ANNOUNCEMENT
GOING ALL-IN ON FLOW RESEARCH (MAJOR FRC UPDATE)
Five years ago, my mission was straightforward: I wanted to use the tools of neurobiology to decode the science of flow. If I had any advantage here, it was simply that my approach was unique at the time.
I started my career with the good fortune to be a journalist covering brain science at a time when brain science was exploding. The job gave me access to top minds and a wide view of the field’s disparate elements—especially those elements that might be relevant to flow and human performance.
On the inside, neuroscience, like every field, is balkanized and insular. The folks who study neurochemistry rarely talk to the computational neuroscientists who study networks who rarely talk to the neuroanatomists who study individual clusters of neurons or the neurosurgeons who try to repair the damage to individual clusters of neurons after something has gone catastrophically wrong, etcetera.
My secret plan was to unite the tribes. I wanted a cross-disciplinary collaboration that pulled in at least one of the world’s top experts in every area with a high probability of being crucial to an understanding of flow. Call it, a moonshot for flow science. Along with my then-research assistant and now co-founder Rian Doris, this is exactly what we did.
In 2019, we launched Flow Research Collective. We went all in on our moonshot. Yet, what began as a research institute to decode flow, evolved into something wild and unexpected. To fund our work, we began training people in the science of flow and how to use that science to skyrocket performance.
The response was incredible. In five years, we’ve trained people in over 160 countries and 28 industries. We worked with everyone from professional and Olympic athletes to members of the US Special Forces to entrepreneurial unicorns and executive leaders from across the Fortune 500. We have witnessed organizations like Meta, Audi, Accenture, the San Francisco Police department, and the US Air Force, transform their performance using our methods.
Over 15,000 people have taken our core flow training, Zero-to-Dangerous. As a result—and we have the data to prove this—we transformed flow from a rare and random experience into a reliable and repeatable process.
Meanwhile, research took a little longer to find its feet. In 2019, we did early and exciting work on the relationship between flow and psychedelics, flow and THC, and flow and Formula One racing—but none of that work has yet to be completed. Our first major success was a study on Flow and Business with Deloitte (you can find it on our website), which came out in 2020.
Since then, Rian Doris built on this foundation to become one of the world’s leading experts on organizational peak performance, but the three or four novel findings about flow and business uncovered in that paper… they’re still in need of follow-up research.
The year 2020 was also when Steven and FRC Chief Science Officer Michael Mannino started down the path of inquiry that led to our first major paper, The First Few Seconds of Flow, which was written in collaboration with the father of social neuroscience, Scott Kelso, and published in one of the field’s leading journals, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. The paper examined what happens in the brain as we transition into a flow state. It also makes a strong case that flow can override trauma and stave off PTSD, and identifies six novel neuronal markers that arise as the brain transitions into flow—all tantalizing targets for further research.
We followed that paper with another on the relationship between flow and caffeine, which also ran in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, and marked the very time a substance has been identified as a legitimate flow hack. Next, we worked on neurophysiology and how mindset impacts exercise tolerance, followed by an experiment in peak performance aging, followed by a white paper on Flow and Longevity that became a book on peak performance aging, Gnar Country, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Yet, this is only the visible tip of the research iceberg.
In the next six months, we are about to drop six additional papers. Many are co-written with neuroscience legends like Karl Friston, Gyrui Buzsaki and Andrew Nebwerg. Some have the potential to be landmark contributions, including the first examination of the neurodynamics of intuition, the first inquiry into the relationship between flow and intuition, the first proof that prayer amplifies flow-proneness, the first paper to show that information processing in flow is significantly amplified, and, wait for it, the very first textbook ever written on applied performance neuroscience, which is the field that all of us together have helped to form.
Yet all of this breakthrough success has led us to difficult decision. In order to finish what we’ve started on the science side of this equation, as of November 16th, 2024, the Flow Research Collective will be returning to its roots—focusing exclusively on research and continuing to serve our existing clients.
We’ll also continue to inform you about our research progress in this newsletter and on our podcast, but after November, our peak performance training will no longer be available to the public. Our goal was to advance the science of flow and to bring this work into the heart of the mainstream.
Thanks to all of you, especially those we’ve had the privilege to train directly or the extreme privilege to train right now, as members of our final training class, we have gone so much farther faster than we ever dreamed. It's been an honor.
Steven Kotler and Rian Doris
