow Genome Project. And he's a leading
expert in neurosemantics of ultimate human performance. And he works with Fortune 100
companies, leading business schools, Young
Presidents' Organization, an also Red Bull, with
their world-class athletes. So with that, I'm going
to turn it over to Steven. [APPLAUSE] STEVEN KOTLER: Hello. Thank you guys for coming out. I very much appreciate
you being here. I want to kind of
just orientate you a little bit to what
we're going to do. I'm going to kind of
give you an introduction to flow and start breaking down
some of the neurobiology, how it works under the
hood and giving you kind of the broad
spectrum of importance. And then Jamie's is
going to take over and he's going to talk
about practical applications about how you can get
more flow into your lives. As a way to kind
of begin, I want to tell you kind of where
I began with this, which was when I was 30 years
old, I got Lyme disease. And I spent the better
portion of three years in bed. If you don't know what
Lyme disease is like, imagine the worst
flea you've ever had, crossed with paranoid
schizophrenia. So by the end of it, the doctors
had pulled me off medicines. My stomach lining
was bleeding out. There was nothing else anybody
else anybody could do for me. And I was functional,
5% to 10% of the time. My mind was totally shut down. My body was in so much
pain, I could barely walk. I was hallucinating. My short-term memory was gone. My long-term memory was gone. It was all gone. And at this point, I was
going to kill myself out of practicality. The only thing I was going
to be from here on forward was a burden to my
friends and my family. And it was really a question of
when and not if at that point. And in the middle of all this
kind of negative thinking, a friend of mine
showed up at my house and demanded we go surfing. And it was a ridiculous request. First of all, it had
been about five years since I had surfed
at that point. And the last time
I had surfed, I had nearly drowned in a big
way of accident in Indonesia and wanted nothing
to do with surfing. And as I said, I could
barely walk across the room. And she was a pain in my ass. She wouldn't leave
and wouldn't leave. And kept badgering me
and kept badgering me. And after finally about
three hours of this, I was like, what the
hell, let's go surfing. What is the worst
that can happen? And they she kind of
walked me to their car. And they put me in their car and
they drove me to Sunset Beach in Los Angeles. And if you know anything
about surfing in Los Angeles, you know that
Sunset Beach is just about the wimpiest beginner
wave in the entire world. And it was summer. And the water was warm
and the tide was low. And the waves were crap,
like maybe two feet high. And no one was out. And they walked me out to the
break, literally by my elbows and kind of helped me out there. They gave me a board
the size of Cadillac. And the bigger the board,
the easier it is to surf. This was enormous. And I was out there about
30 seconds when a wave came. And I'm not quite
sure what happened, muscle memory took
over, whatever. The wave came. I spun the board around. I paddled a couple
times and I popped up. And I popped up into a
completely different dimension. My senses were incredibly
incredibly, incredibly acute, I was clear headed for
the first time in years. I felt like I had
panoramic vision. And time had dilated. It had slowed down. So that freeze-frame
effect, if you've ever been in a car crash,
that was my experience. And the most incredible
thing was I felt great. I mean I felt alive, that
thrum of possibility. And it was the first
time in about three years that I had felt it. And that wave felt so good,
I caught four more in a row. And after that fifth
wave, I was disassembled. I was gone. They had to carry me to the car. They put me in the car. They drove me home. They had to put me into bed. And people actually had
to come and bring me food because for 14 days,
I couldn't walk again. So I couldn't make it 50
feet away to my kitchen to make a meal. And on the 15th day,
which was the day that I could walk again,
I got back in my car and I went back to the
ocean and I did it again. And again, I had this kind
of crazy, quasi-mystical experience. And again, it felt great. And the cycle kept
repeating itself. And over about six
months' time, when the only thing I was doing
different was surfing, I went from about 10%
functionality to about 80% functionality. So my first question was
what the hell is going on? Because surfing is
not a cure for chronic autoimmune conditions,
first of all. Second of all, I'm a
science writer by training. I'm a rational materialist. And I don't have
mystical experiences. And I certainly don't have them
in the waves while surfing. The whole thing
seemed ludicrous. Lyme is only fatal if
it enters your brain. And I was pretty
certain that the reason I was having these
quasi-mystical experiences out in the waves was
because I was dying. So where all this started
for me was a giant quest to figure out what the
hell was going on with me. What I discovered was this
altered state of consciousness I was experiencing had
a name, flow states. Now, you may know this by
other names, being in the zone, runner's high. If you happen to be a
beatnik jazz musician, then you're in the pocket. If you're a stand-up comic,
it's called the forever box. The lingo goes on,
and on, and on. The term researchers
prefer is flow. And they prefer this
term for a reason. It's actually a technical term. And we'll come back
to why in a second. But in flow, what
happens is attention becomes so focused
on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Your sense of action or
awareness merge together. So the doer and the
beer become one. A sense of self, our sense
of self-consciousness disappear completely. Time dilates. So that means it slows
down like I mentioned. You can that freeze-frame
effect, like in a car crash. Sometimes it speeds up. And five hours will go
by in like five minutes. And throughout all
aspects of performance, mental and physical
go through the roof. I'm not going to
dwell too much on it. I'm just going to
kind of explain it. And we're going to go
on to a lot of things. But I want to talk about
why flow actually healed me from Lyme disease, just
so you guys understand what was going on. We're going to talk later about
the neurochemicals involved in flow. All of them significantly
jack up the immune system. More importantly, they reset
the nervous system back towards zero. So they calm you down. An autoimmune condition
is essentially a haywire nervous system. So the fact that periodic flow
states were calming my system back down is allowing me
to form new neural nets. Neural nets that didn't lead
immediately back to illness. And this is what kind of gave
me a toehold and possibility to get better. What I also
discovered when I was researching flow and
learning all this stuff is that the exact
same state that helped me get from seriously
subpar back to normal was helping a lot
of other people go from normal up to superman. Another thing that I
learned very quickly on is that I really was
not the first person to come to this conclusion. Flow science dates back about
150 years, to the early 1870s. By the turn of the century,
Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James
was looking at the state. And he was the first
person to figure out that the brain can radically
alter consciousness to improve performance. More importantly was the work
of one of James' students, Walter Bradford for Cannon,
who was a great physiologist. Bradford Cannon discovered
the fight or flight response. And in doing so, he kind
of give us our first window into where this
accelerated performance might be coming from. This was a very, very big deal. Before that moment in time,
performance enhancement was essentially a
gift from the gods. You want a better time in
100-yard dash, Hermes can help. You want to write a better
poem, talk to the muses. But Walter Bradford Cannon
turned a gift from the gods into standard biology. He give us our very first
toehold into the mystery. In 1940s, psychologist
Abraham Maslow picked up on this thread. He discovered that
flow was a commonality among all successful people. And then in the 1960s and '70s,
the real revolution began, a guy named Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi, who is then the chairman of
the University of Chicago psychology department. Csikszentmihalyi sort of-- well,
Maslow discovered the state in successful people. Csikszentmihalyi got curious
about kind of everybody else in the world. So he made what
is now considered one of the largest global
psychological studies ever. He went around the
