Tag Archives: Mind Magic

Flow Genes

Volume 3, Issue 9

Thanks to Steven Kotler and the Flow Research Collective for their metaphor of the Human Genome Project as the kind of thing we need even more to facilitate Flow state. Now that thousands and maybe millions of us are experimenting and getting into this state, it has to become a world priority like the environment and the economy. In fact it can solve those and any other challenges we face, whereas the reverse is not true. If we start with the symptoms we will never reach the cure. Flow is where it all starts. Flow means better decision making and more creativity. If that is not exactly what we need, what is?

Love you say? Glad you added that. Love is actually the best pathway for the average person to reach Flow most quickly. Loving communication is the way for the masses to realize Flow state in our lifetimes — maybe the only way.

It starts with people we already love. We find Flow ways to communicate with them. They notice and appreciate the difference. We notice the stuck keys inside us that we get past to allow us to talk lovingly about another’s stuck keys in a way that feels good to everyone.

Getting back to the metaphor of genes, what could Steven and his colleagues mean? If I take it to mean that brain states and methods are the two ways of looking at the components within Flow, this metaphor has objective and subjective levels:

Understanding what goes on in the brain in getting to and through Flow and the post-period and recycle — this is the scientific objective level that corresponds most exactly to the Human Genome Project, which decoded what information each gene carries;
Understanding the methods we can each use to take advantage of this prior scientific understanding, where each method is a gene — this is the subjective interior method each individual takes by acts of will or automatically in order to experience Flow and maximize it. The subjective is operationally more important to us than the objective level, because it is only through willful inner experience shaping that we exercise any power to bring on one state or another.

The Human Effectiveness Institute has discovered numerous genes/methods for bringing on Flow more often. The Aha! Cultivation process is one of them that the Institute shares with Steven Kotler and his colleagues, who revealed only that one method at the ARF conference; we assume there are more methods/genes in the Flow Genome Project so far, and more to be discovered by cross-fertilization with other researchers like ourselves. Aha! is only one way in which Flow can be experienced — other methods get you there too. The book Mind Magic is a compendium of Flow genes/methods, not exhaustive of the entire long list. The book is focused on stimulating Flow state through the Observer state by the use of “inner head” language, which some see as poetry, to evoke moods that evidently change brain chemistry and shift energy patterns within different brain parts.

Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi who coined Flow, lists quite a few genes/methods such as the balance between skills and challenges, the autotelic enjoyment-driven way the individual comes to the game or métier, and a number of other great insights available in his books.

Daniel Goleman has also contributed genes/methods to the list. His dictum that a person needs about 10,000 hours of practice in something in order to become a candidate for Flow in that endeavor is illuminating. This is a gene that can guide us to selection of activities in which to attempt and monitor our success. Anything that guides the individual to use specific methods that actually work to get to Flow is a gene in the way I take, or perhaps take liberties with, the seminal metaphor Steven and the Flow Genome Project have cooked up.

The work of many people led to the discovery of the gene of previsualization, which is widely recognized to increase Flow.

The genes that our work has contributed include, to mention a few top of mind:

Getting to the Flow state by getting to the Observer state first
Thinking without words
Burning out attachments
Vigilant action to vitiate the power of distraction
Unconditional Omnidirectional Love
Fun
Can-do attitude

I hope that someday when all the genes have been listed someone will organize them into something that looks like a space age version of Mendeleyev’s (periodic) table of the elements so we can see the relationships among the genes/methods/brain states and thereby have a better understanding of how each method works to change the brain state.

Best to all,

Bill

Flow State — How Can I Know It Will Work for Me?

Flow Goes Mainstream

3 Replies

Volume 3, Issue 6

March 18-20, 2013 — the Advertising Research Foundation Re:THINK 2013 program sports a lunchtime speaker, Steven Kotler, two days in a row on the subject of Flow state (the Zone) and how to instill it in business. Bravo! (See Review next issue.)

