Here’s I think a needle-moving insight, world-class comes from instinct versus intelligence. You get your best ideas when you get out of your thinking. And just to give you some neuroscience, the seat of reasoning is the prefrontal cortex, but there’s a phenomenon called transient hypofrontality. This is the secret of genius. Geniuses don’t get their ideas for Uber, Amazon, the electric bulb, Tesla, Shakespeare, the polio vaccination, SpaceX.
Great ideas don’t come from the intellects. They don’t come from the neocortex reasoning and thinking. All great heroes and great inventors and great creators dialed into something deeper. When you get out of your neocortex through solitude and my life structure, it’s called the Tight Bubble of Total Focus, and when you get away from distraction and you immerse yourself in deep creativity and creation and you find your laboratory or what I call your Menlo Park, like Edison had his Menlo Park, which was the wilderness away from the
world, what happens?
The prefrontal cortex gets silent, and it’s called transient, transient which means temporary, transient hypo, small, frontality. The neocortex, the seat in your brain of thinking, actually shuts down for a short period of time. This is profound information
and will confirm your brain is built for genius. But if you don’t do the right things, you’re not going to be able to allow the genius to see the light of day. When your brain goes into transient hypofrontality, the prefrontal cortex shuts down and actually
your brain finally becomes quiet.
If you’re like most people, your brain is going all day long. You’re never going to get to genius, because you’re caught up in thinking, not your instinct. Your brainwaves when your prefrontal cortex shut down temporarily go from beta, which is every day, down to alpha, and perhaps even down to theta. You drop into a state. The first time I ever read it was about 20 years ago. One of my favorite books, Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, University of Chicago. The subtitl e of the book is The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
He found the best hockey players, Gretzky. Remember what Gretzky said? “I go to where the puck is going, not to where the puck is.” The great athletes, the great inventors, the great writers. When you do a yoga class and your thinking stops, it’s because you have dropped into a state that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow. When the Navy SEALs do amazing things on their military missions, we are now finding through research they are in a state of flow. They’re not in their thinking. They’re in the deeper state of genius that lies within every one of us.
This is revolutionary information. It means that every child, man, woman, entrepreneur, creative person, firefighter, police officer, pizza maker, taxi driver has genius within them, but very few people have been taught this information that you’re getting. The key point I want to offer to here is when your brain drops into transient hypofrontality and when you reach that state of flow, your brain actually starts to create a pharmacy of mastery. You release dopamine, the inspirational neurotransmitter, so your brain starts feeling like it’s alive.
It’s like your brain is supercharged. You release serotonin, the pleasure neurotransmitter. You feel happy. You release oxytocin, and your brain becomes next level superhuman.