← Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Lessons - The Science of Achieving Anything | Steven Kotler - 13 Books & Peak Performance Expert
00:12:03
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- [00:00]
A
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 narcotics, like in your new book, you actually speak about in the later half of someone's life, how to maintain an optimized performance. So narc 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 like accelerating in physical tasks? Is there, is there some connection? Are these two.
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B
Yeah, let me, so let me, let me pull back, give you a big picture statement about we'll just stay on cognitive peak performance for a second and then I'll Let me move into the. Answer your question. So flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. That is not an understatement, right? 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, is quite simply this. When we say peak performance, I 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 of each of those categories, there's a four big long list of skills, but there's a category under the heading of motivation, and this is extrinsic motivation. Stuff will work hard in the world to get intrinsic motivation, passion, purpose, autonomy and goals, and grit. So that's all under the heading of motivation. There's a similar subset of stuff under the heading of learning, creativity and flow. And the way to think about these categories is when you face any challenge, motivation gets you into the game. Learning allows you to keep on playing, continue to play. Creativity allows you to steer. And especially if you're interested in the kind of stuff that the work I do on impossible. How do you get there? Where is it exactly? Challenges or creative challenges you need the creativity to steer. And finally flow, which is optimal performance, is how we hardwire all of these. Or excuse me, is how we turbo boost all of these results sort of beyond all reasonable expectations. That's on the cognitive side. Now on physical side, flow does it deadens pain, it amplifies strength. Fast twitch, muscle response. A couple other things get amplified inflow. So there's a big physical impact as well. But the bigger boost is cognitive. Now, you asked a peak performance aging question. I have been studying peak performance aging for almost as long as I've been studying flow for two reasons. One, Mihalyikszentmihalyi. Who's the godfather of flow psychology? Everybody knows. Oh, he 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 pass, 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 whiz bang, genetic engineering stuff. That's not what we do. We take, 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. And 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 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 slide. 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 it, all the stuff we used to think fades away over time. There's nothing we can do about it. We now know they all use it or lose its skills. So on the physical side and on the mental side, if we properly train all of these skills, we can hold on to them and even advance them much later in life than anybody thought fast will. Now, you asked a question about flow. So let me talk about.
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A
Now we're tying it all together.
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B
I love it. Yeah. So let me bring it back to your original question. Cognitive decline is a great place to talk about this. So we used to believe cognitive decline is inevitable. We're going to get Alzheimer's, we're going to get dementia and there's nothing we can do about it. And certain aspects of there are 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.
- [05:58]
A
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- [06:50]
B
So yes, there are changes in brain function. We also, and this is Gene Cone's work predominantly founder of the godfather of geriatric psychiatry and sort of the founder of peak performance aging. 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 could not get access to before. Ways of thinking, ways of abstract reasoning, problem solving. You get whole new levels of creativity as well, including divergent thinking. That's the outside the box. We 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 late in life. That keeps. That keeps going. If you do all the right stuff where those norm are matter. So a lot of the insults of aging are very local, right? This part of the brain gets weak, right? These kinds of shifts happen. And most of the damage is in the prefrontal cortex. The newest structure, from an evolutionary perspective in the brain is where most of the damage takes place. It's the first to erode 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 very interested. First of all, they're very into education. So they liked this research and they were very interested in peak performance aging or successful agents or 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 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 full of dementia and Alzheimer's, like pang hells 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 Collier tests incredibly well. And 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 club that 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 lifelong 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 the 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 non verbal, 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 in emotional intelligence stuff. That's all the wisdom stuff. And it's different parts of the brain that do it. So those things are neural protective against cognitive decline. Here's what matters for flow. When we move into Flow 1, learning is massively amplified. US Department of Defense found that soldiers in Flow learn 240 to 500% faster than normal. So you get a huge spike in learning and flow naturally for neurobiological reasons. We can 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 high, worked on flow, and it's at the start of the adult development. And flow is how we become adults. It's 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, more wisdom, more expertise. So what's interesting is flow is. I don't. Csikszentmihalyi seemed 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 gonna take. I go, I would say it's 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.
- [12:35]
A
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 See you in the next one.