I’d like to think that my blogs on Flow, and the (somewhat) Flow-inducing ARF University Masters Level Playshop with Richard Zackon, helped create a conducive atmosphere for ARF to put Flow state high on their new program. Hopefully it will stay there over time as Flow state means better decisions, more creativity, more effectiveness, and significantly, it means authenticity, not the Mask of the Advertiser, as Nick Pisacane calls it. Advertising itself as well as its research will benefit more from Flow state than by any technology.

Authenticity is the key attribute most necessary in the new social era of media advertising and persuasive communications. In Flow state, one has no egoistic tugs on the essence of the idea emanating. One is not self-protective (except in martial arts settings). Authentic feelings are expressed and this is what the public thirsts for — both to receive authentic messaging and to evoke it from inside by immersion in a world of role models acting genuinely. This is the promise of the future society powered by Flow state.

President Obama is initiating a federal research program into the brain and consciousness. Flow state for the military and government is one motivating driver. I began to pepper US presidents with this idea 40 years ago and have run workshops for top US military officers to teach the inner “tricks” of Flow.

Our work at the Human Effectiveness Institute is focused on the experiential handles. What goes on within the subjective frame that can be guided? Richard Davidson and Daniel Goleman, my old friends and partners, lead the world in both understanding the psychology of consciousness at the brain level, and in disseminating the information so that everyone can benefit. I see our workstreams as complementary. Theirs is objective and mine subjective, the way consciousness is experienced from the inside and what controls we have over it, which are largely subtle.

Dan in his great book The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights (reviewed here recently) uses the term “Self-Management” to describe one of the pillars of Emotional Intelligence, a quotient conducive to Flow. We would probably use the word “guidance” in place of “management” in that managing is not as encompassing as guiding. Freud in Civilization and its Discontents calls the ego or secondary principle the “manager”, arising from the id or primary principle, which is who we are at first. In Freud’s view both the id and ego persist together as aspects of the self, joined by the impounded incoming other-directedness of the superego or conscience.

Zen is the art and science of making the ego and superego transparent (though still present) so the self is expressing the id in a way that is in Flow with the Tao or universal consciousness. Zen’s contempt for words and concepts neuter the ego, which depends on the intellect, concepts and words for its management style. In Mind Magic, the section on Mindquiet provides a simplified step-by-step approach to removing the over-emphasis on words.

In his Maximize your “Aha!” Moment blog post recently (see also my post Set Yourself up to Cultivate “Aha!” Moments from Sept 27, 2012) Dan points out that there is a burst of gamma activity (signaling “far-flung brain cells connecting in a new neural network”) in the neocortical right temporal lobe 300 milliseconds before an “Aha!” moment. He also describes that part of the brain as being the part that gets jokes: “It understands the language of the unconscious… the language of poems, of art, of myth. It’s the logic of dreams where anything goes and the impossible is possible.”

That’s a good description of the inner-mind language used throughout Mind Magic, which is designed to be a stimulus to bring the reader into the Observer state as an ideal Launchpad for Flow. We hypothesize that the subjective self is more centered in the right temporal lobe than the left during Observer state, as sensed by the natural ease with which one thinks wordlessly — whereas the left temporal is the “Worder” as I call it. Both right and left temporal areas have active insight collection capabilities, the left seeing differences analytically through abstraction and symbols (e.g. words), and the right seeing connections holistically in feeling/images.

Main takeaway: we need tools we can use to get into Flow and these must speak in layperson terms. Dissecting the physical brain processes underlying Flow is needed too, but in itself does not replace tools that the layperson can apply to get into Flow — which is the purpose of our work. More on Flow Goes Mainstream in the next post.

Best to all,

Bill

Entering Flow State by Koan

Leave a reply

Volume 3, Issue 2

Continuing on our theme from the prior post, we are sharing nuances of mind that can act as triggers to two successively higher states of consciousness, Observer and Flow. The assumption is that one is presently in what is known here in the West as “normal waking consciousness”, what we call Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) in our theory of Holosentience.