world, asking people about the times in their
life when I felt their best and they performed their best. And it was a huge group. He started out
talking to experts. He talked to expert
rock climbers, ballet dancers,
artists, surgeons. It didn't matter. They all said same thing. They felt their best. And they performed their best
in the state he termed flow. Then he blew it out
to everybody else. And by everybody else, I
really mean everybody else. He talked to Navajo
sheepherders. He talked to Italian
grape farmers. He talked to elderly
Korean women. He talked to Japanese teenage
motorcycle gang members. He talked to Detroit
assembly line workers. Everybody he talked to
told him the same thing. They felt their best,
they performed their best when they were in
the state of flow. Csikszentmihalyi also came
up with the term "flow." One of the reasons was when he
was talking to all these people and they describing this
state, they always said, well, I'm using my
skills to the utmost. I'm pushing myself as
far as I possibly can. But it feels effortless. When I'm in this
state, every decision, every action leads seamlessly,
fluidly to the next. In other words, flow felt flowy. The other major finding
that came out of this, as I hinted at a second
ago, flow is ubiquitous. It shows up everywhere,
in anyone, anywhere, provided certain initial
conditions are met. What this means is that
everybody from jazz musicians in Algeria, to software
designers in Mumbai, to coders here in Silicon
Valley are using flow to massively
accelerate performance. And it is a considerable
bit of acceleration. Flow amplifies all of
our physical skills. So in this state, we are better. We are faster. We are stronger. We are more dexterous. And we are more agile. So our brains. Flow jacks up
information processing. So when we're in the
state, our senses are actually taking in more
information per second. We're processing it more deeply. So that is using more
parts of our brain at once. And while there's a lot
of debate about this, it does appear that we are
processing it more quickly. And it's not just
information processing that is getting jacked up. Pattern recognition, future
prediction, basically all the fundamental neuronal
processes in the brain are amplified by flow. As a result of
this, scientists now believe flow sits at the heart
of every athletic championship. So almost every gold medal
that has ever been won. But it also accounts for
significant, significant progress in the arts and major
scientific breakthroughs. In business, McKinsey
did a 10-year study. They found that top executives
report being five times more productive in flow
than out of flow. So you got to stop
and think about that. Normally, I have to
explain to most audiences that five times is
actually a 500% increase. I'm guessing you guys got it. But what that means is you
can go to work on Monday, spend Monday in flow, take
Tuesday through Friday off, and get as much done as
your steady-state peers. So it is a huge, huge,
huge amplification. And that 500% increase
may sound ridiculous until you consider
action-and-adventure sport athletes. So one of things
McKinsey discovered is that average people, average
workers, spend less than 5% of their work life in flow. One place where this
is definitely not true is in action-and
adventure sports. Action-and-adventure
sport athletes, for reasons that Jamie is
going to get into later, have essentially become the
best flow hackers on Earth. And this has happened over
about the past 25 years. And there are reasons for it. And we'll talk about them later. But I want to tell you
what this has produced. It has produced near
exponential growth in what's termed ultimate
human performance, which is performance when life
or limb is on the line. Nothing like this has
ever happened before. Sports progression, it's slow. It's steady. It's governed by the
laws of evolution. At no point in history does
it quintuple in a decade. Yet this is exactly what's been
happening in surfing, skiing, snowboarding, rock climbing,
mountain biking, et cetera, all the action and adventure sports. I'll give you a
couple of examples. Surfing is a great one. This is a
thousand-year-old sport. From 400 AD to 1996, the biggest
wave anybody has ever surfed is 25 feet. Above that, it's
believed impossible. Scientists don't
think it's possible. Surfers don't think
it's possible. Today, we're pushing
into 100-foot waves. In snowboarding, in 1992,
the biggest gap jump that anybody had ever
cleared is 40 feet. Now, 40 feet is a big jump
to clear on a snowboard. Today, as you can
tell from this image, snowboarders are pushing
into 230, 240 foot jumps. So near exponential growth in
ultimate human performance. The better news, at the same
time all this is going on, they solved a
couple of problems. For a long time, one of the
big problems in flow research was the subject of state. How the hell do know if your
research subjects are in flow? The good news about action
adventure sport athletes, sort of, is that the
level of progression has advanced so
much in recent years that if people are not in
flow on their performing, they're ending up in
the hospital or dead. So this gives you a hard
research set to work with. It's a hard data set. If they lived through
the experience, we know they're in flow. Simultaneously, combined with
this-- flow science, as I said, goes back to 150 years. Most people are really aware
of the first 130 years, which is when we figured out the
psychology of the state. And we got really good at
the psychology of the state. What's happened since 1990ish
is that our neurobiology has gotten very good. Our brain imaging technology
has gotten very good. EEG has gotten a lot better. And for the very
first time in history, we can look under
the hood and we can figure out what's
going on in flow. One of the first things that we
discovered is there's-- the old idea about ultimate human
performance was based on what's called
the 10% brain myth. It was actually a
misinterpretation of William James. But it's the idea-- and I'm sure
you're all familiar with it-- that most of us only
use 10% of our brain. For ultimate
performance, a/k/a flow, it has to be all of our brain
firing on all of our cylinders. That was the idea. It turns out that's
exactly backwards. What's happening in
flow is the brain isn't becoming hyperactive. It's actually starting
to deactivate. So this is happening
for a number of reasons. The simple reason is it's
an inefficiency exchange. The brain is a giant energy hog. It's 2% of our mass. It uses 20% of our energy. So one of the fundamental
rules of the brain is how do I can conserve energy? So conscious
processing is very slow and it's extremely
energy expensive. Subconscious processing, on the
other hand, is very, very quick and it's very, very
energy efficient. So what's happening
in flow is we are trading conscious processing
for subconscious processing. As this is happening,
huge swatches of the brain are being shut off. The technical term for this is
"transient," meaning temporary, "hypofrontality," hypo, H-Y-P-O,
it's the opposite of hyper. It means to deactivate,
to slow down, to shut off. Frontality refers to
the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain
that's back here, that houses all of your
higher cognitive functions. So why does time
dilate in a flow state? Why does it speed
up or slow down? Because time, as Baylor
neuroscientist David Eagleman figured out, is calculated all
over the brain, especially all over the prefrontal cortex. As parts of it
start to wink out, we can no longer separate past,
from present, from future. So we're plunged
into what researchers call the "deep now." To give you another example
of what goes on in flow, another portion of the
brain that goes off-- we talked earlier about how
self and self-consciousness disappears. Why does self-consciousness
disappear in flow? Because a portion of the brain
known as the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex,
which sort of is responsible for self
monitoring and impulse control, shuts down. So self-monitoring, that's your
inner critic, your inner Woody Allen. That's that nagging,
defeatist voice that's always on in your head. In flow, it's turned off. When it turns off, we
experience this as liberation. We are literally
free from ourselves. Creativity goes up. Risk taking goes up. Performance goes up. We are much more
open to experience. So what we've just
been talking about is neuroanatomy,
where in the brain something is taking place. If you really want to kind of
map an experience in the brain, you have to talk
about neuroanatomy, where in the brain it's
taking place, neurochemistry, and neuroelectricity,
