How To Focus To Maximize Your Potential | Steven Kotler

[Music] so it's great to be with you guys it's fun to be back at mine Valley you guys heard a little bit about my background I'm an author I'm a journalist and I'm the co-founder and director of research at the flow Genome Project and what we study the flow Genome Project is ultimate human performance what does it take to be your best when it matters most what does it take to significantly level up your game we're interested in paradigm shifting breakthroughs nothing is ever the same again and really in a phrase if you can sort of get past the hyperbole and get to the practical level of this or interested in what it takes to do the impossible and now I need a clicker see I told you I wasn't gonna go well so we are in the middle of kind of a giant revolution in what it takes to achieve the impossible and it is counterintuitive it is strange it is unusual it turns a lot of our old ideas about high performance upside down and it sits at the Nexus of kind of two different lines of inquiry one is the science of peak performance the science of high performance and the second is the science of spirituality so I'm going to essentially tell you the same story twice starting at the exact same point we're going to end up at two different places and then they're going to come together this nexus has been was the topic of my most recent book steel fires if you're curious that's where to go farther but I thought as a way of kind of introducing this idea of what does it take to do the impossible and the high performance side I would sort of start where I started because I came to this question what does it take to do the impossible through a pretty unusual door I walked in through the door of journalism and I became a journalist in the early 1990s and back then action sports were just starting to happen surfing skiing rock climbing snowboarding the like so back then if you could write in ski or write and surf or write and rock climb there was work I couldn't do any of those things very well but I really needed the work so I lied to my editors and I was lucky enough to spend the better portion of ten years chasing professional well--we're called extreme athletes in an hour called action-adventure sport athletes around mountains and across oceans and if you are not a professional athlete and you spend all your time chasing professional athletes around you're gonna break things I broke a lot of things what that meant is I got to take a lot of time off I'd be hanging out I'd snap this or that and I didn't take three or four months off and when I came back the progress I saw was astounding it was amazing sleeps abounds kind of stuff tricks and feats and activities that were absolutely completely impossible just three or four months ago people believe they were never been done never going to be done weren't just being done they were being iterated upon and this caught my attention and it caught my attention for a couple of reasons first of all back in the early 1990s action-adventure sport athletes were a rowdy irreverent punk rock Bunch without a lot of natural advantages most of the people I knew had horrific childhoods came from broken homes they had very very little education and they had almost no money and yet here they were on a semi-regular basis reinventing what was possible for our species and by reinventing I'm not going to spend a lot of time on action sports but I want to give you one example surfing is a thousand-year-old sport and evolution was incredibly incredibly slow from the fourth century AD until 1996 biggest wave enemy had ever surfed was 25 feet above that it was believed absolutely impossible there are physics papers written about how it's impossible to paddle in two waves over 25 feet tall today as you can see from this photo surfers are routinely toeing into waves well over 100 feet tall and they're paddling into waves over 80 feet tall this is nearly exponential growth in ultimate human performance in two decades and it was happening all across the boards and action sports and I wanted to understand why I also knew that if I didn't take my question out of action sports and into other domains I was going to kill myself I've broken about 80 bones at that point and I had to switch so that's what I did I took this question of what does it take to do the impossible into pretty much every domain and what books about them so Tomorrowland for example is an invention investigation of those kind of maverick innovators who turned science fiction ideas into science fact technology bold was a look at upstart entrepreneurs Larry Page Jeff Bezos Elon Musk Richard Branson people who have been world changing businesses in near record time it's incredible odds in abundance I teamed up my good friend Peter Diamandis started the XPrize in singularity University and we looked at entrepreneurs who were tackling grand global and possible challenges stuff that 20 years before was the sole province of large corporations and big governments healthcare crises poverty energy scarcity water shortages small teams of people were succeeding against these incredible challenges and the interesting thing is it doesn't actually matter what domain you look at it doesn't matter where you go whenever you see the impossible become impossible whenever you're seeing peak performance you're seeing a state of consciousness known to researchers as flow you may know flow by other names you may call it runner's high or being in the zone if you play basketball it's being unconscious you're a stand-up comic it's the forever box flows the technical term and we'll talk about where it comes from in a second but it is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness it is a state of consciousness where feel our best and we perform our best and more specifically it refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption when you get so focused on the task at hand everything else just vanishes extra awareness will start to merge concentration is so focused in the present moment that your self vanishes time dilates it's a fancy way of saying it passes strangely sometimes occasionally it'll slow down you get a freeze-frame effect from an enemy who's been in a car crash I've seen