Lessons - The Science of Achieving Anything | Steven Kotler - 13 Books & Peak Performance Expert

In this lessons episode, explore how flow drives peak performance and protects long-term cognitive health. Discover how motivation, learning, creativity, and flow combine to elevate performance, understand why expertise and wisdom help slow mental decline, and uncover how entering flow states amplifies learning and mental resilience. Do you feel that flow is the key to performance, especially in your new book? You actually speak about in the later half of someone's life how to maintain an optimized performance. So, in our country, I'd like you to walk through how that came about, but then is flow the secret to reducing cognitive decline, Alzheimer's dementia without genetic precursors, even accelerating in physical tasks. Is there some connection to these two? Let me pull back to give you a big picture statement about, we'll just stay on cognitive peak performance for a second, and then let me move into the answer your question. Flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. That is not an understatement. The list of skills that flow magnifies is extraordinary. Motivation, productivity, learning, creativity, collaboration, cooperation, empathy, wisdom, happiness, well-being, overall life satisfaction. The reason is quite simply this. When we say peak performance, I'm don't mean anything fancier than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. What is that biology is essentially the question you asked? Is it just flow? The answer is no, it's not just flow. From a cognitive side, when we're talking about peak performance, there's four categories inside each of these categories. There's a big long list of skills, but there's a category under the heading of motivation. This is extrinsic motivation, stuff will work hard in the world to get intrinsic motivation, passion, purpose, autonomy, and goals and grit. That's all under the heading of motivation. There's a similar subset of stuff under the heading of learning, creativity, and flow. The way to think about these categories isn't when you face any challenge. Motivation gets into the game. Learning allows you to keep on playing, continue to play, creativity allows you to steer. Especially if you're interested in the kind of stuff that the work I do on and possible, how do you get there? Where is it exactly challenges or creative challenges? You need the creativity to steer and finally flow, which is the optimal performance. Is that how we turbo boost all of these results beyond all reasonable expectations? That's on the cognitive side. Now on the physical side, flow does. It deadens pain, it amplifies strength, fast twitch, muscle response, a couple other things get amplified inflows. There's a big physical impact as well, but the bigger boost is cognitive. Now, you asked a peak performance agent question. I have been studying peak performance aging for almost as long as I've been studying flow for two reasons. One, Miyachik sent me high as the Godfather of flow psychology. Every, you know, is, oh, we wrote a book called flow. What they don't realize is he actually started his career in creativity and then he moved immediately. He did some flow work creativity and he never stopped working on flow, but he went right into adult development. Why? Because flow is the engine for adult development. How do we grow as people? Flow is woven into that equation so that all of this work sort of sits in the heart of my field. The other thing is my wife and I for 20 years now have done hospice care work for dogs and we specialize in worst of the worst cases. So if you are a three-legged, one-eyed Chihuahua with an abusive past, cancer, heart disease, liver failure, and bad flatulence, you are our dog. And we've developed a very amazing sort of healing methodology. There's a sort of a global movement to double canine lifespan. We are deeply involved in that. There are some people doing really crazy whizz-bang, genetic engineering stuff. That's not what we do. We take, we work with evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology and some flow science. And that's the work we do, but we're very, very successful at it. It turns out the same stuff that works in dogs also works in humans and this is very well established as well. But my point is, I've been in this field for a very, very long time. What happened and what is at the center of our country is for reasons we can get into if you want to go there, but at long story short, their traditional story of aging, what I like to call the long slow rot theory is that all of our mental and physical skills decline over time and there's nothing we can do to stop this line. That is the standard theory on aging. And most of us believe either that's true or some version of that is true. And it turns out none of it's actually true. And there's a wild pile of research that starts in the 1990s and goes through now that establishes all of this very, very clearly. So if all the stuff we used to think fades away over time, there's nothing we can do about it. We now now they're all used to lose its skills. So on the physical side and on the mental side, if we properly train all of these skills, we can hold onto them and even advance them much later in life than any of you thought fast will now you asked a question about flow. So let me talk about now we're talking about together. I love it. Yeah. So let me bring it back to your original question. Collier of Klein is a great place to talk about this. So we used to believe. Collier of Klein is in heaven. Well, we're going to get all these hybrids. We're going to get dementia and there's nothing we can do about it. And certain aspects of certain changes in brain function that that do happen, right? Certain things biologically. But it turns out that a lot of things that happen biologically, nobody's actually linked to Collier of decline. So yes, there are