Mike Gordon’s Quest to Understand the Science Behind the ‘Flow State’

I
n the middle of a sprawling recording room at Bob Weir’s TRI Studios in San Rafael, California, one Sunday afternoon in April 2023, Weir and Phish bassist Mike Gordon were up to something strange. At a glance it looked like a couple of chill music legends doing chill music legend shit. They both sat in chairs, Weir on guitar and wearing shorts and slides and a loose button-down, breezy as ever, and Gordon on the bass in gray jeans, green sneakers, and green shirt. Gordon setting the rhythm, Weir finding a groove. 

But they also both had something strapped to their heads and arms, and under their shirt, their chests, too. Sensors of some sort. And across the room, a half-dozen scientists and engineers gathered around laptops and monitors positioned semi-carefully atop music stands and a giant purple equipment trunk. 

“All right, we are doing this,” said a bald man with a gray goatee — Dr. Greg Appelbaum, a neuroscientist from the University of California-San Diego standing behind the big purple trunk. To his right, Dr. Suzanne Dikker, a neuroscientist from New York University with long blonde hair, studied a monitor displaying an array of colorful jagged lines. In front of them, Gordon’s longtime engineer/producer/collaborator Jared Slomoff took a seat next to Sean Montgomery, a neuroscientist and creator of biofeedback company EmotiBit. They both likewise had similar technology strapped to their heads and bodies. And as Gordon and Weir played, they occasionally pressed a pedal mounted next to each of them on the floor under their feet — and Montgomery and Slomoff did the same sometimes as they listened. 

All the strapped-on sensors were connected to the computers by Bluetooth and transmitting data collected from their respective humans to the machines — clocking things like heart rate, skin galvanic response, and brains’ electrical activity. 

“We’ve been slowly chipping away at this,” Gordon tells me when we catch up this spring. This being research for the creation of a device that Gordon dreamed up years ago, something he calls XenboX.  

The device — in theory, at least — would detect when an artist is approaching flow state, that otherworldly form of consciousness wherein peak performance takes no effort, when there seems to be no such thing as time, when one feels everything and everyone all at once, maybe feels God, maybe even feels like God. “It’s when the music is playing itself,” Gordon says. 

And when detecting the artist approaching flow, the device would emit a subtle cue — a slight change in the sound of their instrument or the lighting — to give the brain a subconscious boost and thereby accelerate and enhance one’s immersion into flow. That’s what the pedals were that the guys were pressing: signals that they felt in flow. 

It all sounds like it could be the product of some sort of tech-bro-backed, change-the-world startup venture, but it’s just Gordon and his curiosity. He pays the research crew consulting fees out of his own pocket and has been on-and-off for years. The thing about XenboX is it might be impossible to actually create. Gordon knows this. He doesn’t care. “It’s not to make money for me,” Gordon says. “It’s to promote this idea that there’s, you know, practicing and becoming agile on your instrument or your voice or whatever it is, is important. And that there’s also another important thing, which is the way of letting go, surrendering that, and that’s what allows this kind of flow state to come about.”

“We want to experience the eternal while we’re still alive.” 

Mike Gordon says of “flow state,” quoting Star Wars

Gordon’s mission here is like a cross between ancient, mythical quest and cutting-edge R&D about understanding the creative process and, specifically, the concept of flow. 

In a lot of ways it started more than 40 years ago, before Phish, before he knew what flow was, back in Sudbury, Massachusetts during a high school engineering class. Using a wooden box and a few wires, he made a device from scratch that could measure changes in his brain activity. “Very rudimentary,” he says now. “Just a simple biofeedback machine. I made it from scratch. The idea was that it was supposed to measure some kind of a brainwave flow and then maybe warble a tone when the brainwave state changed. But in reality, it shouldn’t have worked at all. It just seemed intriguing as a concept.” 

He still has the thing to this day, sitting in his house: a small brown box labeled ALPHA MONITOR with two white dials (“SENS” and “VOL”) above a metallic switch and a couple of input-output ports. Gordon doesn’t remember what sparked the idea, probably a Radio Shack catalog or inspiration from writer and inventor Forrest Mims. “I had all his books,” Gordon says. “I even wrote him a fan letter at one point. So maybe it was in one of those books. I liked the idea of incorporating brain stuff with electronics.” 

Then came one night in 1985 during one of his first shows with Phish, and he felt something new that he wanted to feel forever. “It’s when the music feels like it’s playing itself,” he says. “It’s an experience via music that makes me feel extremely myself, extremely connected to the people around me — a very connecting, universal sort of feeling. And once you’ve had a little taste of it, it’s like — Oh. This is why we’re here, and why we’re alive, as people.”