the matrix more frequently it speeds up and five hours go by in like five minutes and throughout all aspects of performance both mental and physical go through the roof flow science itself is very old it dates back to the late eighteen seven which was sort of the birth of the fields that became cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience in the 1870s was the first time somebody noticed and was actually a geologist and Albert Heim who noticed that altered states of consciousness seem to have a huge impact on performance this idea got carried forward got explored by William James often called The Godfather of American psychology he taught at Harvard as a physiologist was a physician was a psychologist and was a philosopher real breakthroughs took place in the 1960s and 70s when this man Mihai Csikszentmihalyi who's often called the godfather of flow psychology he was the chairman of the University of Chicago psychology department and he did the largest global investigation of optimal performance anybody not for undertaking tens of thousands of people took part and what he discovered is four key things about flow the first is the state is definable it has eight core characteristics and I mentioned these things to you before the merger of action awareness complete concentration in the present moment the vanishing of self time dilation and so forth because it is definable it is also measurable so we extremely well validated psychometric instruments for studying flow we don't yet have a physiological flow detector though our organization a bunch of other people are working hard on it but we have great psychometric questionnaire based instruments the next thing she sent me hi discovered is flow is universal it shows up in everyone anywhere provided certain initial conditions are met so flow is halt we are hard-wired for high performance it is the biology of high performance we've evolved to do it he also gave flow its name and the reason is when he was running around the world asking people what the times in their life when they felt their best and they performed their best every said the same thing he said well I'm in this state every action every decision flows seamlessly perfectly effortlessly from the last flow is a phenomena it gonna learn how to talk this is over I promise flow is a phenomenological definition right it describes how the state makes us feel flow feels flowy what's interesting about that feeling is war flow to feel flowy for every decision in action to flow seamlessly effortlessly from the last your getting a good quick look at what the state is actually doing it is as close to near perfect decision-making near perfect high speed decision-making as we can get now notice I said near-perfect not perfect you can make all kinds of bad decisions in flow and they're gonna feel amazing they're gonna feel like you're dead-on in fact Scot Schmidt one of the early extreme skiers used to say flow makes me feel like Superman up until the moment I'm not so important words of caution on that one the other thing that chicks at Maihi discovered and probably the most important discovery is that flow is fundamental fundamental to overall well-being to life satisfaction into meaning in fact it is the most fundamental component of those terms will call them terms in his research the people who scored off the charts for overall life satisfaction for the most meaningful lives these are the people who most flow in their lives so after chicks that Maihi was done doing this kind of foundational work people want ok flow is optimal performance next question how optimal what the hell are we talking about the answer is pretty optimal what we now know is that in sports and athletics pretty much every gold medal or World Championship that's ever been won as a flow state at its heart flow is responsible for significant progress in the art major breakthroughs in science and technology business we have some interesting and really compelling research done by Mick Keith the McKenzie consultancy and they found after a 10-year study that top executives in flow report being five times more productive and five times more productive is 500% more productive it means you go to work on Monday spend Monday in a flow state you can take Tuesday through Friday off and get as much done as your steady state peers two days a week and flow you are a thousand percent more productive than the competition which is interesting one of the things that's going on all across business and it's my organization a bunch of other organizations this whole companies are being trained up and flow right and left why because they're gonna be a thousand percent more productive than the competition in within ten years it is going to be very difficult to keep up without doing this kind of work the next question people asked after they figured out that this is optimal performance is where is this coming from alright what is actually going on and here we've gotten a huge assist from neuroscience neuroscience is accelerating wildly wildly biotechnology in general right now is moving at four times the speed of Moore's law so it is doubling in power every four to five months and neuroscience and brain imaging technologies coming along for the ride so for the very first time over the past ten to fifteen years we've been able to peer on the hood of flow and figure out where it's coming from and why it's coming now there are still holes in this research we can drive buses through weena hell hell of a lot more than we ever did this by the way is one example of that research so this is me taking part in an experiment designed by Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman and I've been hoisted 150 feet in the air and I'm being dropped into a circus net I've got a perceptual chronometer on my wrist and we're trying to figure out why time passes so strangely and flow which we have made some progress on and I will also tell you after that experiment eight months of chiropractic work till I can walk right again so I have bled for this research for you people just want you to know that and what we've discovered turns a lot of our old ideas about high-performance upside down so the old idea about optimal performance is something you're probably