Hacking the GENOME of Flow: Jamie Wheal at TEDxVeniceBeach

well I'm not from here but that plays a big part in why I am here I'm not really from anywhere unless you count a zip code in the middle of the Atlantic as an address my mother was South African and was old school South African when I say old school I mean old school I mean 1890s Merchant Ivory film old school makes Margaret Thatcher look like Martha Stewart my dad was a test pilot in the British Royal Navy and his job was to take the best of top gun pilots and teach them to fly into space so he spent his day job picking holes in the best of the best of the best and mapping it with differential calculus so to say that I had a high bar at home is a bit of an understatement but I got unceremoniously dumped into American Education and pop culture during the 80s and 90s and so I had this scorecard from my family that was built a continent away maybe even a century ago and I was playing a game that the natives all seemed to know and I didn't even know the name of so I was a stranger in a very strange land and I was lost and all through high school even I kept on waiting for that breakthrough moment I wanted my sort of Breakfast Club Sixteen Candles epiphany and homecoming came and went and Letterman's jackets and first dates and proms and graduations and Animal House keg parties and none of it none of it broke through I still felt like I was engaged in glass and everybody else all my friends were coming home they were having the time of their lives and I didn't feel alive at all so by the time I got to college I was getting a little bitter and I was getting a little frantic and I'd learned a bit more about my family history and my family like most has its demons and ours came in the form of depression addiction and suicide and at that point I kind of took stock and I thought well and at the time I wouldn't have been able to give it this label and I wouldn't have accepted it if someone had tried but I was I was in the neighborhood of depressed and I was flirting with a host of addictive behaviors looking to blow up or numb out that sense of separation and while my particular sort of aesthetic of morbidity did not tend towards gobbling too many sleeping pills or sucking on a tailpipe I had a plan and I was already engaging it and and that was basically to start taking bigger and bigger risks in the mountains in the oceans until I either got it or I just let it get me and I was actually okay with either because I felt at the time that if I couldn't find what I was looking for that I didn't really have much of a reason to stick around so one day in the middle of September of my sophomore year so literally thank you Brene brown i'll say it 25 years ago to the day right a friend said hey try out this wind surfer of mine it's fun so I did and it wasn't fun it sucked I sucked I got blown off shore I couldn't get up I tried and try I was scared I was frustrated and soon enough everybody else packed it in all the other boats all the other sales you know girls on you know bikinis everybody went away and there was about half an hour left before sundown and I was just floating downstream and something happened and the wind picked up a little bit and it lifted me up on the board and I started going I stayed up and I started going faster and I started going fast enough that the board popped up on top of the water and the next thing I know I was skimming along I was flying and it just sheer fluke and it's never happened again in my life but the aligned the alignment of the wind and the sunset made that I was literally flying along on the liquid gold of the Setting Sun for about 15 minutes and I was the only soul out there and I still didn't make it back to land the wind died I had to swim the whole rig in and by the time I got lino limp and exhausted to the beach I was different I had found what I had been seeking I was home for the first time in my life so that's really been the rest of my life both my life path and what has become my life's work which is how to have more of these experiences how to string together these stepping stones of redemption and then also how can we do more of this together how can we go beyond just monkeys at a typewriter occasionally getting lucky into something that can scale into something that we can push out through culture so let's take a look at this for a moment you you've all experienced a flow state you may have called it something else may have not had a name for it Abraham Maslow called them peak experiences Jim Fixx back in the 70s called it a runner's high Phil Jackson the Lakers and bulls coach calls it being in the zone Miles Davis John Coltrane called it being in the pocket right but regardless of what we call it the experience is the same time slows down or speeds up right a three hour conversation with a dear old friend or an amazing first date that goes by and what feels like 15 minutes 5 seconds barreled in a wave that feels like five minutes myself disappears action and awareness merge the beer and the doer become the same thing and even if we just glimpse it we spend the rest of our lives looking for it again now up until really recently that was as far as it got that was all we could do we have these strikes of lightning yee-haa are men and then we just had to twiddle our thumbs and just tried spinning the combination lock to see if we could ever get back but in the last five years some amazing things have happened and it just raise your hand if anybody is wearing any kind of like smart health you know Fitbit FuelBand jawbone up any of those kind of things right in another year or two half the audience will be with the smartwatches right we have an Advent in consumer health right now which is being allowing us to have the same self-awareness that used to be reserved for Yogi's ascetics right the neuro and biofeedback we have access to these days is letting us objectively measure what used to be mysterious couple that with fMRI is with EEG s with skin pricks and swab tests and on the spot labs lab readings we have the ability to see under the hood of what used to be ineffable of what you used to be accidental and there are three amazing and interesting findings I want to show you there's a ton there's an entire universe of this research but for the span we have today I want to share the things that matter most flow is selfless flow is effortless and flow is timeless so all of us know this guy right our inner neurotic Woody Allen never goes