Developing Technology to Induce Flow

Science Friday is supported by MathWorks, creator of MatLab and simulink software for technical computing and model based design, MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks dot com dot WNYC stududios is supported by the New York Hall of Science, a hands on science center and learning lab in Queens Welcoming New Yorkers to explore, play, watch the World Cup, and more tickets at nysci. orgot Science Friday is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet. Drivers who switch and save with progressive save over nine hundred dollars on average Hop over to progressive.ot comot answer some questions, and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by. In fact, ninety nine percent of their auto customers earn at least one discount Visit progressive dot com and see if you can enjoy a little cash back. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average twelve month savings of nine hundred forty six dollars by new customers surveyed who saved with progressive between june twenty twenty four and may twenty twenty five potential savings will vary Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today we're revisiting this conversation that I think about all the time. It's about a musical mystery, and I hope you enjoy it This is a farmhouse. If you don't recognize the tune because you're too young or too old or Too cool. No worries, man. It's Fmhouse by the band Fish. and tens of millions have streamed it and countless others have vibed to it during the band's legendary live shows Fish has stored for over forty years, and one of the draws of their performances, which can go on for many hours, are finding these moments of flow That feeling of being locked in or in the zone. musicians and artists talk about it, athletes do too, you've probably experienced it For Fish, it's when the band members sync up in an improvised jam and find new musical ideas in real time Fish fans live for these transcendent moments, but so do fish' musicians The band is flow seeking and flow obsessed to the point that Mike Gordon, the band's basassist, is funding scientific research to better understand flow state Mike is here to tell us about this work, along with his research collaborator, neuroscientist, Dr. Greg Applebaum from the University of California, San Diego Great to have you both here Thanks for having us Pleasure Okay, Mike, when you in the band talk about flow state, is that the language that you use? What do you call it? Huh, Well, that's a good question because It's inherently hard to talk about. It's intangible. So we're already out of the gates with a problem And no, I don't think Fow state would be the words in the band dialect. But And well first, they would say, okay, we were really hooking up Be the thought is that music is a communication and improvisation, especially all communicating between us and the audience, you know, writing on the energy. but So hooking up is really important. and it doesn't happen readily. You have to cultivate it and Train yourself to do it, to listen more than your You know, like in a conversation, if you only listen to yourself, then it's going to be a very bad conversation We've had those on Science Friday here and there. I bet yeah. Oops. But what we're talking about bigigger than just communication for me. We're talking about a religious experience transcendence, self actualization Whatever you want to call it, that can't be put into words. We don't attempt those grandiose words. Instead, we'll say that jam was amazing. Yeah, we'll say we were so hooked up. And it's incredible that we still love each other after forty years and that we get to do this as a job. All this will be said But in terms of the dream states that I get into and feel? No, I don't think we use that language. Why not? Wh is it just that it's too overwhelming to sort of call it what it feels like? I don't think it's too overwhelming. I guess, even though we're having the most inccredible Brotherly experience ever It's still too personal because The way that each person perceives music, whether it's one of these peak experiences or whether it's a song that makes that strums your heart strings. It's really different for every person. I'm probably leaving out a whole bunch of things Like someone might say, oh during that jm, I I actually cried or I might say Oh, during that gym There were about five minutes I forgot to swallow And for me, that's a sign that I'm really in it by It's different for each person. so I don't know. I think it would start to It would minimize it because words wouldn't do it justice anyway. It's a funny question. It's funny question to try to answer. Does the music change when the band s up And you have an example you might walk us through Yeah, I mean, the music It changes in so many ways, you wouldn't even believe it. whether we're hooking up or not, it changes. For me, it's such a different band from night to night. I tell people, if I have friends who've never seen the band, I say, Well, you're gonna have to come two or three nights because one night will be a jazz band, and one night it will be a funky dance band. and one night will be this sort of soul searching religious experience, and one it will just sound terrible. Not really. I mean, there's a certain benchmark Um So then within the same kind of jam, we really don't know where it's going to go. And so I'd like to make an example of this One song is Bathtub Gin. we've been playing it forever. So just to talk over it, so what you're hearing now is the song part is over. We're less than half theway through the song or you know we're at the beginning of the jam part, and we've migrated from one chord to another. So we've gone from a bluesy chord to what they would call the relative major, a major chord and What's significant for me and this is sort of the most important part is that we're playing notes and patterns, not for the sake of playing notes and patterns. We're playing notes and patterns for the sake of getting into a dream state and transporting our consciousness in ways that we've learned to cultivate over the years just by doing it. and the dream state starts to starts to flow. And then what happens after a while, we're on this chord and for those who know music, we lower the seventh and make it a dominant seventh. so one note is changing in the chord And it becomes gluesy. And then eventually what we're gonna do is actually go to a whole new chord that is the note of that flat seventh. So we're migrating to a third or fourth new chord But while this is going on Everyone changes their approach And then people are experimenting with their effects pedals, reverse reverb And then at the very end it just gets really high energy and nothing's held back and it's just raging energy Is this song a prime example of the band in a flow state For me it is, yes, because it's not performing. It's not trying to be cool.'s not trying to play something cool that my bass teacher I used to have would like. It's just trying to get into yeah, the flow state Greg, you've been working on this for years now. Can we detect flow state? Are there sort of biosignatures of flow think so. it's a very hard question. We're certainly experiencing flow and we're certainly measuring it The real challenging questions are can we reliably measure it and can we reliably do anything with it But can we measure it? A there can you look at my brain and say Oh Yes, you're in a flow state I think the first thing to do is start with the behavior. So the real trick is defining when the artist or artists are in flow And it's really like a three pronged approach where we could ask the audience and we could ask Mike in real time while he's