familiar with it's what's now known as the 10% brain myth it's the idea that at any one point we're only using a small portion of our brain so ultimate performance aka flow it must be the full brain on overdrive we had it completely backwards turns out in flow we're not using more of the brain we're using less of it a lot less in flow we experience what's known as Xion hypofrontality transient meaning temporary hypo hyp oh is the opposite of hyper means to slow down to shut down to deactivate and frontality refers to your prefrontal cortex part of your brain that's right back there is a critical portion your brain long-term planning complex logical decision-making your sense of morality your sense of a willpower this is all prefrontal cortex inflow this portion your brain gets really really quiet this has a huge impact both on cognition and performance what is time pesto strangely inflow turns out time is calculated all over your prefrontal cortex and as parts of it wink out we can no longer separate paths from present from future instead we're plunged into a state the researchers talked about as the deep now deep now has some big benefits on performance if you think about your fears your anxieties most of them are horrible things that happen in the past that you'd like to avoid happening in the present or the scary that might happen in the future and you'd like to navigate around from the present very little to our fears unless you're an action sport athlete in a dangerous situation or a soldier in combat or a box or martial artist kind of thing our acute most of our fears are not present tense so by removing past and future from our consciousness anxiety disappears all of our stress hormones flush out of our system same thing happens to your sense of self self is essentially a network it's a bunch of different structures and prefrontal cortex and a couple other parts of your brain working together in concert and like any other network when the nodes start to get down produce go down pretty soon the whole network collapses and your self disappears again huge impact on performance as your self disappears so does your inner critic that nagging always on to feed it's voice in your head when you're in flow that voice goes silent now emotionally we experience this as liberation as freedom you're actually getting out of your own way performance-wise it's a huge boost creativity goes way up because you're no longer doubting all your neat ideas risk-taking goes way up because you're no longer standing in your own way simultaneously to these changes in neural anatomical function or also seeing brainwaves shift so normally like right now you're paying attention to me your brain is probably in beta it's a fast moving wave it's where we are when we're awake were alert below beta is a slower wave known as alpha this is daydreaming mode this is where you can sort of move from idea to idea to idea without a whole lot of internal resistance underneath that is theta much slower wave usually shows up only when we're in REM sleep or in the hypnagogic state as we're falling asleep the theta is where you're going from idea to idea with no resistance so you're thinking about a green sweater and becomes a green elephant and becomes a green planet that's theta flow exists on the borderline between alpha and theta it's a state of much heightened creativity but more interestingly it's also the ready condition for a gamma spike now gamma is a totally different wave is a very fast-moving wave and it shows up a lot of different cases but it shows up primarily during binding which is when the brain dies a whole bunch of new ideas together into a firm idea it's the brainwave signature of the alcohol moment what this means is flow perch's us right on the edge of that aha moment so when you're in flow you are always on the edge of creative breakthrough finally perhaps most importantly we see a big shift in neuro chemistry when we're in flow and there's a lot more work to be done here and there's a lot of stuff we don't know but what we think we know is that five of the most potent neural chemicals the brain can produce show up in flow now all five of them have huge impacts on performance norepinephrine dopamine these are focusing chemicals endorphins are pain blockers nanda mine it's a pain blocker that amplifies lateral thinking serotonin is a calming feel-good chemical pro-social chemical as well all of these things have huge impacts on physical performance so fast twitch muscle response goes up our sense of pain goes down strength increases more importantly is how they impact cognition and I'm going to talk about how they impact the three sides of the so-called high-performance triangle this is motivation learning and creativity so besides being performance enhancing chemicals all five of those compounds are pleasure drugs and the five most potent pleasure drugs the brain can produce just to give you an idea so these are endogenous chemicals they're internal to our system and they're mimicked by exogenous chemicals so endorphins for example are the internal version of external opiates like heroin and morphine and oxycontin and just to give you an idea they're about 20 different endorphins in the brain the most common one is a hundred times more potent than medical morphine so when I say these are pleasure drugs these are very very pleasurable and usually you don't get all five it wants to give you an example romantic love this is one of the best feelings we get on the planet it's primarily dopamine and norepinephrine that's that cocktail that we call romantic love flow gives you three additional pleasure chemicals on top of this so flow is a huge boost in motivation so when we see that five hundred percent spike in productivity that McKinsey discovered it's because of these addictive fear fuel good chemicals now scientists they don't like the word addictive it's got bad connotations so instead they call flow autotelic meaning in its ending of itself where they talk about it as the source code of intrinsic motivation we see something similar with learning quick shorthand for how learning and memory works in the brain the more neural chemicals that show up during experience better chance that experience is going to move from