Introduction to The Optimized Brain, with Steven Kotler

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 that 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 States 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...