Obsession took hold and defined his life from that point on. “That experience and experiences like that really informed my sense of vision,” he says. “Peak experience — religious, transcendent experiences, epiphanies, etcetera, have guided me … I dedicated many journals after that simply figuring out what happened that night, and how can I make it happen more.” 

He threw himself into it as often as he could as both performer and participant. He studied mythical philosophy, neuroscientific inquiry, everything in between. “As Joseph Campbell said,” Gordon says, quoting the famed mythologist whose work inspired Star Wars, “‘We want to experience the eternal while we’re still alive.’” 

Gordon first heard the term flow in the 1990s as psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi popularized the term, inspiring Gordon to make his 2002 film Rising Low, in which he interviewed musicians about their experiences with flow. One interviewee told Gordon that flow feels like moving down a river or through the ocean. For Gordon, it feels like flying. “We all have so many different experiences that have led to where we’re at and how we’re able to create music and experience it,” he says. “It’s subjective — and yet at the same time, there’s a commonality … when everyone knows that something happened, and no one of us could have made it happen … It took everyone committing.”

The XenboX concept began taking shape in the early aughts when Gordon walked into a Boulder, Colorado, new-age shop and discovered a biofeedback device that clocked his brain’s electrical activity and helped guide him into a more focused, flow-like state. 

“It really seemed like it was working,” he says. This eventually led to the XenboX concept. 

Explaining the scientific intricacies of flow state would require a summary of decades’ worth of neuroscience and biology lectures and books, and even in its most distilled form, such a summary comes across as somehow dry and pretentious and mind-numbing despite the fact that it describes an existentially mind-boggling phenomenon. The brain is likely the most complex object in the known universe; researching and explaining it becomes inescapably dense. So the simplest way to put it is: all areas of the brain always have a half-dozen or more different levels of electrical activity present at all times — a.k.a. brainwaves — and how well your brain functions often depends on which brainwave is strongest. And one category of them can be considered flow waves. 

In theory, XenboX would recognize a brain beginning to generate stronger flow waves and signal the brain to keep doing that. Maybe it’s via a vibey wobble in the guitar or a subtle lighting shift — something giving the brain a little extra juice. 

After years of talking about it, by the 2010s Gordon and Slomoff, the sound engineer, started doing something real about it. “We started taking it more seriously,” Slomoff says. “We didn’t want this to be some woo-woo thing — the idea was for it to be a real object based on real science.”

Scientists had been studying flow state and brainwave training for years, particularly in the worlds of sports, concussion treatment, and child behavioral development. A few phone calls later, Slomoff and Gordon set off on what Slomoff calls “a big field trip one furious weekend.” They visited a lab in Montreal where a company was working with everyone from athletes to children struggling with behavioral issues, teaching them how to improve their minds by training their brainwaves. Using brainwave-detection headsets, these athletes and children would sit at computer screens that ran simulated roller coaster rides, with a catch: the ride would only move forward as they learned to generate stronger focus waves. 

“We didn’t want this to be some woo-woo thing — the idea was for it to be a real object based on real science.”

Jared Slomoff, Gordon’s longtime sound engineer

Similar work was being done around the country and around the world to help in treating an array of issues, from PTSD to ADHD to concussions and more. Sports scientists were starting to explore the use of brainwave training to enhance athletes’ performance. 

So, Slomoff and Gordon reasoned, why couldn’t this also do something for musicians? 

Slomoff reached out to Appelbaum, whom he’d been friends with since college and who had gone on to become a world-class neuroscientist at Duke working on an array of elite performance projects with everyone from surgeons to the military to all-time great athletes. Now at UCSD, Appelbaum was “stoked” to dive in with them, but also skeptical. “It was like, how could you do it?” he says. “Is there a signal that can really be recorded from this, or is there just too much noise? Is it kind of a hopeless endeavor?”

While there’s a clear parallel between flow in athletes and musicians, identifying flow in the latter is much harder. Sports have scores, statistics, data that can quantify an athlete in flow. “In music,” Appelbaum says, “when we’re talking about flow and that kind of peak performance, it isn’t quite so obvious or objective what peak performance is.”

Over the years the team evolved. In came John Cohn, a 25-year IBM veteran and electronics engineer trained by MIT who helped develop tech for the project. Adam Horowitz, an MIT grad who studies dreams. Kaia Sargent, a current UCLA neuroscience Ph.D student who’s also a classically-trained cellist, pianist, and singer. Technologist Sean Montgomery, developer of the EmotiBit company, which produces a device that measures an array of physiological phenomena — heart rate, temperature, galvanic skin response, accelerometer, gyroscope. 

