[This lesson is drawn from the Practice unit of GuitarOS]
In life or death situations, your brain literally shuts down any parts of your body it doesn’t need to keep the rest of you alive.
If you’re starving, it stops sending resources to your reproductive system.
If you’re freezing to death, it’s willing to sacrifice your extremities to save the core.
In dangerous situations, it shuts down the parts of your brain concerned with self-consciousness, with time passing, with impulse control, with self-monitoring.
Ever narrowly avoid a car accident, and feel like time has slowed down? You experience those brief seconds like an hour-long movie.
Your brain, in trying to keep you alive, funneled resources away from the part of your brain that’s in charge of sensing the passing of time.
Conversely, if you think back to the best moments of your music-playing life, you probably felt time stretch in the opposite direction.
You took the stage, or headed to the basement with your teenage friends. What felt like minutes later, your two-hour show was over, or your mom was flicking the lights and telling you to come upstairs for dinner (which you completely forget to be hungry for).
Do you think it’s a coincidence that when you’re in the zone on stage, you feel like you’re outside of yourself, watching?
Nope, that’s transient hypofrontality––your brain diverting resources away from its higher functions, turning off the part in charge of self-consciousness.
You cease feeling separate from the world around you.
Remember when you played that ridiculously over-the-top solo that made your bandmates laugh in amazement?
The part of your brain that says, “this might not work” had been silenced, freeing you up to solve an old problem in a new way. You were so deeply in the music that your brain didn’t have any juice to waste on things like self-monitoring or impulse control.
You were in flow.
Flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term flow as early as 1975. In the years since, he’s remained at the forefront of research into these heightened states.
pronounced: “me-high, chick-sent-me-high”
He says that being in flow is “being so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”
Steven Kotler, in his badass book about how flow is creating superhuman athletes in extreme sports, lists Csikszentmihalyi’s ten core components that demarcate the flow state:
- Clear goals: Expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities. Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high.
- Concentration: A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention.
- A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness: The merging of action and awareness.
- Distorted sense of time: One’s subjective experience of time is altered.
- Direct and immediate feedback: Successes and failures are apparent, so behavior can be adjusted as needed.
- Balance between ability level and challenge: The activity is neither too easy nor too difficult.
- A sense of personal control over the situation.
- The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so action is effortlessness.
- A lack of awareness of bodily needs.
- Absorption: narrowing of awareness down to the activity itself.
[The Rise of Superman, Kotler]
Of these, clear goals, immediate feedback, and the appropriate balance of challenge and skill aren’t features of flow so much as they are conditions necessary for flow to happen.
“Moreover, flow exists on a continuum, so not all of the remaining seven elements need to be present at the same time. Csikszentmihalyi uses the terms microflow and macroflow to explain these variations. In microflow, only a few of his categories are fulfilled—say clear goals, concentration, and absorption.” [Kotler]
Ok, hold on to these tidbits for a moment:
1. Flow states are awesome.
2. In flow, your brain diverts resources away from things you’d like to have less of in your musical life:
- self-consciousness,
- an awareness of the passing of time,
- impulse control.
3. Those brain resources get redirected to things you’d like to have more of in your musical life:
- concentration,
- absorption,
- a sense of personal control,
- a feeling of being plugged in to something larger than yourself.
4. It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition: flow is a continuum.
Brain Chemistry & Learning
The list of chemicals that your body produces to regulate itself is longer than the line for the new iPhone.
But there are five important ones that your brain is just swimming in when you’re in flow:
- dopamine
- norepinephrine
- endorphins
- anandamide
- serotonin
Dopamine heightens our pattern-recognition, making us feel excited, engaged, and creative.
Norepinephrine boosts attention, blocks out distractions, and increases “neural efficiency”––how fast we think.
Endorphins kill pain and produce pleasure––they’re the body’s hella-strong version of opiates.
Anandamide is an endogenous cannabinoid––the body’s version of marijuana. Besides making us feel blissed out, it boosts our lateral thinking, helping us solve problems in novel ways.
Serotonin makes us feel happy and tightly bonded with our fellow humans––be they bandmates, the audience, or that burning guitarist whose solo you’re transcribing.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see how an excited, engaged, creative, attentive, focused, lightning-witted, euphoric, lateral-thinking person who is mind-melding with her bandmates, audience, and/or influences would be an absolute learning machine.
Flow states turn you into a super-learner.
A Super Learner Of What Exactly?
Ah, but here’s the catch.
Flow states are great for soft skills, but terrible for hard skills. As Daniel Coyle says in The Little Book of Talent:
To build hard skills, work like a careful carpenter. To build soft skills, play like a skateboarder.
Hard skills are things like technique & time.
Soft skills are all about creative decision-making–things like improvising & songwriting.
That creative decision-making leans heavily on pattern recognition––things like music theory & ear training.
If you have to choose between working on your hard skills and your soft skills, you’re better off prioritizing hard skills.
Why?
Your neural pathways are busy hardwiring your movements––and that’s true regardless of whether you’re making perfect reps of tiny musical motions or sloppily soloing for an hour over a blues vamp.
If you spend all of your time practicing in flow, you’re going to permanently ingrain sloppy, shitty playing.
