The Rise of Superman by Kotler
Ref: Steven Kotler (2014). The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance. Quercus Publishing.
https://www.flowgenomeproject.com/
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Summary
How extreme athletes take advantage of peak experiences called “Flow” (psychologically ‘transient Hypofrontality’) to accelerate and enhance elite performance.
Flow is an optimal state of consciousness, a peak state where we both feel our best and perform our best.
Flow State: “being so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”
“During a peak experience the individual experiences an expansion of self, a sense of unity, and meaningfulness in life. The experience lingers in one’s consciousness and gives a sense of purpose, integration, self-determination and empathy…these states were the hidden commonality among all high achievers, the source code of intrinsic motivation: The peak experience is felt as a self-validating, self-justifying moment.… It is felt to be a highly valuable—even uniquely valuable—experience, so great an experience sometimes that even to attempt to justify it takes away from its dignity and worth. As a matter of fact, so many people find this so great and high an experience that it justifies not only itself, but even living itself. Peak experiences can make life worthwhile by their occasional occurrence. They give meaning to life itself.-Maslow.
In flow, we are so focused on the task at hand that everything else falls away. Action and awareness merge. Time flies. Self vanishes. Performance goes through the roof.-Rise of Superman by Kotler.
If you consistently use flow to do the impossible, you get confident in your ability to do the impossible.
The disappearance of self, the distortion of time, and that “psychic connection” to the universe—are among flow’s more famous qualities.
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Flow, defined:
Conditions necessary for flow:
Clear Goals: Expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities.
Immediate Feedback: Successes and failures are apparent, so behavior can be adjusted as needed.
Studies have found that in professions with less direct feedback loops—stock analysis, psychiatry, and medicine—even the best get worse over time.
Challenge/Skill Ratio: the challenge level and skill level should both be high.
Extreme athletes rely on risk to drive focus, the requisite first step toward producing flow.
Think challenging, yet manageable—just enough stimulation to shortcut attention into the now, not enough stress to pull you back out again.
The sweet spot for flow requires a 4% increase in effort.
If the challenge is too great, fear swamps the system. If the challenge is too easy, we stop paying attention. Flow appears near the emotional midpoint between boredom and anxiety, in what scientists call the flow channel—the spot where the task is hard enough to make us stretch but not hard enough to make us snap. How hard is that? Answers vary, but the general thinking is about 4 percent. That’s it. That’s the sweet spot.
Yerkes-Dobson law: Increased stress leads to increased performance up to a certain intensity, beyond which performance levels off or declines.
Concentration: Deep embodiment; a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention with a sense of personal control over the situation.
As focus tightens, the brain stops multitasking. Energy normally used for temporal processing is reallocated for attention and awareness. Instead of keeping time, we are taking in more data per second, processing it more completely, and, perhaps—though great debate rages around this point—processing more of it per second. It is all this data that actually elongates the current moment. Our sense of how long “the now” lasts is directly related to information processing: The more stuff we’re processing, the longer the moment appears to last. And the longer the moment lasts, the better quantity and quality of information we have at our disposal. More data gives us a shot at sudden insights. Better data leads to more creative solutions. Both allow us to fine-tune our reactions.
Properties of Flow:
Profound mental clarity:
Emotional detachment: A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness: The merging of action and awareness. Distorted sense of time: One’s subjective experience of time is altered
Automatic nature: Effortless action.
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Flow Psychology- The Brain
Brain- Cortex
Neocortex: main job is to predict the future.
Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex: Job is to ask questions, to start the process of second-guessing. It is the enemy of flow junkies everywhere.
The Prefrontal Cortex (PFC): the heart of our higher cognitive abilities where we collect data, problem solve, plan ahead, assess risk, evaluate rewards, analyze thoughts, suppress urges, learn from experience, make moral decisions, and give rise to our normal sense of self.
Brain- Neurochemicals
Neurochemicals: “information molecules” used by the brain to transmit messages. Mostly, these messages are either excitatory or inhibitory: Do more of what you’re doing or Do less of what you’re doing.
Norepinephrine: Tightens focus (data acquisition).
Norepinephrine provides another boost. In the body, it speeds up heart rate, muscle tension, and respiration, and triggers glucose release so we have more energy. In the brain, norepinephrine increases arousal, attention, neural efficiency, and emotional control. In flow, it keeps us locked on target, holding distractions at bay. And as a pleasure-inducer, if dopamine’s drug analog is cocaine, norepinephrine’s is speed, which means this enhancement comes with a hell of a high.
Dopamine: Jacks pattern recognition (data processing).