short-term holding into long-term storage which is why and studies done on soldiers and radar operators and snipers skill acquisition in flow goes up 200 to 500 percent in fact there's a really cool study that was done by a friend of ours Chris burka works at advanced brain monitoring you can find it online be RKA they took soldiers or they took snipers who had novice snipers people who had never fired a bow before or never fired a handgun or a rifle they put them into flow and they trained them up to expert level it took 50% less time so we've all heard about malcolm gladwell's payable 10,000 hours to mastery this is Andrews Erickson's research what the research also shows is that flow can cut that in half creativity is probably a bigger story so creativity is one of these terms is often mystified but if you look under the hood of creativity what you often see is a recombinant ory process it's the product of the brain taking in novel information using it to connect with older ideas and create sort of something startling new out of that connection in flow all the brain's information processing machinery gets amped up tanks to this neural chemistry so we take in more information per second so data acquisition goes up we pay more attention to that incoming information this is salience increases we find faster connections between that incoming information and older ideas so pattern recognition goes up we find faster connections between that incoming information and really far-flung disparate outside-the-box ideas so lateral thinking goes up and on the back end at creativity because it's not enough to come up with new ideas where you have to turn them into something and go public with it we also see risk-taking getting amplified so the neural chemicals and flow surround at the creative process which is why in studies run by my organization some at Harvard some of the University of Sydney we see flow increase 400 creativity increase in flow 400 to 800 percent so I told you I was gonna tell you a tale of two simultaneous revolutions so we're gonna stop here and we're gonna go back right this was a look at the science of high performance is sort of where we are today now we're gonna jump back and look at the science of spirituality or more specifically the science of mystical experiences so we're gonna go back to this slide 1901 William James writes a book called varieties of mystical experiences and what James was interested in was in all sorts of mystical experiences so we went around the globe interviewing anybody he could find all kinds of different experiences from Tibetan Buddhist meditators all the way through Quaker meetings and so forth he studied flow he stood a whole ton of stuff and what he's noticed what he said is you know it doesn't seem to matter when you're looking at psychedelic experiences when you're looking at trance states when you're looking at religious states when you're looking at meditative States when you're looking at flow States produced by endurance sports or action sports at all these things seem very very similar to me and he said even if you don't believe the kind of religious wrapping around these states you have to think two things a real one these experiences are psychologically real meaning however they're gussied up on the other side of these experiences people are different happier more content more passionate about their lives so these states are psychologically real no matter what else you want to say about them now that idea didn't hang too well in psychology Freud came next in psychology took about a hundred year detour around this idea first of all Freud was a hardcore atheist right wanted nothing to do with religion he said that religion was comparable that childhood neuroses and that was it for Freud so science became very very a theistic at that point and the other point was he didn't feel it was the job of psychology to explore these states he wasn't interested in psychological possibilities he thought psychology should be about curing pathological problems and that's essentially what happened for about a hundred years we took a hundred year detour around these ideas into positive psychology brought them back a little bit but that doesn't mean the work stopped in fact in the 1950s this man while there Penfield made a huge discovery so while there Penfield is one of the early neurosurgeons and he was an epilepsy expert and what he was doing is who's open the skulls of epileptics who were having horrible seizures and you can do that because there aren't a whole lot of nerve endings in the skull so you do with local anesthetic and patients can be awake and what he was doing was using a mild electric current to probe various regions of their brain he was trying to produce what is known as an ore not the way you think in aura in epilepsy is what comes on before an epileptic seizure so it's often a really strong smell sometimes it's bright lights or noises this is a precursor to his seizures who's trying to stimulate an aura and then he would scoop that out so interestingly when he started stimulating people's temporoparietal junction where the temporal lobe in the parietal lobe come together especially on the right side and also in the right temporal lobe people started having crazy experiences out-of-body experiences near-death experiences they would feel sense presence which is the technical term for the feeling of a God or a ghost or a demon in the room with you they'd have hallucinations and see visions which was an amazing amazing discovery because what he discovered is that mystical experiences were biologically real there was something going on in the brain that was producing them most of this work sort of continued a little underground for a while until the late 1990s when this man dr. Andrew Newberg who was one of the bravest research researchers to come along when there was a tremendous academic pressure not to study these kinds of topics in a Newberg was really interested in consciousness he was at the University of Pennsylvania and he really wanted to understand what is known as cosmic unity or unity which is the feeling of becoming one with everything and dr. Newberg feeling was that this experience of oneness it's often been called the perennial