The Neurochemistry of Flow States, with Steven Kotler | Big Think.

The Neurochemistry of Flow States,
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Perhaps our pursuit of drug-free sports went a little too far. Many diseases supposedly linked to steroid use in adults simply do not occur, says Steven Kotler. Steroids are, however, great at combating HIV/AIDS and as an anti-aging too.
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STEVEN KOTLER:

Steven Kotler is an award-winning journalist, a New York Times bestselling author, and co-founder and director of research for the Flow Genome Project. His books include the non-fiction works The Rise of Superman, Abundance, A Small Furry Prayer, West of Jesus, and the novel The Angle Quickest for Flight. His works have been translated into over 30 languages. His articles have appeared in over 60 publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, Wired, GQ, Popular Science, and Discover.

His latest book, co-authored with tech CEO Peter Diamandis, is Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Steven Kotler:  I had no interest whatsoever in steroids. I got involved in this because an editor who is a friend of mine called me up and said Jose Canseco just wrote this crazy book where he said steroids are the wonder drug of tomorrow. And I said look man, I am not much of a baseball fan. It kind of bores me and everybody knows steroids are terrible for you. Canseco’s out of his mind. There’s no way – like you’re wasting my time. And he said, you know, it was very, very convincing. He said I’ll pay you to do the research. I was like absolutely I’m in. So I started looking at it and I just started I said okay, I’m just going to read – I’m going to go back ten years and read the articles in major journals – The New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Nature – that kind of thing. I’m not even going to go that deep. Very very quickly what I started to discover is every single thing I thought I knew about steroids was wrong. Every crazy disease these drugs had been linked to have nothing to do with it. I’ll give you a phenomenal example. Steroids were linked to liver cancer, liver problems, right. It had nothing to do with the steroid. It has to do with the coating they put around the steroid so it could pass through the stomach and get into your bloodstream. That was what was causing the problems. That coating has obviously since been replaced. But Nick Evans who’s at UCLA is the only person literally in history whose ever done long-term steroid studies, right. Long term abusers. Body builders, double and triple stacking steroids for 10, 20 years at a time.

None of the things we’ve been told about are real. The only danger he found is since the heart is a muscle there is a certain point if you’re taking massive massive doses over long periods of time it can expand it, it can grow, right and grow bigger than the blood vessels and the ventricles and what not which would be a problem. And this doesn’t mean, by the way, when teenagers use steroids, right, when you’re still producing lots of these substances it’s an absolute disaster, right. That’s bad news. But in adults everything we’ve been told tends to be wrong and some of what we’ve been told costs millions of lives, right. It turns out steroids are phenomenal, phenomenal in fighting back AIDS. They’re really, really, really good. Nobody wanted to talk about it. When doctors started treating AIDS patients with it the guy who started doing this was a guy named Walter Jekot. The government jumped in and put him in jail for five years. He scared the hell out of a ton of doctors and the result of this kind of us trying to keep sports pure and, you know, preserve the competitive advantage has been millions of people died as a result. So not only is everything you’ve been told about steroids wrong, but there were a lot of consequences. The people who have been at the forefront of this and kind of pushing it forward is the life extension community, right. Our hormones decline as we age so the idea here is we can replace them. And they’ve been working on this stuff for 10, 15 years at this point with some success. It is now one of five or six different ways people are attacking aging, right, and fighting back death. But one thing seems to be sure. Since Google’s in the anti-death game, right, Peter Diamandis, my partner, in Bold and Abundance has human longevity incorporated there in the life extension game. There are big companies, massive amounts of resources getting involved and steroids are a piece of this puzzle. And I think we’re going to have to as a country rethink our position on these drugs and anti-aging stuff is going to force us to do it.

[AuthenticSelfGrowth]

I believe I experienced this 'Flow' state last week. I had been working pretty hard during the day time, I did some yoga afterwards then I went out and practiced some cold-approach pick up. When I came home I was just in the zone. There is no other way I can describe the way I felt. I was reading like a machine. I was writing and everything which came out of me was just on point. I actually come up with a new idea for an app (I have never before thought about making an app). Also, music sounded incredible and I was really able to take it in. I then meditated just before bedtime and I went into the deepest meditative state I have ever been in.

Now here I am researching whatever it was that I felt. I just stumbled across this 'state' but I certainly want more of it.

[PsychopathUltimate]

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Steven Kotler explains the neurochemical changes during flow states that strengthen motivation, creativity and learning. "The brain produces a giant cascade of neurochemistry. You get norepinephrine, dopamine, anandamide, serotonin and endorphins. All five of these are performance enhancing neurochemicals." Kotler discusses how each amplifies intellectual and cognitive performance.

Transcript: Besides neuroanatomical changes in flow there are neurochemical changes, right. The brain produces a giant cascade of neurochemistry. You get norepinephrine, dopamine, anandamide, serotonin and endorphins. All five of these are performance enhancing neurochemicals, right. So they make you faster, stronger, quicker and they do the same thing with your brain. In the front end of a flow state you take in more information, you process it more deeply meaning you process it using more parts of your brain and you process it more quickly. There’s some debate about this but it does appear that you process it more quickly. This is norepinephrine and dopamine. So when people enter a flow state they talk about feeling like they’re senses are incredibly heightened. This is the performance enhancing aspect of norepinephrine and dopamine.