Emotionally, we feel dopamine as engagement, excitement, creativity, and a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world.
Anandamide: Accelerates lateral thinking (widens the database searched by the pattern recognition system).
The next neurotransmitter is anandamide, which takes its name from the Sanskrit word for “bliss”—and for good reason. Anandamide is an endogenous cannabinoid, and similarly feels like the psychoactive effect found in marijuana. Known to show up in exercise-induced flow states (and suspected in other kinds), this chemical elevates mood, relieves pain, dilates blood vessels and bronchial tubes (aiding respiration), and amplifies lateral thinking (our ability to link disparate ideas together). More critically, anandamide also inhibits our ability to feel fear, even, possibly, according to research done at Duke, facilitates the extinction of long-term fear memories.
Endorphins: Natural “endogenous” (meaning naturally internal to the body) opiates relieve pain and produce pleasure much like “exogenous” (externally added to the body) opiates like heroin. Potent too. The most commonly produced endorphin is 100 times more powerful than medical morphine.
Serotonin: Stabilizes our mood, feelings of well-being, and happiness. This hormone impacts your entire body. It enables brain cells and other nervous system cells to communicate with each other. Serotonin also helps with sleeping, eating, and digestion.
Brain Waves
Each correlate to a different state of consciousness:
Delta: 1-3.9 Hz; deep, dreamless sleep.
Theta: 4-7.9 Hz; REM sleep, meditation, insight, processing of novel incoming stimuli.
Alpha: 8-13.9Hz; the Brains basic resting state- relaxed, calm, and lucid, but not really thinking.
Beta: 14-30 Hz; learning and concentration at the low end, fear and stress at the high end.
Gamma: >30 Hz; only shows up during binding, when different parts of the brain are combining disparate thoughts into a single idea.
Brain- Info Processing
Human beings have evolved two distinct systems for processing information:
Explicit System (~Conscious, Left Brain, Beta brainwave): Rule-based, can be expressed verbally, and is tied to conscious awareness. When the prefrontal cortex is fired up, the explicit system is usually turned on.
When the explicit system (mostly on the left side of the brain) handles a problem, the neurons involved are very close to one another. This much proximity leads to linear connections, logical deductions, and all the other keystones of standard reasoning.
Implicit System (~Unconscious, Right Brain, Alpha brainwave): The gut sense of intuition; relies on skill and experience, is not consciously accessible, and cannot be described verbally (i.e., try to explain a hunch).
When the implicit system is at work, its reach is much broader—far-flung corners of the brain are talking to one another. This is known to experts as “lateral thinking” or, to the business executives who so crave this talent: “thinking outside the box.” It means that novel stimuli can combine with random thoughts and obscure memories and the result is something utterly new.
Creativity has a brain wave signature as well: alpha waves pulsing out of the brain’s right hemisphere. This is considered the readiness state for sudden insight—meaning not the revelation itself, rather its precursor condition. Exactly thirty milliseconds before the breakthrough intuition arrives, EEG shows a burst of gamma waves. These ultrafast brain waves appear when a bunch of widely distributed cells—i.e., novel stimuli, random thoughts, and obscure memories—bind themselves together into a brand-new network. It is the brain-wave signature of the “Aha!” moment.
There are two advantages of using the implicit system. The first is speed. “When the brain finds a task it needs to solve,” writes Baylor neuroscientist David Eagleman in Incognito, “it rewires its own circuitry until it can accomplish this task with maximum efficiency. The task becomes burned into the machinery.… Automatization permits fast decision making. Only when the slow system of consciousness is pushed to the back of the queue can rapid programs do their work. Should I swing forehand or backhand at the approaching tennis ball? With a ninety-mile-per-hour projectile on its way, one does not want to cognitively slog through the different options.” Efficiency is the second advantage. Our brain is 2 percent of our body by weight, yet consumes 20 percent of our energy. As a result, it’s always looking for ways to conserve. Using the explicit system to think through decisions burns a lot of calories, but switching to the implicit minimizes the energy required to solve problems.
The angel/devil argument is really about alpha versus beta. The angel was alpha. It was the implicit system saying ‘let’s go for it, we know what to do.’ The devil was beta—it was the explicit system saying ‘hold up a second, let’s just gather more data.’
Situational Awareness: the ability to absorb information accurately, assess it calmly, and respond appropriately, situational awareness is essentially the ability to keep cool when all hell breaks loose.
Decision Making
When any of us make decisions, our brains go through a six-stage cycle, each with its own brain waves:
Baseline (before the novel stimuli shows up)
Problem- Solving Analysis (theta-beta):
Pre-Action Readiness (beta- alpha):
Action (alpha):
Post- Action Evaluation (alpha-beta-theta):
Baseline:
The best athletes move through this entire cycle fluidly, seamlessly transitioning from step to step, mentally taking total charge of the stimuli (situation).