which are the two ways the brain sends signals. I'm going to talk a little
about neurochemistry. Then Jamie's going to pick
it up and talk a little bit about neuroelectricity. In flow, we get five of the
most potent neurochemicals the brain can possibly produce. So all of these are performance
enhancing neurochemicals. Norepinephrine and
dopamine enhance focus. They tighten focus. They drive us more into the now. It also speeds up
muscle reaction time. They lower signal to
noise ratios in the brain also so we have more
pattern recognition. Anandamide is a pain reliever. But it also speeds up or
increases lateral thinking, thinking outside the box. So pattern
recognition is defined as the linking of
similar ideas together. Lateral thinking is the linking
of disparate ideas together. That goes up in flow. Endorphins, very, very
potent painkillers and very, very powerful
social bonding chemicals. And serotonin keeps
us calm throughout. That's the chemical at the
heart of the Prozac revolution. So the thing you need
to know about all of these neurochemicals,
besides the fact that they up performance, is
how they impact motivation. So for those of you who don't
know much about neurochemistry and drugs, all of
these chemicals are incredibly potent
reward chemicals. Let's talk about
dopamine for a second. Cocaine is widely considered
the most addictive substance on Earth. When someone snorts cocaine,
all that actually happens is dopamine floods
into their brain and then the brains
blocks its re-uptake. So the substance is in
your brain for longer. Norepinephrine-- let me go
back-- norepinephrine is speed or Ritalin. Anandamide is the
same psychoactive that's inside of marijuana, THC. Endorphins are opiates. And just to give you
an example, there are about 20
different endorphins in the brain and the body. The most common one is
100 times more potent than medical morphine. And serotonin is
essentially MDMA. The point here is that when
all five of these chemicals flood into your
brain, it produces an extremely, extremely,
extremely addictive experience. Flow is arguably the most
addictive experience on Earth because it's probably the
only time, or the only time that we know of, when all
five of these chemicals get flooded into
your brain at once. Researchers don't like
the word "addictive." It has very negative
connotations. So they prefer "autotelic,"
which means an end in itself. What this basically means is
that once an experience starts producing flow, we will
go extraordinarily far out of our way to
get more of it. Which is why researchers
talk about flow as the source code of
intrinsic motivation. So why does this
apply in daily living? One reason is, as a recent
Gallup survey pointed out, 71% of American
workers are disengaged or actively
disengaged on the job. The other 29% have
jobs that produce flow. So we really know what the
solution is to this problem. The other thing I
want to talk about, flow doesn't just
amp up motivation. It also massively
jacks up creativity. It's hard to put
numbers on this. We did a kind of a loose study
at the Flow Genome Project. And I say loosen
loose and preliminary. And people reported a 7x
improvement in creativity. To give you another
example of this, an Australian study--
it's a neat study-- they took 40 people. They give everybody a really
tricky brain teaser to solve. Nobody could solve it. They induced flow artificially
using transcranial stimulation. They literally took
an electric pulse and knocked out the
prefrontal cortex and basically induced
transient hypofrontality. 23 people solved the
problem in record time. So creativity goes
massively through there. Again, this comes down
to neurochemistry. So creativity as a
skill is usually, not always, but
usually recombinatory. It's the product of a novel
idea bumping into an old thought to create something
startling new. So if you want to
increase creativity, you have to increase
all of those things. Well, norepinephrine and
dopamine, they tighten focus. The brain is taking in more
information for a second. So it's heightening
our access to novelty, which is on the front end
of the creativity equation. Because they lower signal to
noise ratios in the brain, they are also upping
pattern recognition, so our ability to
link ideas together. And then anandamide is
increasing lateral thinking or our ability to link
disparate ideas together. So literally the state of
flow surrounds creativity. And what's really interesting
here is creativity, as most of you I'm
sure are aware, is a quality that's
really, really desirable. IBM did a global survey. I think it was 1,500 CEOs. Of the quality most
necessary in a CEO today, creativity was
the number one answer. Yet how to teach creativity? How do we teach people to be
more creative, a big problem. Teresa Amabile at
Harvard did a study where she discovered
that not only are people more creative in
the state of flow, but that heightened
creativity actually outlasts the state
by a couple of days. Which suggests-- and more
work needs to be done-- but it suggests that
the state of flow actually trains the brain
to be more creative. The other things these
neurochemicals do is they exist to kind
of tag experiences. So a quick shorthand for
learning and memory, the more neurochemicals that show up
during experience, the greater chance that experience moves
from short-term holding into long-term storage. Neurochemicals are essentially
a big tag on experience. It says, important,
save for later. So flow is a gigantic dump
of potent neurochemicals. So this has a radical
impact on learning. In studies run by
the US military by DARPA in advanced
brain monitoring, which is a team in
Carlsbad, California, they again induced
flow artificially, two different ways. They used transcranial
direct stimulation and they also used
neural feedback. And they found that
snipers in flow learned an average of
230% faster than normal. They then repeated
this same study with novices,
nonmilitary personnel. And they found that
the time it took to get from novice to expert
by artificially inducing flow could be cut in half. So what this tells us is
that Malcolm Gladwell's famous 10,000 hours to mastery,
flow cuts them in half. So this is where I'm going
to stop with learning, and creativity, and
motivation because I think those are three big categories
that apply in everybody's life. As a way of kind of
transitioning into Jamie, what I want to say is what has also
come out of all this research is not just what's
going on in flow. And because we've had these
athletes as a data set, we can figure out
what they are doing to get into flow so successfully
and we can work backwards. And we can apply this
knowledge across all domains in societies. So what we've discovered is
that flow states have triggers. These are preconditions
that lead to more flow. I'm going to turn it over
and let Jamie talk about this and why they're so important. JAMIE WHEAL: Thank you. [APPLAUSE] So about 2,000 years ago, there
was this epic, "Old Testament" rap battle between Rabbi
Hillel and the pharisees. And the pharisees
challenged him. They said, OK, Rabbi Hillel,
you think you're a hot shot. Can you stand on one leg
and recite all of scripture? And he said yes, I can. And he did it. And he stood on one leg. And he said do
unto others as you would have them do unto you. The rest of scripture
is mere commentary. And here at Google,
it's your guys' world to be organizing the
world's information. And while that is
ambitious and noble, you guys know, too,
that it's the insights we gain, it's not simply
the data we gather, that makes a difference. And where we are today
is truly drowning in information and
just as we always have been, starving
for motivation. We know better. We know we're supposed to eat
real foods, mostly plants, not too much. We know we're supposed
to do work that matters. We know we're supposed
to practice gratitude. We know that meditation
is supposed to be amazing if we ever get around to it
and can sit still long enough. We know all this stuff. But if you just-- a quick
glance at the stats behind me. Look at the toll. We are less healthy. We are more obese. There's higher
workplace injuries. There's dollar values
attached to this stuff. Lifetime fitness,
arguably the kind of access to
embodiment and wellness for like the suburban
masses, 75% attrition rate. And that's an
internal statistic. 75% of the people
that say yes, I want you to take my $150 a
month, I want the outcome, never show up again. And most chillingly, a
study at Harvard conducted-- that, hey, when you are faced
with a chronic lifestyle disease, diabetes,
heart disease, smoking chronic stress, and your
doctor says, hey, look, here's the deal. You really have to