philosophy because it shows up in pretty much every religion and mystical tradition on earth and it did long before the error of mass communication so he asked a simple question if it's everywhere at once either the whole world is having a mass hallucination which might be possible might be interesting or there's something biological going on so what dr. Newberg did is he took two different patient populations Tibetan Buddhists and Franciscan nuns who both experienced a version of unity right in Tibetan Buddhism it's absolute unitary being it's oneness with everything for Franciscan nuns it's unio Mystica which is oneness with Jesus or oneness with God's love and what he discovered after putting people in an early version of fMRI brays and there's known as a suspect scanner is that when people feel one with everything what he calls the orientation area and is actually the right parietal lobe the same spot that while the Penfield notice gets really really quiet it deactivates so in the same way that float deactivates the prefrontal cortex what's going on here and the reason that happens it's an efficiency exchange when you need extra energy for attention the brain has a limited energy budget got a fixed energy budget and it's an energy hog it uses up 25% of our energy is simply at rest so when the brain needs extra energy for attention like it does in deep meditation it starts to turn off non-critical areas this is what happens in flow and it also happens in meditation and in meditation and really deep meditation not only does the prefrontal cortex start to shut down but this right parietal lobe shuts down and this is called he could update the orientation area because it helps us orient ourselves in space this portion of the brain separates self from other does this by drawing a boundary around the self and say you end here and the rest of the world begins now this boundary is flexible anybody who's had a child knows that when you hold a small child after a little while you can no longer tell where you end and the child begins right we all had that experience blind people can feel the sidewalks through the tips of their cane tennis players will become one with their racket all right all the same phenomenon it's the right temporal lobe shutting down and when this portion of the brain shuts down no information in or out the brain concludes it has to conclude that it is a particular moment you are one with everything so this is also where I sort of drop into this story I was at this point researching surfers and I was researching surfing and flow States and one of the things that kept coming up is I kept talking to surfers who would secretly take me synonyms when I'm in a tube when I'm surfing I've become one with the ocean don't tell anybody they were totally embarrassed and nobody was talking about it but they would tell me these store but becoming one with the wave and it was like wait a minute hold on this is really really similar to what my buddy and ian's discovered in the lab and we were talking about it and I said at that point I was like do you think it's possible that like the flow state that surfers are experiencing the focus is as intense as what meditators are experiencing and he said well I think it it may be and we've looked at it and the answer is yes that's exactly what's going on that was the start of sort of a gold rush into the science of mystical experiences over the past 10 to 15 years pretty much every mystical experience you can think of what is known as the entire ecstatic spectrum so these are all the experiences that are north of happy trance States flow state states of awe contemplative states meditative States technologically mediated States and we'll talk about those in a moment sexually provoked states like tantric States mystical States even transformative festivals research out of Oxford on what's going on in people's brains at Burning Man shows that festival and other transformational festivals are also presumed these same states of consciousness turns out that the neurobiology of the ecstatic the entire kind of north of happy spectrum shares very similar kind of underlying foundations there's lots of individual differences but the foundation is pretty similar we see deactivations in the prefrontal cortex the default mode network goes down the temporal parietal lobe also gets really really quiet we see brain waves move to that alpha theta borderline we also see some combination usually or at least a handful of the Big Five neural chemists chemicals which is why all of these states phenomenologically produce the same experiences so what we know about all these altered state experiences all of these north of happy experiences is they do the same thing selflessness timelessness effortlessness and richness in other words prefrontal cortex goes away so our sense of self disappears prefrontal cortex goes away so time disappears effortlessness is a reference to that huge spike in feel-good neurochemical you often feel like you're being propelled through your life by forces that are greater than you right simultaneously we see richness which is short for information richness which is why all of the brain's information processing machinery starts getting amplified in these experiences so the all of these experiences feel very very similar interesting thing is they're also having similar impacts and we see this on both sides of the spectrum so we're gonna look at the healing side first before we look at the high performance side on the healing side I love the PTSD research for this because it's very very interesting so back in the late 90s the early 2000s a guy named Rick Doblin who is the head of the multidisciplinary Association for psychedelic research and a psychologist named Michael Miller Hoffer was down in South Carolina in the States wanted to know if they could use MDMA so the same psychoactive that's inside of ecstasy or Molly um to treat PTSD and after an incredibly brave and hard fight they finally got to test this research you've probably heard about it at this point and what they discovered is combining MDMA with talk therapy into what's known as psychedelic therapy so you're not just taking a drug you're taking a drug with a lot of attention being placed on set and