A comprehensive proposal of the neurobiology and neurodynamics of state onset

With Center for Edge at Deloitte we worked to quantify the relationship between flow and Deloitte’s metrics for employee engagement.

The Flow Research Collective taught 17 adults aged 30-68 how to perform park skiing/snowboarding tricks over 4 days. Participants made significant progress learning the tricks, experienced increased flow states, and had more positive attitudes about learning new skills later in life.

An interdisciplinary book defining the new field of performance neuroscience—linking psychophysiology, cognitive control, brain dynamics, flow, recovery, sports, arts, meditation, and future AI applications—with chapters from leading researchers. A Complexity-Science Framework for Studying Flow: Using Media to Probe Brain–Phenomenology Dynamics Introduces a complexity-science model and experimental paradigm for studying how media stimuli drive shifts in attention, absorption, and subjective flow-like states.

Argues against the popular “stored trauma in the body” metaphor and reframes PTSD as a collapse of neural metastability—over-precision of threat priors—and suggests restoration through adaptive prediction and flow-rich interventions.

Studies whether spirituality, belief in a higher power, and religious rituals predict performance and flow across different levels of athletic risk and gender.

Proposes that consciousness isn’t a fundamental property of matter but an emergent informational phenomenon that arises when neural dynamics cross a metastable coordination threshold.

Presents a unified dynamical model showing that purpose, synchronicity, and flow are temporal expressions of the same metastable attractor dynamics, linking meaning to predictive processing and active inference.

Develops a mathematical framework for modeling moral reasoning as metastable attractor dynamics and proposes a JEPA-based architecture for AI systems that minimize “moral free-energy” in real-time decisions.

Shows how Zen koans deliberately overload predictive processing, triggering cognitive collapse into awe and then reorganizing into effortless flow as the brain resets its generative model.

Argues that between-set smartphone checking satisfies short-term prediction-error relief but collapses the metastable brain dynamics needed for flow, conditioning intolerance of uncertainty and undermining both physical adaptation and mental health benefits of exercise.