Flow is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness. A state of consciousness
where we feel our best and we perform our best. It refers to those moments of total
absorption when we get so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. So
our sense of self, our sense of self-consciousness, they vanish. Time dilates which means sometimes
it slows down. You get that freeze frame effect familiar to any of you who have seen the matrix
or been in a car crash. Sometimes it speeds up and five hours will pass by in like five
minutes. And throughout all aspects of performance, mental and physical, go through the roof.
Underneath the flow state is a complicated mass of neurobiology. There are fundamental
changes in neuroanatomy – which is where in the brain something’s taking place, neurochemistry
and neuroelectricity which is the two ways the brain communicates with itself. The most
prominent of this is the neuroanatomical changes. So the old idea about ultimate performance
- “flow” is what’s known as the ten percent brain myth. The idea that we’re
only using ten percent of our brain at any one time so ultimate performance must obviously
be the full brain firing on all cylinders. And it turns out we had it exactly backwards.
In flow parts of the brain aren’t becoming more hyperactive, they’re actually slowing
down, shutting down. The technical term for this is transient, meaning temporary, hypo
frontality. Hypo – H – Y – P – O – it’s the opposite of hyper means to slow down,
to shut down, to deactivate. And frontality is the prefrontal cortex, the part of your
brain that houses your higher cognitive functions, your sense of morality, your sense of will,
your sense of self. All that shuts down so, for example, why does time pass so strangely
in flow? Because David Eagleman discovered that time is calculated all over the prefrontal
cortex. When parts of it start to wink out we can no longer separate past from present
from future and we’re plunged into what researchers call the deep now.
Transient hypofrontality is interesting. It was discovered back in the nineties and it
had a very negative connotation, it was found in schizophrenics and drug addicts. And then
in the early two thousands Aaron Dietrich who was then at Georgia Tech discovered or
hypothesized that transient hypofrontality actually underpins every altered state – dreaming,
meditation, flow, drug addiction – it doesn’t really matter. And then in 2007, 2008 Charles
Limb at Johns Hopkins working with first jazz musicians and second with rappers was looking
at flow in those contexts and found that the prefrontal cortex was shutting down as well.
Though depending on the altered state you get different parts are shut down. Like in
flow one of the most prominent examples is the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. It shuts
down in flow. This is the part of the brain that houses your inner critic, that nagging
defeatist always on voice in your head turns off in flow. And as a result we feel this
is liberation right. We are finally getting out of our own way. We’re free of ourselves.
Creativity goes up. Risk taking goes up and we feel amazing.
The project at the Flow Genome Project – my mission for the past 15 years has been sort
of to reclaim flow research from the hippie community, from the new age community and
put it back on a really hard science footing. And really what that took was flow research
has been going on continuously at kind of both here in the United State and Europe all
over. And it really just took synthesizing all the information and bringing it together
and putting it on a hard and neurobiological footing. That said there’s a bunch left
to do, right. We have 150 years of flow psychology and flow science goes back all the way to
the 1870s. In fact some of the earliest experiments ever run in kind of early neuroscience and
early kind of experimental psychology were run on flow, were done on flow. In the past
25 years as our brain imaging technology has gotten better and better and better we can
look farther into the brain and see what’s going on. We’ve got about 25 year of neurobiology
that’s underpinning and I sort of think it starts with Dr. Andrew Newberg at the University
of Pennsylvania who was looking – he was actually looking at spiritual experiences
in meditating Tibetan Buddhists and Franciscan nuns.
And he found that “state of cosmic unity” when we become one with everything is actually
a byproduct of transient hypofrontality as well. That’s what happens when the hypofrontality
moves out of the prefrontal cortex and back into the right parietal lobe which is the
part of the brain that separates self from other, right. It allows us to walk through
crowded rooms without bumping into people and things along those lines. In flow or any
kind of deep focused attention, this portion of the brain shuts down so we can no longer
separate self from others. So when people talk about feeling one with everything you’ll
get it in action sports – surfers will talk about being one with the wave, mountain climbers
one with the mountain, whatever it is. For Buddhists it’s cosmic unity, it’s one
with the universe. But what’s really happening is the portion of the brain that separates
self from other is shut down so we can no longer distinguish between the two things.
And as a result we feel one with everything.