In the last post we quoted Zen masters dismissive of mindfulness. We explained that to get from EOP to Observer state one needs to strive for mindfulness, but to get from Observer state to Flow state (the Zone), one must be in natural mind sans intellectual overlays. The over-thinker is turned off. Language is not a prerequisite for anything. Wholeness is. Subject-object lens is off. There is no separation. Abstraction is somewhere offstage.

We are sharing these mental techniques as part of a noble bargain. If they work, you will naturally take on more and share as you wish. Many other similar experiential techniques and insights can be found in my book MIND MAGIC and will continue to be offered in this blog.

In the next post I will share some childhood experiences as useful to illustrate making mental transitions willfully.

Let’s lead into that story with an experiment in Zen. Most of us are familiar with one technique used in Zen, the koan, a verbal construct used to jog the psyche out of its EOP trance. Our theory as to how a koan works is this: something that makes no sense forces you to stop and NOT think in language, to back out of the EOP lens into original consciousness (or natural mind). Because language is not working it is instinctively dropped for the moment. Just as you instinctively stop trying to use a hand that has fallen asleep until it wakes up again.

This can be experienced. Remove yourself from all distraction. Concentrate on your breath and keep your eyes on whatever is in front of you. Then repeat to yourself the following: “I have no right to play God, even though I have every right to play God.” Obviously you will need to pre-memorize this or you won’t be able to keep looking straight forward. However, don’t spend any time thinking about the meaning of it — for the moment, you are concentrating on what you see and experience subtly when you first put your mind on this.

What you may see (and in future experiments of this sort will gain the knack for seeing) is that in one moment you were in a pretty normal state for you, and in the next moment your mind is naturally quiet and your senses are highly attuned. You are not easily distracted, you feel centered and aware, balanced and unafraid. Your attention is on everything around you and there is no obsessive stream of internal dialog. You are making no effort toward this whatsoever, you are not striving. It is doing itself naturally. When ideas pop into your mind you notice that they are unusually insightful and self-evidently important to your life.

You may at that point be transitioning in and out of Flow, with stability in Observer state. If negative emotion arises, take it as a signal of EOP resumption and see what comes naturally for you to stay above this weather. Direct attention to the causes of the negative emotion as if experiencing it for the first time. Mine and record insights into your (e)journal and tweet those of potential utility to all, if you’re into such things (journaling is provably useful, e or otherwise).

In next post, stripping my childhood bare. 🙂

A Daniel Goleman Must-Read

When I first met them a long time ago, Daniel Goleman, Richie Davidson and I formed a partnership called PRM and did brainwave research together in the media business. They have gone on to fame in their respective fields of psychology and neuroscience. I am belatedly catching up on their massive output over the years. This is a first installment, look for more in future posts.

Dan’s concise and powerful 2011 book The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights is packed with information conducive to Observer and Flow states. Drawing on the work of his long-term collaborator Richie Davidson among many others at the forefront of brain science, Dan does his reliable tour de force condensing the cutting edge view of the best and brightest ideas in psychology.

We are heartened that my published intuitions of the last decades are increasingly supported by real science. Emergency Oversimplification Procedure in my terminology does in fact exist as “chronic overwhelm” in today’s scientific parlance. The EOP interaction between the prefrontal cortex and limbic system, which I postulated in the theory of Holosentience (and was possibly obvious to others), turns out to be accurate.

What I felt from the inside and struggled to communicate in language, describing inner experience so that others could take similar control of themselves — what Dan calls self-management and self-mastery, one of the four key components of emotional intelligence — is now being described scientifically from the outside as well. Looking at both sides, inner/experiential/phenomenological and outer/scientific, contributes to self-mastery more than seeing only one side of the story — or neither side of the story, as in the case of the unenlightened, who by their actions are crying out for enlightenment but don’t know they are doing so.

Best to all,
Bill