Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - The Science of Achieving Anything | Steven Kotler - 13 Books & Peak Performance Expert

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Lessons - The Science of Achieving Anything | Steven Kotler - 13 Books & Peak Performance Expert · Success Story with Scott Clary

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