change your ways and if you don't,
it might kill you. This is what we're left with. Seven out of eight of us
would rather die than change. Mind boggling. So back to these guys. [INAUDIBLE] is not just kind of
noodling around on the sides. They actually have a
full-bore research project. It is global. It is interdisciplinary. It's called the
Quantified Warriors. So forget you're kind of
Quantified Self meet-ups here in the Valley. These guys are building
these supersoldiers of 2030. And what they're doing
is sort of alternately fascinating and
horrifying, depending on your point of view. But there's something
really interesting that's been going on. And Steven talked a
little bit about there's a 150 years of research. The last 10 to 20 years has
been getting super-interesting. And if I was in your
seats, I'd be saying, OK, this sounds OK, cool. But how come I
don't know about it? If it was really all that,
we'd know about it right now. And there's actually a problem. There's a reason
why we don't have this as shared
working knowledge. Which is really how do we take
information and translate it into motivation? Because as Steven said,
flow is autotelic. Flow has this massive
neurochemical dump. It encodes and rewards
us to do more of it. And if we could unlock that,
intrinsic human motivation, what's possible next? Because these guys, the
Special Operations forces, Yale is working with Delta
Force and the Rangers, and Red Bull is working with
the Coronado SEAL Team Six, these guys are getting
way into the fine details. But they are
explicitly disincented to share this knowledge. One of them wants to stay a
step ahead of the bad guys. And the other guys want
to step up on the podium. So what they've been learning
has not been shared yet. And certainly part
of our mission is to actually take this
extreme, the folks who risk their lives for
a living, and bring it more into the mainstream. Bring it to impact
entrepreneurs. Bring it to communities
of innovation where we can harness
the same rocket fuel. So to go back and
just kind of shake out three of the more practical
takeaways of what-- if you remember nothing
else from today, please think through these ones. Number one is what we
were just talking about. Flow is the source code of
intrinsic motivation reinforced with the most potent
neurochemical set we have access to. Next, it shortens learning. Which means either I get
to spend a lot more time on the couch or I can
actually go further in my domains of inquiry. I can learn more. What happens to
human progression when we can double its efficacy? And lastly, again
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow, did
a 10-year global study. And one of the
additional benefits was that the people who have
the most flow in their lives are in fact the happiest. So as far as the bottom
line in optimal psychology, that is the "so what"
at the end of it. So to go back to these action
sports athletes as a case study because they've been kind
of a fringe population. People don't pay much
attention to them. The notion ski bum and surf
bum aren't exactly warm embraces of people
who have dedicated their lives in these domains. But they really have
come up with three very good and transferable
ways for all of us to get more flow in our life. And the three re
deep embodiment. When they are doing
things, they are feeling the forces of gravity. So their proprioceptive
sense, like where are my limbs in space,
my vestibular sense, where is my inner ear in
relationship to my hips, compression, weightlessness,
rotation, all of these things are giving very strong
sensory motor inputs into our body and brain. And as Steven was mentioning,
cells that fire together, wire together and we create
richer and more robust neural networks. So we've some
fascinating studies. They did a sort of human
life-sized Frogger experiment with college
athletes versus just frat boys and sorority girls. And they said, OK,
who's going to do better at this life-size Frogger
game and who would you put your money on? Well, the athletes
and the athletes won. But not for the
reasons we would think. They didn't win because they
had faster reaction time. They didn't win because they
could-- explosive box jumps. They won because they could
process complex multivariable equations faster and then
act on that information. So the notion of the dumb jock
was also absolutely wrong. And in comparison--
so this goes back to the sort of ancient
Shaolin temple-- mastery and control of body yielding
mastery and control of mind. So you go from
basically going on a dial-up modem-- I'm just a
brain on a stick, disembodied, disconnected, only perceiving
and receiving information through one data feed-- into
broadband or even satellite. I am now picking up all
channels available to me as a sensing cognition machine. And those neuron nets are
now fired and wired together. Next, rich environments. Think about the
difference in a surfer or a skier, big mountain
skier, any of these things, between just playing ping-pong. And every day that ping-pong
table is exactly the same. And my paddle is. And the ball bounces
the same way. It all works. And I can kind of check out. But in a situation
where the environment is so rich it's overwhelming
and stimulating, it actually sort of can knock
out my waking sense of self and forces me to pay
explicit, acute attention because if I don't,
I get knocked down. And lastly, high
consequences, which I just kind of foreshadowed. In fact, Oscar Wilde
I think famously said, there's nothing
like the prospect of being hung in the
morning to clear one's mind. So immediate high consequences
have this wonderful effect, which is very hard
in this day and age. We're always elsewhere
and elsewhen. I'm thinking about tomorrow. I'm on my phones. I'm pitching this. I'm posting that. Like high consequences bring me
back into the incontrovertible now. It is the only place
that flow can happen. And if I get out of it,
if I drift, I get spanked. And it hurts and I learn. Now, think about how much of
our learning and experiences these days are disconnected from
those kind of tight feedback loops. So let's translate this
to your guys' world a little bit because
that's the beauty. And this would just
be kind of a curiosity if it didn't matter
to us as well. So think about
rich environments. You guys are obviously in one. The cross pollination--
a lot of the sort of cutting edge organizational
design of workplaces, whether it's at
Pixar with the atrium and the serendipitous meetings. Whether it's your guys'
cafeterias and restaurants, with the lines
and the management and all of your commons
areas explicitly designed to create
novel, changing environments, high consequences. I mean obviously, next door
Facebook's got the shit fast, break stuff, lean and agile
design and development. The entrepreneurial
mentalities that you guys have where failure is expected
because if you're not failing, you're not learning as
rapidly as you might. And deep embodiment, I mean
it's no mistake I think that you guys here at Google,
with founders who were both Montessori children--
which in the flow research is the most flow-prone
educational method in the world, with sensorial,
manipulative children sweeping and cutting and actually using
body and brain simultaneously, as well as the founders'
passion for all things action sports and adventure,
the DNA of this place is pretty much set up to be
about an optimal an environment for cultivating this as
anywhere you could think of. So Steven described
the five neurochemicals and described the
neuroanatomy a little bit. But let's put this in motion. Let's actually put this
in time, through time as we might experience it. Because what this is, what
we're calling the flow genome matrix, which is literally
what's the genome? What are the core components? How do they work. And if we have that knowledge,
what can we do with it? And just so you
guys kind of track the research, the lineage
behind this model, this comes largely out
of Herbert Benson's work at Harvard, as well as
Dr. Lesley Sherlinis, who is the sort of mad
scientist, EEG guy behind a lot of the
SEAL team and Red Bull work that we just
mentioned earlier. But let's just take a
look at this process because the first thing to
dispel is that flow is a state. So it comes and it goes. It's not an ever
on kind of thing. But it's not like
a light switch. It's not just, it's on
and I'm in it, or it's off and I'm someplace else. It's a cycle. And it has at least
four distinct stages. So if we take a look
at how those progress, the first-- whether you're
a more of a fan of M. Scott Peck and "The Road Less
Traveled" or Buddha and his Noble Truths,