setting you have a therapist with you they found that one to two sessions of MDMA therapy was enough to completely cure or significantly reduce so people could get way off their meds symptoms of PTSD that was amazing was breakthrough research it's fantastic and in fact it's still ongoing MDMA has proved so successful for this extreme anxiety disorder that we're now seeing tested it for normal anxiety disorders and depression and those are moving forward in fact the FDA in the United States it's so excited by this research into MDMA that they have fast tracked drug development which has never actually happened before and they're doing it with ace what is still a Schedule one meaning it's totally illegal and it supposedly has no medicinal benefit America strange place but this research was only the beginning because the next thing that happened is the army came along and they said well this is great this is fantastic but there are a lot of people who don't want to have to take a mind-altering substance to get this kind of result so what can we do so at Camp Pendleton they reran the exact same experiment they've now done it with over a thousand soldiers with PTSD and they replaced MDMA with surfing and the flow states produced by surfing they also use talk therapy so it's the exact same protocol with surfing instead of the psychedelic substance what they found was that five weeks of talk therapy and surfing therapy for flow was enough to completely cure or significantly reduce symptoms of PTSD and soldiers they reran the same experiment with Foucault's with mantra meditation actually I think they use TM and they found that four weeks of TM in conjunction with top therapy was enough to significantly reduce or completely cure PTSD what we're seeing here three different treatments these are I mean think about this for a second you've got people taking MDMA so we're thinking ravers surfers and meditators they're not three groups of people you normally think of overlapping and yet under the hood neuro biologically all these things are doing the same thing because what's going on in your brain is very very similar and we are also seeing this on the other side of the spectrum so what we've discovered is that the same tools that will take the sub power up to normal can take normal all the way up to Superman so for example couple years ago five six seven years ago my organization the flow Genome Project got to take part in what was known as the Red Bull creativity study this is the largest meta-analysis of creativity research ever conducted and what they learned after reviewing like 30,000 studies and creativity there are two things about creativity one they learned that creativity is the most important skill for success in the 21st century big surprise - we absolutely suck at training people to be more creative we're terrible at it we are super bad and the reason is we keep trying to train up a set of skills and what we really need to be training up is a state of mind and here's what I mean we have found that three as little as three 20-minute open Senses meditations is enough to heighten creativity what a significant increase in fluency flexibility originally an elaboration thank you for the notes four fundamental components of creativity so three 20-minute open senses meditation enormous spike in creativity we see the same thing with psychedelics James Fadiman has done phenomenal research on micro dosing so say can taking tiny tiny tiny bits of psychedelics that actually produce sub perceptual changes so you don't actually feel your consciousness shift that much all right a lot of people right now especially on the west coast have been micro dosing at work we're seeing it all over Silicon Valley I've been in huge major companies and people have come up to me like managers have said my entire team of engineers are micro dosing on a regular basis at work which just sounds insane until you stop to realize that what James Madison discovered is that micro dosing can amp up creativity by 200% and of course there's the research in flow and by the way just so you want to know where that creativity is coming from in psychedelics what you're looking from at is this is the brain connectivity on the left this is your brain under normal conditions so the if you really want to amplify creativity you want all kinds of far-flung connections to the brain you want lots of the areas of the brain talking to each other on the left is your brain under normal conditions on the right is your brain on psilocybin the magic and magic mushrooms so this is where that boost and creativity is coming from this is also why consciousness hacking has gone mainstream in the u.s. we got 44% of American companies are rolling out mindfulness training programs this year yoga is now a billion-dollar industry right and as of 2017 psychedelics have been proven to be phenomenal treatments exciting treatments for depression anxiety PTSD and all kinds of addiction this is un OCD this is huge research and there's tons to go on now I want to bring it all back together alright all this stuff has happened and where are we today the good news is what all this research is telling us is that consciousness is hackable and I want to be really clear you don't have to take a mind-altering substance to do any of this I'm gonna talk about what we know from flow so what we've discovered about flow I said earlier flow shows up in anyone anywhere provided certain additional conditions are met what are those conditions we now know there are 20 different flow triggers you're looking at the list are probably by the way way more than 20 but this is all all we've discovered and they come in two varieties there are individual triggers what does can take to drive me into flow are you into flow and then there is a shared collective version of a flow state what's known as group flow this is essentially a team performing at their very best and it probably all had some experience with group flow if you've ever seen kind of like a fantastic music performance where the band just comes together and the level of a performance goes through the roof we've seen a fourth-quarter comeback in football or basketball usually group low if you've taken part in a phenomenal brainstorming session