The fight-or-flight response (aka the adrenaline rush): adrenaline, cortisol (the stress hormone), and norepinephrine flood the body in an extreme stress response. The brain switches to reactive survival autopilot. Options are limited to three: fight, flee, or freeze. Flow is the opposite: a creative problem-solving state, options wide open.
Present and Future Mindsets
Present Mindset: Often the life of the party, people who act without anticipating consequences, don’t often learn from past failures, and are unable to resist temptation including drugs, sex, and the rock-and-roll variety; which can derail their lives.
A dominant present orientation has been correlated with mental health problems, juvenile delinquency, crime, and addictions. And when it comes to the long path toward mastery, with neither desire to plan nor long-term vision, Presents have a difficult time accumulating anything close to 10,000 hours of practice, deliberate or otherwise.
Future Mindset: People able to resist temptation today for a chance at a greater reward tomorrow. Futures outperform Presents in most every category: they get better grades and more education, are healthier and more optimistic, make more money, solve problems more consistently, are more mindful of morality, and can make the best of failure. They are the movers and shakers in this world.
Futures burn out. They become stressed-out workaholics. Blood pressure goes up, bowels get irritable, heart attacks increase, sex lives disintegrate, marriages fail, children become burdens, friends become memories, and the whole house of cards comes crashing down.
“While presents avoid work…futures consider work a source of special pleasure. For them, tomorrow’s anticipated gains and losses fuel today’s decisions and actions. Gratification delayed for greater reward is always a better bet for futures, who will trade a bird in the hand for a flock in the future. Unlike their present-hedonistic peers who live in their bodies, the futures live in their minds, envisioning other selves, scenarios, rewards and successes. The success of Western civilization in the past centuries can be traced to the prevalence of the future orientation of many populations.”-Zimbardo.
The optimal time perspective combines the energy, joy, and openness of Presents, with the strength, fortitude, and long-term vision of the Futures.
Fixed Mindsets: believe abilities like intelligence and athletic talent are innate and unchangeable.
Growth Mindsets: believe abilities are gained through dedication and hard work, that natural-born talents are merely starting points for a much longer learning process.
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The Brain and Flow
“In flow, parts of the PFC aren’t becoming hyperactive; parts of it are temporarily deactivating. It’s an efficiency exchange. We’re trading energy usually used for higher cognitive functions for heightened attention and awareness.” The technical term for this exchange is transient hypofrontality, with hypo (meaning slow) being the opposite of hyper (i.e., fast). A rule of thumb being: the greater the deactivation of neuronal structures, the more profound (and bizarre) the experience.
Transient Hypofrontality: removes our sense of self. With parts of the prefrontal cortex deactivated, there’s no risk assessor, future predictor, or inner critic around to monitor the situation. With hypofrontality, attention is narrowing. Parts of the brain are shutting down. Oneness is the result of the narrowing of the doors of perception.
At the tail end of a flow state, it also appears (more research needs to be done) that the brain releases serotonin, the neurochemical now associated with SSRIs like Prozac. “It’s a molecule involved in helping people cope with adversity,” Oxford University’s Philip Cowen told the New York Times, “to not lose it, to keep going and try to sort everything out.” In flow, serotonin is partly responsible for the afterglow effect, and thus the cause of some confusion. “A lot of people associate serotonin directly with flow,” says high performance psychologist Michael Gervais, “but that’s backward. By the time the serotonin has arrived the state has already happened. It’s a signal things are coming to an end, not just beginning.”
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Distraction
“Explicit interference into the execution of these kinds of tasks tends to decrease their effectiveness.” Deep embodiment, then, is the transient hypofrontality fast track
Not only is the distracted present a miserable place to be, it’s also the worst kind of self-handicapping. Study after study shows that we’re terrible multitaskers. By trying to improve performance by being everywhere and everywhen, we end up nowhere and never. The sad truth is that our lives are pulling us in every direction save the one where we’re most effective.
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Flow- Examples
1996 Women’s Gymnastics Team: The Magnificent Seven.
Runner’s high: considered a low-grade flow state.
Flow’s neurochemistry accelerates social bonding. Ever fall in love? That high—the sleeplessness, giddiness, hyperactivity, loss of appetite, etc.—that’s dopamine and norepinephrine at work.