either way, life's a bitch. Life is struggle. And that's how it starts. And we start by being
in over our heads. We start by finding ourselves
in a situation or a condition-- and this could be late
night code delivery. This could be some new,
big business problem. It could be relational,
whatever it is. And we start out of our depth. And we end up with a
bit of a sort of angel and a devil dialogue
on our shoulder. So our prefrontal cortex that
houses our executive function, what we normally think
as me and the thing we've been rewarded in school
and rewarded in work for being smart and
controlled and precise and delivering things on
time, we try and solve it full frontal assault. But the problem is
bigger than that. It's bigger than
our capabilities. So we start toggling
back to kind of our primitive sense
of self, our amygdala, and is this a fight
or flight situation? Do I need to pull the rip cord? And meanwhile, my brain waves
are in quite rapid beta. This is me trying to
solve binary problems and this may not be one. And then I start
getting cortisol and I start getting
adrenaline in my system. And I'm really
starting to get jacked. And it's either I'm going
to collapse at this point, right, it's going to be
a fetal position or-- or has anybody ever like put
on boxing gloves at the gym or tried to do
something like that and then you get
like Mike Tyson? You say everybody's got a
plan until they get hit? Have you guys ever experienced
an adrenalized response where your knees are wobbly? Or even if it's just like cop
lights in the car behind you and it drives by. And it just pools in your
legs and you're like grrh. And you still feel like
you need to like puke on the side of the road. That's the adrenaline response. So that'll take most of us out. Unless, either through just
sheer fatigue, or dumb luck, or knowing that there's
this actually loop on then, I get into the next phase, which
is the relaxation response. And typically, and
sort of pro tip, when they did the research
with the darker snipers, as well as Olympic archers
and everybody else, the way they got
into this, the way they made that shift
was focusing on breath. So tip of the hat to all your
guys' meditation practices. Focus on breath, lower
your respiratory rate. And you start
approaching equilibrium. Nitrous oxide enters
the bloodstream and flushes away the
fight or flight chemicals, flushes away the
cortisol, flushes away the norepinephrine. And then brings in the
dopamine, the endorphins, and the anandamide. At that point, my brain
waves go from faster beta into a slower alpha wave. And I'm right there on the
doorstep of the flow state. I move into the flow state. And again, there
are four gradations. I mean you can have
what Steven had, which was this sort of
spontaneous, healing, quasi-mystical experience,
like, ah, man, I'm one with everything. Or you could just have it,
hey, all the lights were green and I got to work
five minutes early. How's it going? So the point here is that if you
go into the deeper flow state, you don't just hang out in that
alpha where I'm resourceful, I've got insights. I actually move into an
even deeper, slower state known as theta. And typically, that's
one that only shows up in lifetime meditators. Any of the studies at Madison
on Tibetan meditators, that's what you would see those
guys be able to get into way more often than us. And the other time is kind of
in that threshold between waking and sleeping. So if you've ever been
lying on the couch and you're watching TV-- "West
Wing" used to do this to us all the time, just soporific, grrh. But in that moment before
you're unconscious, you're in a hypnogogic state. And it's so deeply relaxed,
most of us just miss it. We just go to sleep. We nod off. But if you've got
discipline and training, you can actually stay there
and be alert and aware. And there and only there can
come these lightning bolts of gamma. And that becomes these
gestalt integrations. That become sort of your
chocolate and my peanut butter and yee-haw, we
got some Reese's. It becomes those moments of
massive lateral integration that absolutely change the game. And finally-- and this is a
critical stage that most of us forget about. We just don't-- oops,
I just did that. There we go. Most of us forget about
the recovery phase. But I'm sure you guys have
come across all this stuff within the learning
theory, which is that when we
think we're learning, we're not really learning. When we're doing stuff, all
we're doing is collecting data. And that most of our
pattern consolidation and actually annexing
of new skills is happening as we
sleep, and specifically when we sleep, in delta waves. So by no means are we just
have camping out for the week after a flow state in delta. We wanted to highlight that a
lot of that integration, a lot of my level up to
what's possible for me now occurs in the delta
frequencies of deep sleep. So that in a nutshell
is the cycle. And think about what this means? Because now that we know
this we can hack it. And what's so interesting
and exciting about that is that think about the entire
there sort of human development track, including mindfulness,
including optimal psychology, including tons of the
wonderful stuff that's both present inside
this organization and kind of happening more and
more in the world, most of it is trying to get our waking,
conscious selves, our egos, to go quiet, back
to Steven's slide with our inner Woody Allen. But that's a real
tar baby experience. Because if I'm
reading a book on how to get rid of the very part
of me that's reading the book, it's kind of like hiding
your own Easter eggs. It's pernicious. It's sticky. And the more I struggle
with it, the stucker I get. That's why you see so many
uptight baby boomers at Esalen. I mean it's one of
those situations. I'm trying so hard that I
cannot actually decouple from the thing I'm trying to release. So what this lets you
do is back into it. Don't worry about who you are
now and trying to change it. Just optimize your bio,
neuro self system and then see what your subjective
inner experience is. And that's potentially game
changing and that's kind of right where we are on
the verge of these days. So I want to leave
you guys with Steven, on just kind of a sense of
the direction of things, where things are going next. And then we'd love to invite
your questions or queries and potentially just have
a conversation of what's possible. Thank you very much guys. [APPLAUSE] STEVEN KOTLER: So two things. Jamie gave you a look, high
consequence, deep embodiment, rich environment. These are three flow triggers. There are, we believe,
17 total flow triggers. There are these three
environmental triggers. They're external triggers. There are three
internal triggers. These are
psychological triggers. There are 10 social triggers. There is a shared version
of a the flow state, a collective version
known as group flow. There are 10 triggers
that bring that on. And as far as we know, there
is one creative trigger. There is also the flow cycle,
which we just broke down. So the flow cycle
sort of functions as a map for the experience. And the triggers
tell you what to do, where you are in that map. The really important
thing and the thing that I want to leave
you with is that we are at the very, very front
edge of this research. We have a pretty
solid understanding of the psychology of flow. We understand the neurobiology. What we don't know is huge. We don't know, for example,
the order of the cascade. Neural chemicals proceed. Neuroanatomical changes proceed. Brain waves, we don't know. Nobody has a clue. And the physiological
questions, right? We've got mind. We've got brain. But what's actually
going on in the body, we're at the front, front
edge of that revolution. We're just starting to
answer those questions. And we're not going to really
get all this done until we have what we're calling a
heat map of flow which maps the psychology
onto the neurobiology, onto the physiology. And the reason I'm
telling you all this is we know from
the McKinsey study that top executives are five
times more productive in flow. We know that
action-and-adventure sports athletes have produced
near exponential growth in ultimate human performance. But we are just asked
getting started. If you talk to a lot
of people in this world and ask them what percent
of our capabilities do you think we've
actually used, even with all this kind of flow
hacking stuff that we're doing, the answer you get
is 1%, 2%, 3%, 4% 5%. I've never actually
heard anybody give an answer above 5%. Which is to say
we are at the very front end of this revolution. The near exponential growth
in ultimate human performance showing up in