where ideas are just flying off the wall and real progress is getting made that's group flow in action so not going to go into too much detail here but what all of these triggers do what they all have in common flow follows focus it only shows up when all of our attention is in the right here the right now that's what all these triggers do they drive attention into the present moment if I was going to talk about this neurobiologically I would say most of these triggers either boost norepinephrine and dopamine which are besides being underneath romantic love there the brains principle focusing chemicals or they lower cognitive load a little bit so they lighten the load on the working memory both cases drives attention into the present moment so I'm going to break down just so you get a sense of it three different flow triggers and the reason I chose these three is a flow Genome Project just completed a giant creativity study won one of the deepest studies on flow on creativity that's ever been done it's pilot studies so I shouldn't be talking too much about it we've teamed up with neuroscientists at USC to take it to the next step and then we'll publish and I'll be able to talk about it but one of the things that the research shows in this early phase is that there are three triggers that we need to maximize creativity I kind of figure I should go over these things with you guys because I assuming most people in this room are doing something creative for a living don't see a lot of accountants here it could be wrong so the first flow trigger that you need for creativity is the most obvious its complete concentration so when I work with organizations when we work with companies walking to the companies the first thing I say is if you can't hang a sign on your door that says off I'm flowin you're sunk you can't do this work what the research shows is if you want to maximize flow you need 90 to 120 minutes of uninterrupted concentration that means no cell phone no email no instant messaging no Facebook no Twitter none of that if you run or work for an organization that has one of those policies that messages must be returned in 15 minutes and emails and a half an hour it's a disaster for high performance it's a nightmare you're literally destroying the basis of peak performance impossible without it so the next flow trigger that I want to talk about that shows up is critical for creativity it's what's known as the challenge skills balance now this is often called the Golden Rule the flow the most important of flows triggers here's the idea flow follows focus so we pay the most attention to task at hand when the challenge of the task at hand slightly exceeds our skillset you want to stretch but not snap now it is a little increase the number that people have put on and it's not a real number it's a metaphorical number is a four percent difference four percent greater that's the chief the challenge is four percent greater than your skills it's perfect for flow so what I mean by four percent why am I using that number originally it came from a back-of-the-envelope calculation between Csikszentmihalyi godfather flow and a google mathematician and they were just trying to put a number on it we took that four percent into the flow Genome Project over the past couple years and have been running experiments on it we found that it was a lot closer and a lot more accurate than we anticipated and it what I like about it is it's so small now four percent is tricky right if you are shyer meeker a little bit less than a high achiever four percent is tricky because it's outside your comfort zone right it's just outside your comfort zone but you have to get comfortable being uncomfortable to do this work if you're interested in peak performance you've got to learn how to suffer a little there's just no way around it and you got to learn how to be afraid because you're always going to be pushing past your skill set you're gonna push in your challenge for peak performers for people who are really driven this number is tricky because peak performers will take on that is 20% 30% 40% greater than their skill set and they will lock themselves out of the state of peak performance needed to achieve that so if you're wired that way take your task and chunk it down into smaller sub tasks until it gets into that uncomfortable but still manageable zone the challenge skills balance and if I were to put this emotionally by the way I would say that flow sits not on but near the midpoint between boredom and anxiety boredom not enough stimulation here I'm not paying any attention to what's going on anxiety will weigh too much right in between it's what's known as the flow channel this is where the challenge skill sweet spot sits the other thing that we discovered is phenomenal for creativity is immediate feedback so this is again tricky in today's corporate world right most of us we get annual reviews or quarterly reviews what the research shows for creativity to go up much much much closer review so for example I discovered in publishing editors don't really edit these days doesn't happen that much they're too busy they sort of they they're more like movie producers and they are like editors and so I'll get feedback on my books maybe twice a book three times a book and that's it so I've hired somebody who is my feedback editor and all they do is they couple times a week they read everything I've written it and they tell me if it's boring arrogant or confusing which I've discovered it's my minimal feedback for flow that's the feedback I need to kind of navigate through my writing so if you really want to amp up clear creativity find a feedback buddy find somebody on social media you can bounce ideas off much more frequently the easiest way to do this here's the really great news about all this turns out this stuff is remarkably easy to train and that's new information if you would have talked to me 10 years ago did Steven is there anything you bet your life on about flow I would have said it's impossible to train up in fact when the flow Genome Project started we were working only with professional and Olympic athletes and top CEOs we didn't think anybody else was gonna be good at this we were still wrong so a couple years ago we teamed