That’s not the only brain change that’s going on when you achieve flow, though. Risk-taking goes up and we feel amazing.” “And as a result, we feel this liberation… We are finally getting out of our own way. “This is the part of the brain that houses your inner critic, that nagging, defeatist, always-on voice in your head.” And depending on what you’re doing, different parts of the prefrontal cortex get affected: “in flow one of the most prominent examples is the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex,” Kotler explained. “It was found in schizophrenics and drug addicts.”īut as research continued, it was found that this altered state turned up in all kinds of situations: when you’re dreaming, meditating, getting lost in music, or, yes, getting high. Put like that, entering a state of flow doesn’t sound like a particularly good thing – and indeed, when transient hypofrontality was first observed back in the 1990s, “it had a very negative connotation,” Kotler agreed. That’s the part of your brain responsible for the highest-order cognitive abilities, like planning, decision making, working memory, personality expression, social behavior, and speech and language control – in fact, it’s such an important part of the brain that it’s sometimes been thought of as what separates us from other great apes. In technical terms, this is known as transient hypofrontality – aka the temporary reduction in prefrontal cortex activity.
When parts of it start to wink out, we can no longer separate past from present from future and we’re plunged into what researchers call the deep now.”
“For example, why does time pass so strangely in flow? Because David Eagleman discovered that time is calculated all over the prefrontal cortex. “In flow, parts of the brain aren’t becoming more hyperactive, they’re actually slowing down, shutting down,” Kotler said. And given we’re talking about a state of mind defined as improving our focus and productivity, those changes might not be quite what you were expecting.
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