Watching unprecedented achievements in gymnastics, sports, research, space travel, technology and artificial intelligence (AI), you recognize things once thought unbelievable are now, in fact, believable.
What we witnessed five years ago as ‘peak performance’ is now challenged by individuals elevating established records and at a younger age.
Writer and researcher Steven Kotler believes we’re all capable of so much more than we know.
In his discussion on how to use ‘flow state to do the impossible,’ from his book “The Art of Impossible,” he refers to the Bannister Effect.
“This is the idea in psychology and neuroscience that you have to believe something is possible before it becomes possible.
"It’s named after Roger Bannister; he was the first person to run a sub four-minute mile and before he did it, this was a great, crazy, impossible (idea).
"Bannister was the first man to break the legendary four-minute barrier running a mile in three minutes, fifty-nine and four tenth seconds.
"Everyone believed someone could die from it. A month later, the record was broken, then broken again and again.”
How do these impossible feats happen?
The physical requirements were the same but somehow the mental concept is being reframed.
The impossible becomes possible.
Kotler notes the brain thinks in pictures and starts to work out what achieving the impossible would look like.
How would we do it?
How would we train for it?
Ultimately the impossible becomes probable.
Kotler essentially says, “There is a very, very, very tight coupling between our psychology and our physiology.
"If we can pre-wire our brain with the patterns we’re going to perform ahead of time and actually start to perform those patterns, you’ll get dopamine from pattern matching and may help drive us into flow.
"Flow is an optimized state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.”
This mental framing dates back historically to discussions by Goethe, Nietzsche, and William James, but Kotler suggests that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi became known as the ‘godfather of flow psychology.’ (Imagine little Mihaly learning to spell his name as a boy.
Talk about a serious mental construct.)
From Mihaly’s studies taking him all over the world, Kotler says the people he interviewed always said the same thing, “When I’m at my best, when I’m feeling my best, when I’m performing my best, I’m in this altered state of consciousness where every action and every decision I make seems to flow effortlessly, perfectly, seamlessly from the last.
This is where the term flow comes from.”
How do you know when someone is in the flow?
Kotler says psychologists will ask questions like: Was there complete concentration on the task at hand?
Was there a merger of action and awareness?
Did self vanish?
Did time dilate?
We’ve all experienced moments in our life where we are so engrossed in an action that we lose track of time, and all our cylinders are running.
All things are possible.
In other words, bottle this process and watch it take you to new heights.
