Why The Bassist From Phish Is Funding Research Into ‘Flow State’

Phish bassist Mike Gordon is teaming up with neuroscientists to try to understand the transcendent experience of musical flow state.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Flora Lichtman?

  I'm Flora Lichtman and you're listening to Science Friday.

• 0:11Flora Lichtman?

  If you don't recognize the tune because you're too young, or too old, or too cool, no worries, man. It's "Farmhouse" by the band Phish. And tens of millions have streamed it and countless others have vibed to it during the band's legendary live shows. Phish is storied for over 40 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 Phish, it's when the band members sync up in an improvised jam and find new musical ideas in real time. Phish fans live for these transcendent moments,

• 0:55Flora Lichtman?

  but so do Phish's musicians. The band is flow-seeking and flow-obsessed, to the point that Mike Gordon, the band's bassist, 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.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Thanks for having us. It's a pleasure.

• 1:21Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, Mike, when you and the band talk about flow state, is that the language that you use? What do you call it?

• 1:29Speaker 01

  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 flow state would be the words in the band dialect. But the band, well, first, they would say, okay, we were really hooking up. Because the thought is that music is a communication, and improvisation especially, is all communicating. Between us and the audience, riding 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, like, in a conversation,

• 2:13Speaker 01

  if you only listen to yourself, then it's going to be a very bad conversation.

• 2:17Flora Lichtman?

  We've had those on Science Friday here and there.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  I bet, yeah. Oops. But what we're talking about is bigger 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. You know, 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 40 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.

• 2:59Flora Lichtman?

  Why not? Why? Is it just that it's too overwhelming to sort of call it what it feels like?

• 3:07Speaker 01

  I don't think it's too overwhelming. I guess even though we're having the most incredible, 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 your, that strums your heartstrings, it's really different for every person. I mean, I'm probably leaving out a whole bunch of things. Like, someone might say, "Ooh, during that jam, I actually cried." Or I might say, "Oh, during that jam, there were about five minutes where I forgot to swallow." And for me, that's a sign that I'm really in it.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  But 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 a funny question to try to answer.

• 4:04Flora Lichtman?

  Does the music change when the band hooks up? And do you have an example you might walk us through?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the music 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 will be a funky dance band, and one night will be this sort of soul-searching religious experience, and one night it will just sound terrible. Not really, I mean, there's a certain benchmark, but, um, so then, within the same kind of jam, we really don't know what, where it's gonna go. And so, I'd like to make an example of this. One song is Bath Tub Gin. It's, we've been playing it for forever.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  So, just to talk over it, so what you're hearing now is, the song part is over, we're less than half the way 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.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  And the dream state starts to, starts to flow. And then, what happens, after a while, we're on this chord, and we make, we, 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 bluesy, and then eventually, what we're gonna do is actually go to a whole new chord that is the note of that flat seven, 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.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  And then, at the very end, it just gets really high energy, and nothing's held back, and it's just raging energy.

• 6:41Flora Lichtman?

  Is this song a prime example of the band in a flow state?

• 6:45Speaker 01

  For me it is, yes, because it's not performing, it's not trying to be cool, 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.

• 7:00Flora Lichtman?

  Greg, you've been working on this for years now. Can we detect flow state? Are there sort of biosignatures of flow?

• 7:09Speaker 02

  I 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?

• 7:26Flora Lichtman?

  Well, can we measure it? Are there, can you look at my brain and say, oh, yes, you're in a flow state?

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Well, 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 Sloamo, whose job is to find those moments of musical articulation that are amazing, that are the flow.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  And with this three-pronged approach, we could then say, okay, this part of the song is flow for Mike, 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.

• 8:37Flora Lichtman?

  Greg, 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 biosignatures of flow.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 8:57Flora Lichtman?

  Dudes, we got to take a quick break, but don't go away because when we come back, the details of Mike's brain on flow.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:16Flora Lichtman?

  Is that a compliment?

• 9:17Speaker 02

  I take it as a compliment. It's given as a compliment.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  Support for Science Friday comes from the William K. Boz Jr. Foundation.

• 9:36Flora Lichtman?

  Is musical flow state different from flow in other activities like sports, for example?

• 9:43Speaker 02

  There are probably similarities and differences, but when we look kind of across the literature, the description that Mike gave is actually very consistent with our interpretation of what the brain and the physiology is doing. What we think is happening during flow is a reduction in the frontal cortex, the part of the brain that's doing executive functioning. So, 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. And all of this is kind of what Mike was talking about, which is kind of a reduction in conscious effort.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  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 hypofrontality. So, there are commonalities and it's what we're seeing with Mike, too.

• 10:59Flora Lichtman?

  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?

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean...

• 11:07Speaker 01

  So you know, there are a handful of classical composers who have said that they do their best work when they're half asleep, maybe 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 night dreams while I'm in the middle of the jam on stage with all the people around.

• 11:31Flora Lichtman?

  Can you get into a flow state with a bunch of wires attached to you?

• 11:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  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 Mike 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.

• 12:17Flora Lichtman?

  Signal to noise of what?

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Of the brainwaves that we're recording and the heart rate measurements that we're recording. And-

• 12:24Speaker 01

  First is the background noise, which is just maybe static from your muscles moving, etc.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Exactly. And our ability to kind of eavesdrop 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-

• 12:46Flora Lichtman?

  Is that a compliment?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  I take it as a compliment.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  It's given as a compliment.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  It doesn't mean that I'm the alpha male or anything like that.

• 12:54Flora Lichtman?

  I don't know what an alpha wave is.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so- The brain is oscillating, there's firing neurons are firing and 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 10 hertz. 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

• 13:41Speaker 02

  with Mike, we can see that really clearly in real time in the EEG, and that's allowed us to be able to do a lot of things that we want to do.

• 13:49Flora Lichtman?

  Mike, when did you go from, you know, being a fan of flow, of sort of experiencing it as a musician, to wanting to team up with brain scientists like Greg to understand it on a scientific level?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I'm a project person, and I just came up with this idea is I want to make a thing, which we're calling ZenBox, X E N B O X, and they could use it, maybe 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.

• 14:31Flora Lichtman?

  So you want to make a device that induces flow, or helps you prolong your flow state?

• 14:37Speaker 01

  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. And 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 sort of like a symbol of the experience that I would like to make in a tangible form.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so some 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 What 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

• 15:42Speaker 02

  measurement devices, like more alpha activity, for example, that can be translated into a sound effect or a lighting effect or some, some type of musical pedal that he could operate with his brainwaves.

• 15:59Flora Lichtman?

  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.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  Well, the effects help get in the flow state. The idea for me is to make it autopilot. And yeah, it'll 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 that's, 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 a different level of being human. And it doesn't feel cosmic or, you know, out in the middle of La La Land.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  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 self, 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 their daughter, which I get to do, or whatever. And but I found it through music and my bandmates have too. And it's it's when we talk about it, even right now, it sounds like just another normal thing that you could read in a self-help book or in a science journal or but experiencing it, people change their whole whole lives,

• 17:34Speaker 01

  whether they're playing or, you know, going to listen and experience it for years. So it's it's intangible.

• 17:41Flora Lichtman?

  Mike, I disagree. As you described it, I had a smile ear to ear. I think it sounds really lovely.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 17:50Flora Lichtman?

  Mike Gordon is the basis for Phish and Dr. Greg Applebaum is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Thank you both so much for coming to talk to us today.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Pleasure. Thanks for having us.

• 18:07Flora Lichtman?

  Today's episode was produced by D. Peter Schmidt. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.