How to open up the next level of human performance | Steven Kotler | TEDxABQ

I study ultimate human performance or what it takes to be your best when it matters most what it takes to do the impossible and when I found when I say something like ultimate human performance out loud and in public most people tend to think of anybody but themselves we picture astronauts or Navy SEALs or genius innovators so I want to be clear when I say what does it take to be your best when it matters most I mean what does it take for you to be your best when it matters most what does it take for you to do the impossible and I came to this topic from an unusual direction journalism in the early 1990s I became a journalist and at the time action sports were beginning to grab the public's imagination so back then if you could write and you can surf or you could write and you could ski you could write you could raw climb there was work I couldn't do any of those things very well but I needed the work so I lied to my editors and I was lucky enough to spend the better portion of five years chasing athletes around mountains will tell you if you're not a professional athlete and you spend a lot of time chasing athletes around mountains and across oceans you break bones I broke a lot of bones this meant I had a lot of time off I had a lot of downtime I'd be hanging out I would snap this through that and I did take four or five months off and when I came back the progress I saw amazed me absolutely astounded me it was leaps and bounds kind of progress stuff that had been absolutely completely impossible four or five months ago was not only being done it was being iterated upon now sports performance as a general rule it's slow its steady its governed by the laws of evolution as a general rule in athletics we break records every five to ten years not every couple of months but that was exactly what was going on in venture sports and I want to give you a couple of examples in 1990 in snowboarding the biggest gap jump anybody ever cleared was 40 feet 40 feet is big it's two buses stacked and the end today as you can see we're clearing gap jumps that are over 250 feet tall that's a skyscraper this is my favorite example this is my friend Alex Honnold alex is free soloing Half Dome in Yosemite free soloing means he's climbing without ropes and without protection so he falls he dies now most people when they climb Half Dome it's an enormous climb it usually takes a day and a half two days they bring portal edges so they can sleep on the side of the wall Alex didn't need a portal edge because in 2002 or 2012 he free soloed Half Dome in an hour and 22 minutes that's the rough equivalent of running a four-minute mile in about 38 seconds and alex is only one example between 1990 and today action-adventure sport athletes have achieved more impossible feats than pretty much any group in history and this raises a pretty basic question what the heck is going on and the answer is a state of consciousness known as flow that these athletes have learned harness probably better than almost any group in history you may know flow by other names you may talk about it as runner's high being unconscious being in the zone flow is a technical term and it's defined as an optimal state of consciousness when we're feel our best and we perform our best more specifically it refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption we get so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears action and awareness start to merge your sense of self vanishes time passes strangely sometimes you'll slow down you'll get a freeze-frame effect more frequently it speeds up and five hours pass by in like five minutes and throughout all aspects of performance both mental and physical go through the roof but 15 years ago our brain imaging technology got good enough that for the very first time could peer under the hood and figuring out where this ultimate performance was coming from and what we discovered turned a lot of our deep old ideas about high performance on its head the old idea was that at any norm normal time we're only using a small sliver of our brain so ultimate performance must be the full brain on overdrive turns out we actually had it exactly backwards in flow we're not using more of the brain we're using a lot less so the brain becoming hyperactive it's becoming hypoactive Hyp oh it's the opposite of hyper means to slow down or deactivate and the main portion of the brain that's deactivating is your prefrontal cortex now this is the part of your brain that governs all of your higher cognitive functions complex decision-making long-term planning or sense of morality or sense of will why does time pass so strangely when we're in the zone because time is calculated all over the prefrontal cortex you know parts of it wink out we can no longer separate past from present from future and we're instead plunged into a state researchers talk of as the deep now something similar happens to your sense of self self is also calculated all over the prefrontal cortex and as parts of it wink out we can no longer perform this calculation now when your sense of self goes quiet it turns off your inner critic that nagging always on defeatist voice in your head your inner Woody Allen in flow Woody goes quiet now we experience this as liberation as freedom we're actually getting out of our own way risk-taking goes up creativity goes up now besides these changes in neural anatomical function we also get a big dump of neuro chemistry and flow five of the most potent neuro