performing. We have a pedal. He could indicate when he feels like he's flowing And then we have kind of our secret weapon, which is Mike's longtime producer and sound engineer, Jared Slomoff whose job is to find those moments of musical articulation that are amazing that are the flow. And with this three pronged approach we could then say, okay, this part of the song is flow for M or this part of the song is flow for the whole band And then once we've defined that behavior, we can look back at the brain states and lo and behold the brain acts a little bit differently during flow than non flow Craig, so do I have this right? Step one is defining in real time. when someone's in a flow state And then after you can do that, you can look at people's brains and see what's happening there or look at other, you know, Bios signignatures of flow. Exactly Okay, dudes, we gott to take a quick break, but don't go away because when we come back, The details of Mike's brain on fllow. Don't go away Musical flow state different from flow in other activities like sports, for example. There are probably similarities and differences. But when we look kind of across the literature I The description that Mike gave is actually very consistent with our interpretation of what the brain and the physiology is doing White we think is happening during flow is a reduction in the frontal cortex, the part of the brain that's doing executive functioning. So a reduction in frontal activity in the brain and more activity in the sensory systems. and a change in the autonomic nervous systems. You might connect more with deeper respiration I mean all of this is kind of what Mike was talking about, which is kind of a reduction in conscious effort time might pass differently, you kind of lose your sense of self consciousness. And there are brain signals and physiological signals that seem to go along with this. We seem to see them in music, but we also see them in other activities like athletics. We have a project right now when surgeons are doing surgery well, we have these kind of brain signals that are consistent with hypo frrontality. So there are commonalities and it's We're seeing with Mike too Hm, Mike, does that description match what it feels like for you, sort of loss of sense of time? How would you put it into words Yeah, I mean You know, there're a handful of classical composers who have said that they do their best work when they're half asleep. mayaybe just waking up in the morning or just about to fall asleep at night or meditating And that's what I find playing music that It's not that I'm asleep, it's almost like I can conjure up and feel and see images from my nightdreams while I'm in the middle of the jam on stage with all the people around Can you get into a flow state with a bunch of wires attached to you Yeah, I feel like I can get into a flow state and even stay in it while there's still an observer in the back of my brain figure kind of keeping track. So I think the flow state is more What's the word malleable than we realize. but That doesn't mean it's easy to cultivate and to get there in the first place. Just to unpack a little bit about our ability to detect a physiological signal, We spent a lot of time in the early days wiring mic up and really seeing what the signal to noise is in different contexts when he's sitting very, very still, when he's Sitting but not still when he's standing and still, when he's standing and moving around. Signal to noise of what of the brain waves that we're recording and the heart rate measurements that we're recording. And versus the background noise, which is just maybe static from your muscles Exactly, etc. And our ability to kind of eesdrop on the brain. And without being too revealing about Mike, He's got a really robust brain activity. and we can see very clearly that he has really big alpha waves and Is that a compliment? I take it as a compliment. It's given as a compliment. It doesn't mean that I'm the alpha male or anything like that I don't know what an alpha wave is. Yeah. So Brain is Oscillating this firing neurons to firing, communicating back and forth. and we can capture this kind of rhythmic patterns in different frequencies. and we name them with Greek letters, delta, theta, beta, gamma, alpha. And alpha is the rhythm that's around ten hererttz. And the way we think about alpha is that it's part of what we call the default mode network So when the rest of the brain is really active and you're heavily, heavily thinking, alpha is generally low But when you go into a more relaxed state, a more zoned out state Your default mode becomes more active and the rest of the brain, the active cognition parts of the brain become more suppressed. And so with Mike, we can see that really clearly in real time in the EG. And that's allowed us to be able to do a lot of things that we want to do When did you go from you know, being a fan of fllow sort of experiencing it as a musician to wanting to team up with brain scientists like Greg to understand it on a scientific level Yeah. well I project person and I just came up with this idea as I want to make a thing, which we're calling Zenbox X EN BOX they could use it maybe you know, a musician or a singer and use biofeedback to get into a flow state. And then the incredible neurologists like Greg and some others came and the research came because we needed to figure out how to translate what's going on into some usable information. So you want to make a device that induces flow or helps you Prolong your flow state Yeah, I mean, honestly I feel like I don't know that I'm making the device for me. I want to make it to share it with the world. It's also just an excuse to talk about all this stuff by having the device So the idea leads to the device, but then the device will lead to the ideas It's it's sort of like, u symbol of the experience that I would like to make in a tangible form. Yeahes. so S of the really challenging and interesting questions have been Can we measure flow? And we talked about how we do that? And now the questions are evolving to can we do with these measurements And Mike described the music as communication with the band, communication with the audience, and now we're introducing this communication with our measurement devices and Where we're going with this right now is to be able to tune these devices so that when Mike either enters a flow state or enters a state that we could define in the measurement devices, like more alpha activity, for example. That can be translated into a sound effect or a lighting effect or some S type of musical pedal that he could operate with his brainwaves So you can be in your flow state, but there can be effects that the that sort of helps, you know, that cues the audience to. Well the effects help get in the flow state. The idea for me is to make it autopilot And yeah, it wouldd be interesting to try to turn on and off lights and things, but I think What happens that's magical? is when the muse plays the music rather than the musician. So thats that's my ultimate goal you know just to say Early on, some peak experiences playing music with these guys in the middle of an improvisation inspired me to write years of journals just to figure out what happened on one particular night or another another night because It's such differentifferent level of being human doesn't feel cosmic or you know, out in the middle of Lalaand, it feels just like going for a walk with a friend or doing the dishes. It's like being more myself than I've ever been before, which is why Maslow talks about se self actualization. And I think it could happen, you know, if someone were with a loved one watching a sunset or, you know singing music with her daughter.