Effective hard skills practice depends on avoiding automaticity––the sort of autopilot that flow states are full of.
Flow states are fun and kind of addictive. Put yourself in one at the beginning of your practice session and that’ll probably be the only thing you practice that day.
So when you practice, do hard skills before soft skills.
Anti-flow before flow.
Start with technique. Move on to theory. Finish with creativity.
Engineering Flow States
Of course, this assumes that you can just flip a switch and put yourself into a flow state––which you can’t.
On the deep end of the flow continuum, you have those transcendent moments where you and your bandmates are reading each other’s minds and co-creating pure magic. You’re tapping into creative forces that seem to come from outside your self, like flipping up an antennae and channeling the energy of the universe directly through your instruments.
It’s what Csikszentmihalyi calls macroflow.
I don’t think I need to tell you that such moments are rare.
We can chase them all we want, but it’s not as simple as ordering a pizza.
Which is just as well.
Also in The Rise of Superman, Kotler points to unreliable weather conditions as being a key factor in pushing the extreme-sports envelope further.
Basically, the deeper the flow experience, the more recovery time the athlete needs, and the unpredictability of fresh powder or big waves serves as a natural break in which to rest.
So what about Csikszentmihalyi’s microflow state? Where only a few of the ten items on the flow list are present? Can we engineer our practice to summon that more reliably?
Damn straight we can.
Clear goals, concentration, absorption, immediate feedback, the appropriate amount of challenge for our skill level, intrinsic rewards… these are the currencies we’ve been dealing in for this entire course, so you’re well on your way.
But I also want to show you my new favorite tool for inducing that blissed-out, drooling-on-my-guitar state, my own little experimental sandbox.
It’s the soft-skills dessert after my hard-skills meal.
Drone Strike
I went 20-plus years without hearing so much as a peep about drone practice, and now suddenly it’s everywhere I look.
I can’t tell if it’s my brain doing the I-just-bought-a-new-car-and-now-I-see-it-everywhere trick, or if drone practice has had a recent surge in popularity.
What is drone practice?
In its simplest form, it’s playing along with a sustained note.
Why would you want to do that?
Orchestral string players, horn players, singers, and slide guitarists use the drone to work on their intonation––how in tune they are.
Others use it to explore harmony.
- Rather than play scales in isolation, you can hear what they sound like in context.
- Rather than try to squeeze that altered dominant scale you just learned into four fleeting beats of a song, you can stretch out and explore it for a half hour.
- Rather than get all confused about when to call the same set of notes ‘C Major’ & when to call them ‘D Dorian,’ you can have an epiphany about how closely related D Dorian is to D Minor.
Personally, I use it to hypnotize myself.
After I was done practicing my hard skills this morning, I put a C drone on and got lost exploring the melodic minor scale all over the neck for twenty-five minutes.
When I finally came up for air, I’d had a tiny epiphany (which of course I promptly wrote down in my practice journal).
Drone Tools
The app I’m using for drone practice is called iTablaPro (which I first heard about in Jonathan Harnum’s book The Practice of Practice).
The drone is an excellent-sounding electronic tanpura.
It lets you add tabla rhythms and arpeggiated swar mandal chords, which ups the fun factor considerably.
iOS only, and at $25, it ain’t cheap. There’s a free Lite version, but it times out after a minute. Pretty tough to stay in flow when you have to hit play every 60 seconds.
Drone Tone Tool is a great free alternative, with realistic cello drones and a built-in metronome. It’s web-based, so it works on any platform.
Recap
Put it all together, and what do you get?
1. In flow states, your brain reroutes power, turning some parts of itself off while boosting others.
2. The parts that get shut off are mostly things that interfere with great music-making:
- self-consciousness,
- an awareness of the passing of time,
- impulse control.
3. The parts that get the extra brain resources are mostly things that make for better music-making:
- concentration,
- absorption,
- a sense of personal control,
- a feeling of being plugged in to something larger than yourself.
4. There are five big brain chemicals unleashed by flow that make for great learning.
- dopamine,
- norepinephrine,
- endorphins,
- anandamide, &
- serotonin
They combine to boost:
- excitement,
- engagement,
- creativity,
- attention,
- focus,
- speed of thought,
- pattern recognition,
- euphoria,
- lateral thinking, and
- the feeling of interconnectedness.
5. Flow is not an all-or-nothing proposition: flow is a continuum.
6. While you can’t reliably engineer deep “macroflow,” you can set yourself up to consistently reach “microflow” by focusing on
- clear goals,
- concentration,
- absorption,
- immediate feedback,
- intrinsic rewards, and
- the appropriate amount of challenge for your skill level…
…aka all the things we’ve been talking about in GuitarOS Practice.
7. The caveat to this is that you should prioritize hard skills over soft skills––your practice session should start with technique & reading, move into theory & ear training, and then get into improvising & writing.
8. Practicing with a drone (or iReal Pro, or a backing track) is a great way to get yourself into flow.
9. Two solid options for drones: iTablaPro ($25) and DroneToneTool.com (free)
See you out there,
Josh
ps. This article is drawn from the Practice Habits section of GuitarOS, and owes a significant debt to Steven Kotler’s The Rise of Superman and Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code and The Little Book of Talent. If this is up your alley, check those out too.