up with Google and we ran a joint learning exercise so over the course of six weeks we took about 80 different Googlers who all over the company so we had marketing and sales and engineering and facilities across the boards didn't matter and we trained them up in for high performance basics and I mean basics get enough sleep at night kind of basics and then the use of for flow triggers and after six weeks of training about an hour of homework a day we saw 35 to 80 percent increase in flow this stuff is incredibly easy to train it's because we are all biologically hardwired for flow so a little information can make you plenty dangerous interestingly if you're still too lazy to work with the psychological you'd like a technological fix well what you're looking at is transcranial direct stimulation this is the air force this is a radar operator they have zapped her brain artificially knocking out the prefrontal cortex the huge pulse of electromagnetic energy its inducing a twenty to forty minute artificial flow State when this happens you're seeing an 8x increase in pattern recognition which is fundamental to radar operators so we're seeing this go on I will tell you by the way the technology for this is pretty simple you can do with a car battery and some electrodes don't get it wrong you can make yourself really stupid for a long time if you get this wrong this turns out to be a very very very precise science the other thing that we've discovered and this was work done by Richard Davidson who's a guy I didn't mention but he did at the same time Andy Newberg was doing kind of the brain work the brain scans fMRI Richie Davidson at the University of Wisconsin was doing fantastic work on Tibetan Buddhist people who had 34 years of meditation training and what he discovered one of the things he discovered is huge amounts of gamma in their brains right perching them on the edge of creativity so what has happened since is we are now starting to record the brainwaves of monks with this much training and then we're using neurofeedback to train people into this state and we're getting significant significant significant result results people able to do much more incredible things in as little as three weeks so we're now starting to see technologically induced altered states of consciousness and you guys can actually take advantage of some of this technology this is the website for the flow Genome Project and the landing page you're going to be say a big thing that says take the quiz the quiz is a flow profile it basically is a blend of the Big Five personality traits mixed with the 20 flow triggers so what we'll tell you is on the other side and it's free it will say if you're this kind of person you're likely to find more flow in this direction so it's a great place to start if you're interested more flow your lives so one last thing I want to tell you is this is super interesting when myself and Jamie wheel my partner in the flow Genome Project were writing stealing fire we I want early on I was having conversation with a friend of mine a guy named Salim Ismail Salim Ismail was a former head of innovation Yahoo he was at that time he was the first president or executive director of singularity University in Silicon Valley where they study exponential technology and its ability to solve big challenges and Saleem has been a longtime flow fan and he just he happened to look at me he was like you know it's got every time you go to a sporting event every time you go to see the move to go to the movies every time I go to a poetry reading or a concert you're essentially paying to see somebody in flow and I'll bet if you quantify it it's a huge chunk of our GDP and I went wow that's a neat idea I wonder if you could do that and then when that research started to pile in that William James was right that all of these different altered states under the hood have the same kind of neurobiological signature Jamie and I decided to do a study we wanted to see what we was well we could calm the altered state economy which is how much money did we spend globally seeking out states where our prefrontal cortex quiets down where we're selfless effortless timeless in tapping into this richness how much do we spend and we know some of this stuff by the way some of its conscious and it's paused and people come into mind valley and going on meditation retreats and working with flow and some of it is just people chasing unconsciousness with drugs so not all of this is good but just to give you an idea of how big this is what we discovered is that the altered state economy is four trillion dollars a year that is 1/16 of the global economy that is spent trying to shift our consciousness that is astounding and because of all the TEL tools and techniques and technologies I've been talking about today that number is going to continue to grow so you're looking for a growth industry to build a new business altered states of consciousness and I think it's a final thought what I want to leave you with is the fact that I think all of this information everything I've been talking about today puts a wonderful yet horrible burden on each and every one of us right you got to stop you got to ask yourself right what the hell would you do if you could be 500 percent more productive if you could boost creativity by six hundred percent if you could cut learning times in half right what Grand Challenge is what impossible is you're gonna go after this is exactly what is available to each and every one of us today but what you choose to do with this information that is entirely up to you but thanks for listening [Applause]

Channel: Mindvalley Talks

Views: 68,305

Rating: 4.8770742 out of 5

Keywords: mindvalley, how to focus, how to be more focused, how to focus on studying, what is flow state, how to enter flow state, flow state, how to focus better, peak preformance, flow state of mind, how to get in the zone, how to be more productive, how to be more productive in life, productivity tips, How To Get Into The Flow State | Steven Kotler, productivity hacks, ted talk productivity 7 simple habits for a more productive life | studytee, productive habits

Id: TR895QiYMw8

Length: 51min 50sec (3110 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2019