Suzanne Dikker, a neuroscientist at NYU, became one of Appelbaum’s key collaborators. A few years ago, she worked on something similar with Bad Bunny — hyperscanning, in which she conducted some lab experiments that analyzed Bad Bunny’s brainwaves as he collaborated with Puerto Rican rapper and singer Residente, discovering that when people share a musical experience they also mirror each other’s brainwave activity. As Dikker puts it: “When you’re in it, everybody’s in it.” 

All of this has been pretty informal, Gordon and Slomoff just connecting with these folks as needed, paying them consulting fees, piecing things together as they go. Much is done remotely — the required tech gets shipped to Gordon and Slomoff in Vermont, they set up for sessions, the scientists join by Zoom. 

As part of this, they needed a way for the performers themselves to confirm they were flowing. They started by having Gordon wink at them, but that seemed too conscious a signal to allow Gordon to stay in flow. “Does thinking about it, wondering, analyzing — Am I in a flow state or not? — does that very action of observing take away the flow state?” Gordon says.

Hence the foot pedal. It seemed to work best. And word got around to other artists. One day in 2021 when Gordon was in L.A., Appelbaum drove up from San Diego to help him have a XenboX training session at Grammy-winning producer Shawn Everett’s basement studio with Nosaj Thing, “the legendary beats maker” — Gordon’s words — who’s worked with Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, and more. Volunteering as test subject, Nosaj strapped into a headset fitted with 27 electrodes and jammed with Gordon. 

“When you record electrical activity in the brain, you see rhythms,” says Sargent, the only scientist involved who also has extensive musical training and performing experience. “Like how you have different pitches that form a chord, and different chord progressions that somehow mean something,” says Sargent. “And it seems like something similar is happening in the brain — when different rhythms and frequencies interact, that makes meaning out of nothing. There’s such a beautiful overlap.”

It all creates something Gordon has come to feel as a waking dream state. “My goal in music,” he says, “is to bridge the gap between being awake and being in a dream.”  

That’s how Weir got involved. He and Gordon have known each other for years and performed together on occasion, but then, Gordon says, “I read an article where he said that dreams have informed all of his creativity — from his music to writing a book to writing an opera. And, me too. Dreams have been central in my life.” 

When Gordon told Weir what he was working on, Weir’s curiosity took hold, too, and soon Weir was joining some of the remote Zoom sessions. Then he arranged for the big April 2023 test in San Rafael. Gordon and Weir made their way through various Dead songs, doing some radical harmonizing while playing “He’s Gone.” Like I told you, what I said, steal your face right off your head. It went on for some three hours. 

Afterward Weir told Gordon, “We were in the dream together.”

The Weir sessions were an energizing experience for everyone, and they’ve kept plugging away at this in the two years since. It’s had its ups and downs. “Neuroscience now is about where chemistry was in the late 1800s,” says Sargent. “I think we picked a very difficult challenge.”

“My goal in music is to bridge the gap between being awake and being in a dream.”  

Mike Gordon

So far, the building of a usable XenboX is slow going and probably will be for awhile. There are matters of technological limitations, scheduling logistics, real-world life interfering with the dream. “We’re pretty far away,” Gordon says. “The problem is, it’s requiring a lot of electrodes to get it to work. And we want to make it more streamlined … We’re trying to do it in a simpler way.” He sees two main obstacles: “Trying to do the [brainwave] detection in a simpler way. And really, it’s just trying to match up our schedules for the people involved.” 

One day this spring, Slomoff and Gordon went to work in the studio again, with Appelbaum and Dikker conferencing in via Zoom. Gordon strapped on his sensors and got to playing. Slomoff watched the feedback come through the monitors using software called YouQuantified, an open-source platform that’s free to anyone with the proper equipment. Dikker and her team at NYU developed it based in part on algorithms developed through the XenboX research. It has Gordon’s brainwave and physiological data on display in real time for Slomoff to follow as Gordon plays. 

Watching carefully, Slomoff observes Gordon’s brainwaves start moving toward flow state signature levels. He turns a knob. This starts what he calls “the effect” — a chorusing pattern that blends gently into Gordon’s music, a subtle signal that he’s starting to get closer to flow. 

This is the XenboX concept, performed manually by Slomoff as he observes Gordon’s data. The idea is to build a device that uses algorithms and tech to do for the wearer what Slomoff is doing now. 

The effect is at 25 percent. Something starts to take hold. Gordon says nothing, just keeps playing, but the data indicates something shifting now, getting closer to flow state signatures. 

Slomoff turns the knob again. Fifty percent. A moment later, 60. He takes care not to push too hard too soon, only wanting to accentuate but not dominate with the effect, and it’s working well. Moments later, he’s at 70 percent. “There’s a spike in it there,” Slomoff says. “And it’s getting deeper.” Now 80 percent. “There he goes.” 

Gordon’s all the way gone now, Slomoff having helped him onto that bridge between here and there, the music playing itself, Gordon back in the dream.