Where these chemicals really come in handy is how they affect motivation, creativity and learning. We’ll start with motivation. Besides being performance enhancing chemicals these are obviously all feel good drugs, right. These five chemicals are the most potent feel good drugs the brain can produce. As a result flow is considered the most addictive state on Earth. Scientists don’t like the word addictive so instead they use autotelic. When something is autotelic it is an end in itself. What it means is that once an experience starts producing flow we will go extraordinarily far out of our way to get more of it which is why researchers now believe flow is the source code of intrinsic motivation. Another thing that those neurochemicals do is they augment the creative process. So creativity is always recombinantory. It’s the product of novel information, bumping into old thoughts to create something startlingly new. So if you want to amplify creativity, you want to amplify every aspect of that process. Again, the neurochemicals help. So on the front end of the flow state when you get norepinephrine and dopamine they’re tightening focus so you are taking in more information per second. So you are boosting that part of the creative process. Norepinephrine and dopamine do something else in the brain which is they lower signal to noise ratio so you detect more patterns. They jack up pattern recognition so our ability to link ideas together is also an enhancer. Taking in more information we can link it together.

Anandamide which is another chemical that shows up in flow doesn’t just promote pattern recognition. It promotes lateral thinking. So pattern recognition is more or less the linking of familiar ideas together. Lateral thinking is the linking of very disparate ideas together, right. So more information per second, all kinds of pattern recognition, lateral thinking. All of it surrounds the creative process and amplifies all of it which is why, for example, studies run by my organization, the Flow Genome Project, we found creativity is increased 500 to 700 percent. To give you another example in a recent Australian study they took 42 people, gave them a very tricky brainteaser to solve, the kind that needs very creative problem solving. Nobody could solve the problem. They induced flow artificially using transcranial magnetic stimulation to basically knock out the prefrontal cortex. They induced artificial transient hypofrontality technically.

As a result, 23 people solved the problem in record time. So massively amplified motivation, massively amplified creativity. The last thing flow does that’s really important is it jacks up learning. So a quick shorthand for how learning works is the more neurochemicals that show up during experience, the better that experience has of moving from short term holding into long term storage, right? Neurochemicals among their many other functions, one of them is to tag experiences, big neon sign saying "really important, save for later!" 'cause flow is this giant chemical dump. It massively amplifies learning so in studies run by Darpa and researchers with advanced brain monitoring in California, when they induced flow artificially this time kinda using neuro-feedback; in soldiers, marksmen to be exact, they found that soldiers in flow learn to shoot 230% faster than normal. When they redid this study using novice marksmen, they did it with riflemen and archers, what they discovered is the period of time it takes to train a novice, archer or marksmen, up to the expert level when they're in flow can be cut in half so Malcom Gladwell's famous "10, 000 hours to mastery", what the research shows is that flow cuts it half.

[SMAKDON]

"transcranial magnetic stimulation, basically knock out the entire prefrontal cortex. They induced artificial, transient hypofrontality--technically…" that shit is dope literally

[twinkytobar]

I am a teacher and recently started to work at university level, this has had me reading and learning new content that I did not master the way it's needed for this level, so I study and teach at the same time, so I am constantly in the flow, it's super demanding, but this flow gives me enough motivation and energy as to perform the way I am asked to.

[RainbowDevourer]

I think many young people who play a lot of games also get into a sort of Flow state when playing, and it may play a part in people getting addicted to games. I know for sure that I have entered Flow when playing, literally "being one" with the game character and reacting to things seamlessly and solving the challenges at hand effortlessly.

[abhishalsharma]

2:37 creativity increases from 500 to 700% !

[kristinditlevsen]

This video really resonates… I have people asked me if I’m OK all the time and I always feel like I’m trying to get into that state of mind so that I can make decisions… And once I get there, people probably think I’m catatonic. Lol but that’s my happy place. You’ve explained it very well.

[dietrichhoefer]

To add to that punch line of the 10, 000 hour to 5, 000 hour.... I would think you could say as well that the individual also WANTS to experience those 5, 000 hours!
I bet I'm not the only one who would love to get into this field for the experience it could provide... There is another great psychological rule that says "if you can feel it, you can replicate it"
Imagine if our education system could integrate this study as an experience and not entirely the solution...

[j.r.r.tolkee]

Two thoughts: first, I am a licensed professional counselor and have experienced this, or something very much like it, on days when I have a lot of sessions (6+). It always starts with the first session - if it goes well, the following sessions seem also to go well; if not, then remaining sessions are more hit-or-miss. Second, I wonder how I might train my clients to induce this flow state either at the beginning of our sessions, or else on their own time and, to that end, what positive effects it may have on their various struggles.

[MaxxG]

Where can I find scholarly articles that study the neurochemistry of flow state? So far I can't find any of the studies he's listed.

[KayFlowidity]

1:10 👌👌👌
2:00 Signal/Noise ratio
3:15 Learning

[jessicaschoener]

Wait, Big Think how do we get into flow state??

[joeyurko]

Are flow state and the zone synonymous, or is a flow state the means by which to get to the zone?

[OTHERVERSETCG]

Greatest affirmation of 18 years of my life. Thank you. 

[billjackrock]

I swear just the sound of his voice makes me feel like I'm in a flow state.

[theravenousrabbit]

So... What should we do to help women to get empowered through this patriarchal oppression that is Flow States? How do we empower women through this... Big Think? 

[ghoto_]

Its funny how no-one tries to disprove flow state,
It might be because most people have experienced it at some point

If only some people experienced it, the concept would probably be alot more criticized

[AndrewChason]

With Tech Minded / Nerd Community having more access to it in CO, WA, OR, CA... what correlations have been found between the "Hippie Speedball" (Caffeine+Cannabis) and riding the railcar over into the Flow Lane?

[abhishalsharma]

Are there any demerits of neurochemicals?

[troyarmstrong]

Again, remarkable and concise literature.