away and thank thank you for the real one right for immortalizing our collective neurosis on film right but we've all got that and how hard do we work to try and get rid of him from time to time the entire pop psychology New Age self-help movement is predicated on getting to your happy place and he does not get an invite right but what happens in a flow state and this is fascinating is that that inner critic goes away and it's not because I'm saying my mantra is not because I've done my post-it note affirmations on my bathroom mirror it goes away because something happens in our brain and it's called transient hypofrontality and what that means is transient means just for a little while hypo means not a lot of and frontality the complex neocortical hardware up front where woody resides and people used to think right oh we only use 10% of our brains so if I'm in a peak performance data I must be using all of it right that's not true I'm actually using less of it and when they do brain scans on people in flow states that whole front section goes offline it literally is not lit up in any way and that's the secret to getting the relief to getting those moments of calm we crave so much the next DARPA did a study with military snipers and they actually went a step further they said hey we're not going to just see if this happens occasionally we're going to give you guys jumper cable lobotomies effectively they basically did transcranial magnetic stimulation so they sent a magnetic pulse through that area knocked out the neocortex of these snipers in training and they and then measured how long it took them to get from beginner to expert and they did it in two hundred and thirty percent faster time so think about that for a minute two hundred and thirty percent less time to become an expert at something the 10,000 hours to mastery cut in half and oh by the way bonus it's irresistible I can't wait think about all the surf bums around here they can barely show up to their jobs on time do their laundry and manage personal hygiene but if there's glassy overhead barrels breaking in Malibu they are there at 6 a.m. clambering into a cold sandy wetsuit right to spend some time in the green room what is that and how do we get more of it McKinsey and company just finished a 10-year study assessing massive global a say of senior knowledge work as they found that senior knowledge workers who spend the most time in flow are up to five times as effective as their competition as their counterparts so think about that for a minute if you spent six days a week recovering and preparing you could show up on Monday crush it take the rest of the week off and keep pace right and keep pace with your competition if you showed up twice a week and could pull that off they would never catch you that's how powerful it is that's what's possible and lastly and this has not been shown before this is this is literally within the last 12 months the black the map inside the black box what's actually happening in the neuroanatomy and neuro chemistry of the flow experience so the first thing just like Buddha's first noble noble truth and just like my fledgling efforts on that windsurfer it begins with struggle it begins with suffering my brain my inner critic is wide awake and yammering his head off my brainwaves are in a hyperactive beta state that's how most of us are thinking most of the time my nervous system is getting pumped with stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol right I'm getting primed for a fight-or-flight I'm struggling then I say screw it or I get too tired or I get too frustrated or maybe I'm wise enough to know this is coming and I relax I turn off my laptop or chuck it out the window I go and get a beer or I take a shower Albert Einstein used to famously paddle his rowboat out to the middle of Lake Geneva lie flat on his back and look at the clouds but whatever I do I prompt a release my brainwaves shift from hyperactive beta into relaxed alle alpha a slower rhythm nitric oxide flushes all those stress chemicals outside out of my bloodstream and for the kids kids watching at home I said nitric oxide not nitrous oxide so put the ready-whip back in the fridge right next we get to this we get to the goods the actual flow state dopamine kicks in absolute reward like yes you're on the right track do more of this pay attention endorphins I feel no pain right I'm Superman and an and amide right an endocannabinoid for you glow kkoma and lower back pain sufferers in abbot kinney right so Glatt oral thinking kicks in and i drop into theta states which other than tibetan meditators and people falling asleep very few of us actually experience when we're doing stuff it's that relaxed so there we are super powers optimum feeling optimum performing and then finally that comes and goes - right and many of us have learned right the true learning comes not when we're doing stuff that's just gathering data the real learning comes when we sleep memory consolidation of deep Delta waves and we get this beautiful afterglow of serotonin and occasionally even oxytocin the people we did it with how we feel is all wonderful and we begin again so this is the inside of what has been for centuries a black box this lets us actually reverse-engineer the genome of flow and when we think about all that all the speakers to come today and all of the ideas in the broader Ted community I want to invite you guys to consider this as the opportunity to rock it for rocket fuel we're going to hear about inspiring moonshots we're dedicated to change the world but we cannot do it right on just grit and just dedication alone flow is the rocket fuel flow is the force multiplier and in closing I want to leave you guys with a challenge and a quote from civil rights leader and philosopher Howard Thurman because he said he said don't ask yourself what the world needs don't do it ask yourself what makes you come alive and go and do more of that because what the world needs is more of us it's all of us to come alive thank you very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 194,672

Rating: 4.9212546 out of 5

Keywords: tedx talk, lifestyle, tedx talks, ted talk, the zone, FLOW, ted talks, ted, positive psychology, health, Genome, English Language (Human Language), TEDx, human performance, United States Of America (Country), tedx, Psychology (Medical Specialty), TEDxVeniceBeach, science, ted x, bliss

Id: WqAtG77JjdM

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 26 2013