action-and-adventure sports may not be the endpoint. It may be the starting
point for possibility. So that's where I want
to leave you guys. And then we'll open it up. We'll take questions. We'll have a discussion,
whatever you want. But thank you so
much for listening. [APPLAUSE] AUDIENCE: So thanks
a lot for the talk. I'm a snow boarder, a kite
surfer, a motorcycler. And now I realize why I
like those things so much. I guess it was pretty evident. But there was also
research that showed that people who ride motorcycles
regularly kind of live longer. [INAUDIBLE] Your research-- STEVEN KOTLER: It definitely--
I mean it certainly jives with what we know about
flow and the immune system. But I would just assume that
most who ride motorcycles actually probably die younger. AUDIENCE: That's OK. Accidents aside, yes. But what I wanted
to ask is generally like in the computer
world-- or we also have several courses
at Google here that claim that if you
overclock your processor, the lifespan decreases. And what you claiming
with your research or some of the research you mentioned
is that it actually improves various aspects and creates
long-term positive effects. Is that true? STEVEN KOTLER: Flow? AUDIENCE: Yeah. Yeah. Having more flow
in your life, which means overclocking
your processor. And you mentioned
about the release state and the importance of that. And I think we have
several courses. And [INAUDIBLE] and that talk
about that and how important it is to take breaks and
stuff like that and so on. But what I'm
interested in is let's say I find a way to induce
more flow in my life. Is it actually going to also
produce like long term-- or am I going to die
early, like Steve Jobs? STEVEN KOTLER: OK. So there's two kind of
answers to this question. The first is that
the research shows that the people with the
most flow in their lives are quote, unquote "the
happiest people on Earth." That is something of a misnomer. So flow always, always,
always, always includes kind of pushing
yourself to the utmost. You're rising to the challenge. One of the
psychological triggers is known as the
challenge/skills ratio. So all of these flow
triggers that we talk about, high consequence,
deep embodiment, et cetera, flow follows focus. So all of these
flow triggers are ways of driving
attention to the now. So one of the ways we know we
pay the most attention when the skills we bring to
the task are slightly less than the challenge at hand. It's known as the
challenge/skills ratio. Flow exists when we are
stretching, but not snapping. You are constantly rising
to meet your challenge. The studies show that
flow correlates directly to life satisfaction. You get more meaning. You get more purpose. Happiness is fleeting. It's in the moment. It's I feel really
good right now. That may not always
be the case with flow because rising to
challenges are difficult. It's uncomfortable. I always say that people who
get really good at flow hacking, get really, really good
at being uncomfortable. The other thing I wanted to
say to kind of go back this is-- and I want to talk about
why this is not self-help. And it's not self-help
for a couple of reasons. On the positive
side, self-help is about 5% increase, 10% increase. It's about three things
I can tell you today that you can start
doing tomorrow and your life is
going to get better. Flow is not like that at all. It is not 5%. It's not 10%. It is a step
function-worth of change. It is a big shift forward. But it comes at a price. Flow is dangerous. These neurochemicals
are very addictive. So you're playing
with fundamentally addictive neurochemistry. Flow always requires
what we call an escalating ladder of risk. You're going to keep taking
greater and greater chances, pushing yourself farther,
and farther, and farther. That can get dangerous as well. And you're also playing
with very fundamental human motivations, autonomy,
mastery, and purpose, which is sort of what passion
looks like under the hood. These are all big flow triggers. These all show up in flow. They all produce more flow. You don't get to play with
addictive neurochemistry and these kind of
fundamental human motivations without danger. People find themselves--
they join a startup. They get into lots of flow. Startups are great
at producing flow for a lot of different reasons. A lot of the flow triggers
are kind of concentrated in startups. And then the startup phase
ends and they're sort of locked out of flow. There is a depression
that can come from this. If you get a lot of
flow in your life and some day are locked out,
you can get very, very, very deeply depressed. JAMIE WHEAL: Just to
speak specifically to your overclocking the
processor piece as well, which is that the action sports
athletes, when the swell is breaking for
[INAUDIBLE] in Maui, like they all sit
and do nothing. It's kind of almost a
hunter/gather style. We sit around, we tell
stories, we talk shit, and then something
big and crazy happens. We go and do it. And then the swell has come. The big storm has gone. And I have a natural downtime. And so that's my life
as an action sports athlete cultivating flow. But what's my life in your
guys' world as knowledge workers cultivating flow? I do it. I crush the project. I come up with a novel solution. What happens to me then? I get promoted. And so the pressure in our
controlled environments to continue to do it and to
continue to tap and to go back. And now, I'm just revving
at a higher level. And I've got all kinds of
obligations and commitments to do this on command,
I think is real. And that-- which we don't
have up now, but back to that recovery phase-- becomes
vital to ensure that I'm fully replenishing that very expensive
state I've just produced. That I'm annexing the
information and that I'm stably integrating it
into my both psychology and physiology. AUDIENCE: And the
question is, for example, all these sport or energy
drinks can boost your adrenalin and stuff. It looks like it doesn't
go really well with flow. Like you can't release
because your body is like filled with chemicals
that actually boost you up. And so, for example, Red Bull
and all these pro athletes, how does it go together? STEVEN KOTLER: It's
a tricky question. And part of the answer
is we don't know. But one of the things
that it does appear is that at the front
end of the flow state, you've got cortisol rising,
that norepinephrine rising. If there's too much of
that stuff-- and a lot of these energy
drinks flood the body with more of these
chemicals-- it does appear that that can
block the relaxation response. So essentially
what's happening when you go from kind of
the heightened focus and the struggle phase
into the relaxation sometimes, that's
when the switch from conscious to subconscious
processing is taking place. Norepinephrine sort of, when
you have too much of it, it functions sort of like OCD. You can't let go. You're holding on to the
problem and you're thinking it, you're thinking it,
and you're thinking it. And that could absolutely
block the release state. It could block the
rest of the flow state. That said, there's caffeine. There's a whole bunch of
other things in Red Bull. You can say that Red Bull is a
flow precursor in some cases. It can be a flow blocker. It's very individual. And neurochemistry
appears to be individual. All of our receptors,
our receptors for these neurochemicals are
essentially coded genetically, how receptive they are. So it really could differ
at an individual level. And we just don't now. JAMIE WHEAL: And on
the healthy side, if you really are looking
for something like what might I take or do, the most
interesting stuff-- and I just down at Red Bull on Friday
and was talking with a Ph.D. candidate specializing into
this, which is-- nitric oxide, we talked about, right,
was the neurotransmitter that prompts you go from
struggle to release. The best exogenous form of it
is high concentrate beet juice. It's high nitrate. Most pro-endurance athletes
in the world are using it. It sort of debuted in between
Beijing and maybe even London as far as
the Olympic stuff. And there's a
company, James Smith, which we have no
affiliation with. But they're out of England. They're royal insignia stuff. And they do the both
high nitrate, measured in joule shots, as
well as placebo ones. So all the academic
community globally uses them. So two or three hours after
ingestion of high nitrate beet juice, it can transform
into nitric oxide. And that's potentially,
as far as healthy. And actually has some
mechanical impact on this. It's probably one of the
best things to look at. AUDIENCE: Sorry. I don't want to talk too much. And omega-3 might have
some positive influence on like getting into flow. Is it like research