chemicals the brain can produce show up in the state and flow appears to be the only time we get access to all five at once and if we want to understand how these action-adventure sport athletes did the impossible so neuro Chemistry gives us a big clue first of all it enhances all aspects of physical performance muscle reaction time increases our sense of pain gets dead and so strength increases but the bigger impact is cognitive mental performance these neural chemicals surround all three sides of the so-called high-performance triangle motivation creativity and learning in motivation these five chemicals that show up there all pleasure drugs in fact are the five most potent pleasure drugs the brain can produce which means flow is one of the most addictive states on earth researchers don't like the word addictive so instead they talk about it as the source code of intrinsic motivation but this motivation is so great that when McKinsey did a ten-year study they found that top executives in flow report being 500% more productive than out of flow that's a huge leap in productivity that's a huge leap in motivation we see something similar with creativity creativity is a word that gets mistaken a lot but it fundamentally is a recombinant ory process it's what happens when the brain takes in novel information combines it with old ideas to come up with something startling they knew and the neuro chemicals that show up and flow surround this process when you're in the state you take in more information per second you pay more attention to that information you find greater links between that information and closely-related idea is what's called pattern recognition and you find greater leaves between that information and far-flung ideas what's called lateral thinking in fact creativity is so surrounded that most reaches researchers have found that creativity spikes 400% in flow something similar happens to learning quick shorthand for how learning works in the brain is the more neural chemicals that show up during an experience the better chance that experience has of moving from short-term holding into long-term storage flow is this huge neural chemical dump which is why in experiments run by the US military on soldiers they found that soldiers in flow learned 240 to 500 percent faster than normal so we've all heard about Malcolm Gladwell's fabled 10,000 hours to master what the research suggests is that flow can cut that in half more interestingly and I'm biased here because this is a lot of the work that my organization the flow Genome Project has been involved in we've been able to combine this kind of new neuroscience with these high performing groups like the action-adventure sport athletes we've been able to work backwards to what is causing them to get so much access to flow and figure out how to apply this in all of our lives what we've discovered is two things that are important the first is that flow is ubiquitous shows up in anyone anywhere provided certain initial conditions are met second of all what are those conditions turns out flow states have triggers these are preconditions that lead to more flow there are 20 of them in total the first thing to know is that flow follows focus it can only show up when all our attention is focused on the right here right now that's what these triggers do they drive attention into the present moment another way of thinking about this is these are 20 of the things that evolution shaped our brain to pay the most attention to and what we see in action adventure sport athletes is they built their lives around these triggers they're extremely passionate about what they do and that matters here because we pay more attention to those things that we believe in they take very very big risks and risks is another great focusing mechanism drives attention into the now and they take those risks in novel unpredictable complex environments that produce a lot of fast feedback and a lot of sensory input all these things grab hold of attention and drive it into the now and allow them to produce tremendous amounts of flow but it turns out it's not actually just action-adventure sport athletes who do this pretty much every high-performing individual and organization you can think of we've looked at and we found they all do the same thing so Navy SEALs from the top educational institutions in America the best startups in Silicon Valley fortune 500 companies the people run fortune 500 companies they have built their organizations around these triggers to maximize flow the most interesting part is that it's actually really easy last year we did a training we did a six-week training at Google we trained people up in only four of these triggers over a six-week period what we found on the back end was a thirty five to eighty percent increase in flow it's that easy and I think this information puts a wonderful it's sort of terrible burden on all of us what Grand Challenges are you aching to solve what in your life currently seems impossible what would you go after if you could be 500 percent more productive could be 400% more creative if you could cut your learning times in half this is what flow makes possible this is what's available you today but what you do with this information that's up to you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 154,259

Rating: 4.9335084 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Health, Achievement, Brain, Consciousness, Mental health, Mindfulness, Success

Id: 7xnbUT3rOvQ

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 02 2016