Seek out complexity, especially in nature. Go stare at the night sky. Walk in the woods. If you can’t find big nature, contemplate the small. The reasons there are so many clichés about universes inside of dewdrops is because there are universes inside of dewdrops. No dew to contemplate? Use technology to induce awe: surf your city with Google Earth or go see an IMAX movie. Vary the route next time. Brush your teeth with the wrong hand. These against-the-grain tricks increase novelty and unpredictability, demanding focus and pattern recognition, and both are the real goal. If you can light up that same constellation—say replace the novelty found in a natural environment with new routines in your daily life—you’ll get the dopamine and norepinephrine.
Social Activities & Companionship: When other people are present, we pay more attention to the present. Companionship drives focus into the now—it’s arguably the simplest flow hack in the world.
The more social an activity, the higher “flow enjoyment.”
In group flow, spontaneity, cooperation, communication, creativity, productivity, and overall performance all go through the roof.
Communitas: that deep solidarity and togetherness that results from shared transcendent experiences.
Every other athlete in this book got farther faster because they packed their lives with flow triggers and flowed in packs. They leveraged powerful neurobiology to build tighter communities, leveraged those communities to drive innovation, then open-sourced innovation to much larger communities and collectively rode the reverberations into the history books. The lone-wolf maverick is a myth. When it comes to becoming Superman, we really are in this together.
Visualization also firms up aims and objectives, further amplifying flow. With an image of perfect performance fixed in our mind, the intrinsic system knows what needs to happens, keeping the extrinsic system from getting too involved.
Montessori Schools:
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his graduate students went on a quest to find the most “flow-prone” learning environments around. Montessori topped the list.
The educational philosophy pioneered by Maria Montessori in the early portion of the twentieth century is built around self-directed learning, long periods of intense concentration, and deep physicality (it’s often called “embodied education”) and has been repeatedly shown to produce far greater amounts of flow than more traditional methodologies. The results? While the data is still far from complete, a 2006 study published in the journal Science by University of Virginia psychologist Angeline Lillard found Montessori kids outperformed regular students on everything from academic tests to social skills to creative abilities to executive function. Other studies have extended these findings from the classroom to the boardroom. When professors Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of the globe-spanning business school INSEAD surveyed over 3,000 executives and interviewed 500 people who had either started innovative companies or invented new products, they too found a Montessori connection.
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Misc Quotes
“Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.”-James.
“If you’re interested in mastery… or to really achieve anything, you have to be able to tolerate and enjoy risk. It has to become a challenge to look forward to. In all fields, to make exceptional discoveries you need risk—you’re just never going to have a breakthrough without it.”-Barbara Sahakian (Neuropsychologist, University of Cambridge).
“The ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage.”-de Geus.
“At the world-class level, where talent differences are marginal, an estimated 90% of success for elite performers is mental.
Average people can access about 65% of their absolute strength; trained weight lifters can get this up to about 80%.
“Never a glitch on takeoff” (when you’re teetering between flow and fight-or-flight, all it takes is one errant thought to send you in the wrong direction).-Danny Way.
Scientists who study human motivation have lately learned that after basic survival needs have been met, the combination of autonomy (the desire to direct your own life), mastery (the desire to learn, explore, and be creative), and purpose (the desire to matter, to contribute to the world) are our most powerful intrinsic drivers—the three things that motivate us most.
The happiest people on earth, the ones who felt their lives had the most meaning, were those who had the most peak experiences. Moreover, this did not come down to chance or luck. The happiest people on earth worked hard for their fulfillment. They didn’t just have the most peak experiences, they had devoted their lives to having these experiences, often going to extreme lengths to seek them out: It was clear from talking to them, that what kept them motivated was the quality of the experience they felt when they were involved with the activity. The feeling didn’t come when they were relaxing, when they were taking drugs or alcohol, or when they were consuming the expensive privileges of wealth. Rather, it often involved painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person’s capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery. -Csikszentmihalyi.
Catching a wave requires paddling a surfboard to a speed roughly equal to the wave’s speed, but big waves travel far faster than a human being can actually paddle.
“I’m the farthest thing from an adrenaline junky. I can’t stand that feeling. If I’m feeling adrenaline, it means I’m feeling too much fear. It means I haven’t done my homework. It means it’s time to get out of my boat to reassess.”-Tao Berman (Kayaker).
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Hormones and Drugs
Marijuana: triggers the release of Anandamide.
Antidepressants: combination of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin.
Tobacco and ADHD drugs: affect dopamine and norepinephrine
Prescription drugs of abuse are opioids like Oxycontin: affect the endorphin system.
Cocaine: releases dopamine and then blocks its reuptake.
In America, over 22% of the population has an illicit drug problem; one out of ten take antidepressants; 26% of kids are on stimulants, purportedly for ADHD, anecdotally for performance enhancement.