some behind it? JAMIE WHEAL: What might? AUDIENCE: Omega-3. JAMIE WHEAL: That's
a mixed bag, man. I mean in the last
six months, there's been a fair amount of sort
of not so positive stuff on omega-3's, and just questions
on prostate cancer in men, and various other sort
of ancillary things. That said, the chief physician
for the Coronado SEAL teams gave a presentation specifically
on the role of fish oils and high-grade fish
oils, on depression, on physiological
recovery, on sort of stability of mental
states, all kinds of things. And their evidence,
at least with the data sets they were working with,
was overwhelmingly positive. So I don't know right now. And I kind of wish I did
because I like that certainty. AUDIENCE: So you
mentioned the researcher who had done a lot of work
on the brain waves and then with your diagram. Can you tell us
a little bit more about him or her
and how they came up with their research, et cetera? STEVEN KOTLER: Yeah,
Dr. Leslie Sherlin. He is probably the
world's leading researcher on kind of the brain
waves, neuroelectricity of high performance. He-- five years
ago, six years, I don't know when they actually
started the project-- he teamed up with Red Bull. So there was at guy
Red Bull, whose name is Andy Walshe,
a friend of ours, who's the head of
high performance. His job is to take the
best athletes in the world and make them better. He teamed up with
Leslie and they built essentially a
neuroscience skunkworks. So the problem with
EEG has been noise. So I can put an EEG on your head
and I can look at brain waves. But if you yawn, if you
blink, all that stuff is going to register
as static, as noise. It's going obscure the signal. So motion, which is
if you want to look at action-and-adventure sport
athletes, it's a real problem. And we've only recently
gotten to the point that our algorithms can actually
filter out the noise of motion. So Leslie has developed
what they call Brain Sport. It's a wireless, portable EEG. And I think they've
looked at 5,000 athletes. They've compared
the top 1% athletes, the elite of the elite, with
the top 5%, with the top 20%. And just kind of looked
at them across the board. So that's where a lot of
this research came from. JAMIE WHEAL: Yeah. And actually just
to finish on that, the interesting thing they found
was there was not a default MO. There wasn't a
consistent pattern. It wasn't like the
action-and-sports athletes all performed like Tibetan
monks or something like that. But what they
realized was it was almost like the shock
absorber on a motorcycle. It was resilience and
the ability to-- they could come into the
flow state from a bunch of different locations,
depending on sports-specific, genealogy, training, whatever. But it was their resilience
and their adaptiveness that distinguished the elite
from even the advanced right below them. AUDIENCE: A quick
question on audio stimuli. I know there are software
programs, CDs out there, that can supposedly
bring your mind down to these different
wave patterns. Have you done any
research on that? If those things
actually work or if they can help advance the flow? STEVEN KOTLER: I'm
going to let Jaime talk about this in a second. But there's one
thing I really want to say because it's a pet peeve. It makes me crazy. There are a lot of
companies out there who are, hey, this
produces flow. And its single
correlate research. It's we can get your brain
waves to alpha-theta. Or there's some data that says
cardiac coherence produces flow, and blah, blah. So there's a lot of
companies, a lot of widgets, and a lot of things that
trigger one of these things. Flow is a huge cascade. It's a full body/brain reaction. There is nothing out
there that produces-- except some of the
work that we're doing at the Flow
Genome Project. And we're not there yet. But we're sure trying to map it. But most everything's that's
out there is a single correlate thing. So we've got music that
can drive your brain waves towards alpha,
towards alpha-theta. That's great. That's neat. It's going to produce
parts of this experience. But it is a full-on,
deep flow experience with a full neurochemical dump? No. There's nothing that
says that it can happen. And there's not
any evidence of it. So these single correlate
fixes, they're getting at it. They're moving in
the right direction. But the truth claims
make me pretty nervous. JAMIE WHEAL: Yeah. And simply from
the research I've seen, bineural beats, which is
what you'll see a lot of those. And they stagger
themselves slightly and it's supposed to
entrain your brain. I haven't seen a lot of
corroborating research to actually support all
of those truth claims. The stuff that has had a little
bit stronger evidence based on backing is isochronic
brain wave entrainment. And the nice thing
about it is you don't have to have
headphones on. You can actually
just listen to it. But even beyond that--
I mean there's a reason that the whole electronic
scene has blown up so hugely in the last
five to 10 years. There's a reason,
Burning Man culture, all of those bits and pieces, is
that very high fidelity, loud, cleanly separated
sounds absolutely have a psychodynamic effect. And you can take
that to West Africa. I mean there's ancient
traditions on that. So even without the fancy
technology under the hood that someone may be
selling you, clearly music has a powerful
psychosomatic effect. AUDIENCE: How do the
sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems come
into play in all this? JAMIE WHEAL: Well,
can you go ahead and just take another couple of
steps into that and give us a-- AUDIENCE: Yeah. So specifically in the struggle,
release, recovery-- or sorry, struggle, release, flow recovery
phases you showed earlier, the struggle phase
kind of reminded me of what I had heard
very anecdotally and unscientifically about the
sympathetic nervous system. And then the alpha waves
kind of reminded me of the parasympathetic
nervous system. And I was wondering
if that's true? JAMIE WHEAL: Yeah. I mean the short
answer is don't know. And I think it's
the tracking-- I mean being able to track
the neurotransmitters in a live human, right,
tricky, as well as to be able to have
multivariable sensing. So just to give you
guys an understanding, like where is the marketplace? Where's the cutting edge? So we mentioned that darker,
Quantified Warrior project. They love the Red Bull guys
because the Red Bull guys are just trying real
stuff with people. They're actually out
there with their athletes and trying to get them better. Where government and military
projects are much more kind of-- just the way they
move, and innovate, and think is just distinct. And so they love
the Red Bull guys because they're trying stuff. We go to the Red
Bull guys and we're talking with the scientists. And we're like, hey, have you
put this together with that? Well, what about
these three things? And even those guys,
bless their hearts, aren't actually doing an
integrated, multivariable metrics and management. So the short answer
is we don't know yet. And I would picture
that those are the kind of fascinating
questions that hopefully in the next five
years or so we'll be starting to help facilitate those
conversations and those [INAUDIBLE]. AUDIENCE: Is the fight
or flight response, would that be an example or
symptom of that struggle phase? STEVEN KOTLER: So the
fight or flight is. It's one example. It's one extreme example. But when you talk to the
action-and adventure sport athletes about it,
what they will tell you is that they ride the
heightened focus of the fight or flight response in the flow. They sort of get into the
gap before actually the fear becomes an emotion. They see it kind of
rising and they just ride that focus into flow
and block that response. Flow is flowy because
its choice is wide open. One of the reasons you can make
almost picture-perfect decision making is because you
have lots of options. You're taking in more
information, et cetera, et cetera. In the fight or flight
response, your options are fight, flight, or flee. It's totally the opposite. So you are right, it is
totally the opposite. But you can ride
one into the other. JAMIE WHEAL: So the
first thing is, yeah, anyone in their right
mind should be afraid when you're rolling the dice on
16 feet per second per second. So natural and healthy. And then the question is,
is it back to Steven's point about the challenge and skills? Is it enough out of my comfort
zone that I am nowhere else? In fact, I have a friend who
is the CEO of a big company. He says I don't like road biking
because when I'm on the road, I'm still in my day. I love that trail that we
ride because I am nowhere else for the three minutes