changes in brain function. We also, and this is Gene Cohn's work, predominantly a founder of the godfather of geriatric psychiatry, sort of the founder of people performance agent. He discovered that as we move into our 50s, there are because of shifts in the brain, we gain access to what I call a suite of cognitive superpowers. Whole new levels of intelligence open up, stuff we cannot get access to before, ways of thinking, ways of abstract, reasoning problem solvent, you get whole new levels of creativity as well, including divergent thinking that's the outside the box really creative stuff that gets amplified wisdom, which is a very specific neurobiological trait also gets amplified and empathy. So all these things happen. Now back to the flow thing, if you want to stave off cognitive decline, you need to develop two things, expertise and wisdom. And why is this? It's because the brain continues to produce neurons until we die. In fact, parts of the brain will produce 700 new neurons a day up until very, very late in life. That keeps, that keeps going. If you do all the right stuff, where those neurons are matter. So a lot of the insults of aging are very local, right? This part of the brain gets, we write these kinds of shifts happen. And most of the damages in the prefrontal cortex, the newest structure from evolution perspective in the brain is where most of the damage takes place. It's the first door road. Stuff that's older and deep in our brain. That stays, stays there. So you, how do you preserve the prefrontal cortex? Wisdom and expertise. Wisdom and expertise create very diverse neural networks. They're not localized in one part of the brain. They're all over the brain. So you're birthing a lot of new neurons and you're creating a lot of redundant diverse networks. And there's, so there's crazy studies on this over and over and over. The most famous is probably the sisters of Notre Dame. And this is one of the places this research started back in the 90s. This is a group of sisters and they were, they were very interested. They're very first of all, they're very into education. So they like this research. And they were very interested in peak performance aging or successful aging. So they like this research. And it's a very cohesive group, right? They all live the same. They eat the same foods. They do the same thing. So really good for science. And they all donated their brains to science for autopsy after death. So bonus. And they started giving them cognitive tests and physical tests, you know, every year over long stretches of time. And what they started to realize is that sisters were dying. And when they'd autopsy their brain, they would find brains were fully dimensioned Alzheimer's like bangles and plaques. And the brain was totally decayed. And yet during life, they showed no symptoms of Alzheimer's and dementia. None. And they were performing on these cognitive tests incredibly well. And there's this study gets repeated over and over and over. Again, we see the same thing again and again. But it's when we start to figure out that certain lifestyle things, sisters got a lot of exercise. So that's the foundation of oh, wait, exercise is neuroprotective against cognitive. That's it starts sort of there. But it's wisdom and expertise that is really what you see. More than anything else, the sisters are deeply committed to life long learning. It's baked into what they do in the world. They're teachers. They're educators. And it's how they live. So like they're building up expertise all the time. What's the difference between wisdom and expertise? Wisdom is like expertise. All this stuff you're learning consciously. I'm reading a book. I'm learning algebra wisdom is the oh, I'm watching the group. And it seems like there's these nonverbal, you know, social dynamics that you're observing. You can't quite name, but you're learning what they are and how to figure them out and emotional intelligence stuff. That's all the wisdom stuff. And it's different parts of the brain that do it. So those things are neuroprotective as cognitive decline. Here's what matters for flow. When we move into flow, one, learning is massively amplified. US Department of Defense found that soldiers in flow learn 240 to 500 percent faster than normal. So you get a huge spike in learning and flow naturally for neurobiological reasons. We're going to talk about it expands empathy. Our ability to see things from other people's perspective expands naturally in flow. This is the foundation of like that wisdom we were talking about. So flow amplifies expertise. Our ability to get better at things and is neuroprotective and it amplifies wisdom. Here's where let me tie this all together in a bun for you. So when I said earlier, chick sent me a high work on flow and as it started the adult development and flow is how we become adults because when we're in flow, we can only get into flow by using our skills to the utmost. You got to like whatever you know, you're going to push on it and push it to the edge of your abilities. You're going to be a little outside your comfort zone, right? What happens when we do that? We grow. We learn. We get we come back from that more adaptive, more complex, more wisdom, more expertise. So what's interesting is flow is, I don't, chick sent me a high seem to argue that flow is the only driver of adult development in the end. He came to that conclusion and I'm not sure I'm going to take, I'm going to say it's the one of the major drivers of adult development. But what's cool about it is it doesn't only teach us how to become better adults and help us grow up. It actually helps us become great later in life because it protects us against the ravages of age. So that those are, I mean there and I can go, I can sort of go on and on and on about flow and adult development. But I'm going to shut up now just so I don't talk your head off. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.