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Chronology
1999: Finnish company Birdman International brought a safer version of this design to market, then established the world’s first wingsuit flying school to train potential customers.-Rise of Superman by Kotler.
1990s: Frenchman Patrick de Gayardon copied the wing design of flying squirrels, stretching pliable, nonporous fabric into three triangular wings: two running wrist to armpit, a third forming a giant inverted V between the legs. His revolutionary insight was to stitch a series of ribs across these wings. When aloft, ram air inflated the ribs much like modern square parachutes, providing pilots a three-to-one glide ratio (three feet forward for every one-foot drop) and an astounding level of in-flight control.-Rise of Superman by Kotler.
Early 1990s: Florida State psychologist Anders Ericsson performed one of the more famous studies of expertise in recent history. By surveying elite violinists at Berlin’s Academy of Music—a.k.a. musicians—Ericsson found that while one’s early environment was helpful, what truly distinguished excellent players from good players from average players was hours of practice. By the time they were twenty years old, expert violinists had put in 10,000 hours of “deliberate, well-structured practice.” The others had not. As Malcolm Gladwell famously explained in Outliers: “[The] research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.”-Rise of Superman by Kotler.
1972: Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel performed a fairly straightforward study in delayed gratification: he offered four-year-old children a marshmallow. Either the kids could eat it immediately or, if they waited for him to return from running a short errand, they would get two marshmallows as a reward. Most kids couldn’t wait. They ate the marshmallow the moment Mischel left the room. Yet a small percentage could resist temptation and, over time, this turned out to a big deal. When interviewed fourteen years later, the kids who could wait were more self-confident, hard-working, and self-reliant. They could handle stress better and could handle tests better. Those who resisted at four ended up scoring 210 points higher on their SATs at sixteen. This may not sound like that much, but, as fellow Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo explains: “[That] is as large as the average difference recorded between the abilities of economically advantaged and disadvantaged children. It is larger than the difference between the abilities of children from families who parents have graduate degrees and children whose parents did not finish high school. The ability to delay gratification at four is twice as good a predictor of later SAT scores as IQ. Poor impulse control is also a better predictor of juvenile delinquency than IQ.”-Rise of Superman by Kotler.
1930s: Harvard physiologist Edmund Jacobson first discovers that imagining oneself lifting an object triggered corresponding electrical activity in the muscles involved in the lift. Between then and now dozens and dozens of studies have born this out, repeatedly finding strong correlations between mental rehearsal—i.e., visualization—and better performance. Everything from giving a speech to running a business meeting to spinning a 1080 are all significantly enhanced by the practice.-Rise of Superman by Kotler.
1916: Cannon hypothesizes that disparate reactions are actually a global response by the nervous system to extreme stress, a response with a purpose: increase strength and stamina. Cannon had discovered the “fight-or-flight response.”-Rise of Superman by Kotler.
1907: William James challenged psychologists to explain why certain people can draw on deep reservoirs to accomplish significantly more than others. As an example, he reflected on the idea of the “second wind.” Fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed. There may be layer after layer of this experience. A third and a fourth “wind” may supervene. Mental activity shows the phenomenon as well as physical, and in exceptional cases we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points.-Rise of Superman by Kotler.
1892: Heim publishes a long essay titled “Remarks on Fatal Falls,” the first scientific investigation into the fact that high-risk activity can profoundly alter consciousness and significantly enhance mental abilities.-Rise of Superman by Kotler.
1880s: William James experiments with psychedelics, primarily nitrous oxide, but he toyed with mescaline as well. Concurrently, James had been conducting a broad survey of the world’s spiritual literature, trying to come up with an accurate catalog of all possible types of mystical experiences and their psychological ramifications. He noticed that it didn’t seem to matter what drug he tried or spiritual tradition he studied, all of these so-called mystical experiences seemed to share deep commonalities.-Rise of Superman by Kotler.
1854: Modern Mountaineering begins when Sir Alfred Wills’s summits the Wetterhorn. Wills’s conquest marked the birth of “systematic mountaineering” and the start of the “Golden Age of Alpinism,” a decade-long stretch wherein most of the first ascents in the Alps were completed.-Rise of Superman by Kotler.
6th Century: The earliest attempts at “human-powered flight” occur when Chinese emperor Kao Yang got curious about the potential for large kites to lift human bodies. Yang strapped a number of variations onto prisoners and pushed them off tall towers.-Rise of Superman by Kotler.
121: Mountaineering begins when Roman Emperor Hadrian scampers up Mount Etna to watch the sun rise.-Rise of Superman by Kotler.
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