it takes to get down it. And so the beauty is can I find
that place where I'm nowhere else, but not in the hospital? [LAUGHTER] STEVEN KOTLER: Most people have
had tons of flow experiences. You probably have them
almost on a daily basis and you don't
actually realize it. And here's why. Flow exists on a spectrum. It like any emotion,
like anger, right? You can be a little irate or you
can be homicidally murderous. So there's micro-flow when
action and awareness start to mere, maybe time
starts to dilate, and you're paying attention
to the [INAUDIBLE]. Macro-flow, where you get all of
the various conditions of flow at once. If you've ever lost yourself
in a great conversation, the whole afternoon disappears. If you've ever gotten so
sucked into a work project that nothing else seems to
matter for a little while, those are all
micro-flow experiences. They're on the same
spectrum leading up to these giant, deep
flow experiences. So, as I said, there
are 17 flow triggers. The more flow triggers that
get packed into an event, the greater the
chance you're going to move into a really
like truly deep flow experience rather than
a micro-flow experience. But we have these
micro-flow experiences. We recognize deep flow. We know it immediately,
time dilated or something. Like you're like, oh, my
god, I'm in that state. But what we miss is that we're
in micro-flow all the time. And if you actually can
start watching for it, you can start extending
it and deepening it. You can play with it and
really start to utilize it. STEVEN KOTLER: By the way,
when they do flow studies, as a manager, one of
the most common flow experiences among middle
managers in conversation at work. Why? Work usually involves money. So it's high consequence. It's a higher
consequence environment. And then you start looking
at the social triggers, group flow. Work conversations
tend to drive them. You don't have them in
casual conversations at home when you're hanging
out with your friends. But work conversations tend
to produce this more often. AUDIENCE: Yeah. Can you tell us a bit
more about the flow dojo? And is there a physical
space that exists? What are you doing there? When do you plan to
do with the dojo? JAMIE WHEAL: What I'll do is
I'll just describe it to you. But yes, I mean
our answer really is what would it be
like to sort of combine a Montessori-prepared
environment, but for grown-ups, and exploratory style,
interactive, sort of exhibits in installations? But instead of for science, have
it be for embodied cognition, with a sprinkling of X-games. So you have fun, safe ways to
give people the sensorimotor inputs that these athletes
typically use themselves and then put a layer of
quantified self on top of it. So giant geodesic dome
playground training centers, whereby we can all
train our games. We can all burn and fuse
additional neural pathways. And we can put ourselves
into that nonseeking state of hyperperformance. And ultimately back
to the drowning in information,
starving for motivation. At least our assessment of most
developmental technologies-- there's so much great
stuff out there. Most of us fail in
long-term practice. So if we can go back
to that autotelic piece and harness flow states
in service of whatever my goals in life and work
are, but ultimately even the following of well-worn
lineage paths in the wisdom traditions or whatever else
is up, if we can do that, it's something pretty amazing. And certainly communities
with you guys, places like this where
there's such sort of high-value human
capital, the ability to optimize that, both in the
moment and longitudinally, feels really useful. It feels like a way
to help impact it. STEVEN KOTLER: Let me add
two quick things to that. One, the more flow you have,
the more flow you have. So this all about attention. You're training the
brain go into the flow. So you can train the brain on
the ski slope to go into flow. It's going to bleed into
your work at the office. You're going to find yourself
getting to flow more easily. If you can learn how to do this
one area, it transfers over. And I want to just
kind of give you an ephemeral look
at the flow dojo. I want to give you just kind
of like this is the gear, this is what we're doing,
this is what it looks like. One of things we have-- and
there's lots and lots of toys-- but one thing is we have is
a 20-foot looping surf swing. So you stand on a surfboard. Your feet are strapped in. Your writs are strapped in. And you can be upside down, 25
feet off the ground or pulling 3 and 1/2 gees at the
bottom of the loop. So you've got high consequence,
novelty, unpredictability, and complexity, our
rich environment, lots of those things as well. All of those flow
triggers are there. So we've got that. Simultaneously, you are wearing
Leslie Sherline and the Brain Sport helmet, the EEG helmet. So we know flow exists
near alpha-theta. So the entire giant surf
swing is lined in LED lights. So it is real-time
neurofeedback. So you're wearing this thing. You're pulling all
these flow triggers. But you can also
drive your brain. If you are in
alpha-theta, it glows red. If you are in beta, it's blue. So you have real-time
neurofeedback. And to solve the mystery--
because our real goal-- well, one of our real goals
is to really advance flow science and culture--
you are wired head to toe with all the quantified
self, data-gathering stuff. So not only are we using these
flow triggers and neurofeedback to drive you into flow, we are
data capturing along the way. And I hate the term "big data." I don't think it means anything. But hopefully, this allow us
to take a big data approach to flow, which hasn't
been done before. Csikszentmihalyi did it
at psychological level. Nobody has done it at the
neurobiological level. And that's what this is about. AUDIENCE: Have you
considered looking into the personalization
aspect of flow? Because I'm not
sure that everybody experiences flow
in the same way. I mean not for the
same activities. For example, some people this
you studied are like athletes. But-- I don't know. I mean there are
scientists who think that differently, et cetera. There's all this research about
personality types, et cetera. The Gallup organization
itself, to solve their problem of 71% of engagement,
developed their own system, which is called StrengthsFinder. STEVEN KOTLER: Yeah. Sure. AUDIENCE: And I think people
who use their talents according to them are a kind of
like in the flow states because they are
using their talents. JAMIE WHEAL: Yes. Exactly. So what is my typology? What kind of a
person am I and what is my unique signature
and entry points? Absolutely. We've actually
been doing, again, a very preliminary, but
intriguing initial flow profile. And we've had several
thousand folks take it just in the last
three or four weeks. And interestingly-- the
categories we had was hard-charger, so the classic
action sports profile we just described and most of what you
just described; a deep thinker, someone a little bit
more introspective, potentially doing
coding or creative work; one more socially oriented; and
then potentially one more sort of--- the quintessential kind
of [? Loewe Haas ?] personality types, sort of the yoga,
meditation, et cetera. And 50% of the respondents
were deep thinkers. They actually found
themselves more introverted, quiet,
reflective avenues into flow. And again, to
Steven's point, what we anticipate-- I mean I would
be stunned if it didn't show up this way-- is that there is no
such thing as a monolithic flow state, as we really get into it. There will be kind of a
scatter plot on a heat map. And it will depend
on the person, it will depend on
the environment, and it will depend
on the tasks at hand, how exactly they get in there,
which cascade they trigger and to what extent. And we will see probably
areas of clustering. But probably a much broader,
complex equation than we first talk about. STEVEN KOTLER: And the
one thing I want to add is we talk about the
action-and-adventure sports athletes as this great
example of flow hacking. But we're in Silicon Valley. The three things that
built this Valley are network design, circuit
design, and software design pretty much. And you can't do any
of those things well, really, really
well, without flow. Coding and flow
goes hand in hand. The research goes all the back. The same thing with
all those categories. So if you're looking for a
nonathletic example of what happens when groups of people
start getting into flow on a regular basis,
Silicon Valley is not a bad place to start. MALE SPEAKER: Big hand
for Steven and Jamie. Thank you. STEVEN KOTLER: Thanks guys. [APPLAUSE]
Interesting. Can anyone suggest other related lectures on the topic/ongoing research?