Mark: Most people believe peak performance is about using 100% of your brain. That's a myth. The secret to achieving the impossible, according to neuroscience, is actually about strategically shutting parts of your brain down. Michelle: Hold on. You're telling me the key to getting smarter is to get... dumber? That sounds like the best excuse I've ever heard for procrastinating. Mark: It sounds completely backward, I know! But that counterintuitive idea is the engine behind a book that’s been making waves in performance circles: The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler. Michelle: Ah, Steven Kotler. I know his work. And he isn't just some theorist in an ivory tower. He's an award-winning journalist who spent over two decades embedded with the very people redefining human limits—from extreme athletes to groundbreaking scientists. He basically lived this research on the front lines. Mark: Exactly. He was the guy on the mountain, in the half-pipe, watching these impossible feats happen in real time. Which is why his framework feels so grounded. Michelle: Okay, so before we get to this brain-shutdown cheat code, which I'm very interested in, where does this whole journey to 'impossible' even begin? For most of us, it feels like such a huge, terrifying leap.

Mark: That's the perfect question, because Kotler’s first big move is to completely reframe the word itself. He argues there are two kinds of impossible. There’s capital ‘I’ Impossible—think paradigm-shifting breakthroughs like landing on Mars or curing cancer. Michelle: Right, the stuff that feels completely out of reach for us mere mortals. Mark: Precisely. But then there's 'lowercase i' impossible. This is your personal impossible. It’s that thing that feels just beyond your current capabilities. It could be running your first marathon, starting a business, learning a new language, or even just finishing a project you’ve been avoiding for months. Michelle: That’s a much more manageable idea. My 'impossible' on a Monday morning is just clearing my inbox. So that counts? Mark: It absolutely counts. And here's the core idea: Kotler says if you dedicate your life to consistently achieving these 'lowercase i' impossibles, you can sometimes end up accomplishing a 'capital I' Impossible along the way. You're building the psychological and neurological muscles you need for the big leagues. Michelle: I like that. It makes the whole concept less intimidating. But is there proof this actually works? Or is it just a nice motivational poster? Mark: This is where his journalism background shines. He tells this incredible story from the early 1990s when he was covering action sports. At the time, surfers believed a 25-foot wave was the absolute limit of human possibility. Anything bigger was a death sentence. Michelle: I can see why. That sounds terrifying. Mark: It was. But then, a new generation of athletes came along. These weren't people with silver spoons; many came from difficult backgrounds. They just had this relentless drive. And within about two and a half decades, they went from a 25-foot limit to routinely paddling into 60-foot waves and even getting towed into waves over 100 feet tall. Michelle: A hundred feet? That’s a ten-story building made of water. How is that even physically possible? Mark: That's what everyone thought! The snowboarding legend Jeremy Jones told Kotler that fundamental rules of the sport, rules like ‘don’t do this because you’ll die,’ were changing on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. They were systematically dismantling the impossible, one ride at a time. Michelle: Wow. So they were living that 'lowercase i' to 'Capital I' pipeline in real time. Each 'impossible' wave they survived made the next, slightly bigger one seem possible. Mark: Exactly. And Kotler’s big insight, the one that launched his whole career, was that this wasn't luck or a few genetic freaks. It was a formula. He famously said, "Personality doesn’t scale. Biology scales." These athletes, from all different backgrounds, had stumbled upon the same universal, biological process for peak performance. Michelle: Okay, that's the key right there. "Biology scales." It means it’s not about being a special kind of person; it’s about tapping into a system that every human brain has. That makes it feel much more universal. Mark: It is. He even traces his own fascination back to a simple childhood memory. When he was nine, his seven-year-old brother came home and performed a magic trick, making a sponge ball vanish from his fist. Kotler was baffled, he thought it was actual magic. Michelle: Oh, I love that. The ultimate sibling rivalry. Mark: But then he had this realization: it wasn't magic. It was a process. A skill. His brother had learned a formula to create an illusion of the impossible. That moment sent him down a rabbit hole of learning magic, and it taught him a fundamental lesson: the impossible always has a formula. You just have to be willing to find it and practice it. Michelle: That’s a great way to put it. It demystifies the whole thing. It’s not about being a superhero; it’s about being a detective and a diligent student of your own limits. Mark: And that's the perfect bridge to the biological part of the formula. Because the shared biology, that universal cheat code these athletes and magicians were using, whether they knew it or not, is the state of consciousness we hinted at in the beginning: Flow.

Michelle: Right, 'flow.' We hear that term all the time. Being 'in the zone,' hyper-focused. Is Kotler's definition any different? Mark: It's more specific and, frankly, more radical. He defines it as "an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best." But the magic is in how the brain achieves this. It’s a phenomenon neuroscientists call 'transient hypofrontality.' Michelle: Okay, you're going to have to break that one down for me. 'Transient hypofrontality' sounds like a medical condition. Mark: It does! But it’s a good thing. 'Transient' means temporary. 'Hypo' means to slow down or deactivate. And 'frontality' refers to the prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain right behind your forehead. Michelle: So, a temporary shutdown of the front of your brain. Why on earth would that be a good thing? Isn't that the part that does all the smart, logical thinking? Our inner CEO? Mark: It is! It’s our inner critic, our long-term planner, our center for complex decision-making. And that’s exactly why it needs to get out of the way. Think of it this way: your brain is an incredible machine, but the conscious, deliberate thinking of the prefrontal cortex is slow and energy-intensive. When you're in a high-stakes moment, you don't have time for its endless deliberation and self-doubt. Michelle: It's like the CEO who won't stop micromanaging the experts who actually know how to do the job. Mark: Perfect analogy. In a flow state, the CEO goes on a coffee break. The brain re-routes energy away from that slow, critical thinking and pours it into heightened attention and awareness. Your perception sharpens, your skills become automatic, and your sense of self—with all its fears and insecurities—vanishes. You and the activity become one. Michelle: That's the 'losing yourself in the moment' feeling. And the inner critic shutting up… that alone sounds like a superpower. Mark: It is! And we have hard data on this. There was a landmark study at Johns Hopkins where neuroscientist Charles Limb put improv jazz musicians into an fMRI machine. He had them play a memorized scale, and then he had them improvise, to trigger a flow state. Michelle: That sounds incredibly difficult. Playing jazz inside a giant magnetic tube. Mark: Right? But what he saw in their brains was astonishing. During improvisation, a part of the prefrontal cortex called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—which is basically the seat of your inner critic—went almost completely dark. It just shut down. Michelle: So the part of the brain that says, "Ooh, that note was a bit off" or "Are people judging me?" just went offline. Mark: Completely. And that liberated them to be more creative, to take risks, to access a deeper, more intuitive musicality. They were literally getting out of their own way. This is the neurobiology of 'letting go.' Michelle: Okay, I love this, but I have to bring up a point some critics make about books like this. They sometimes argue that popular neuroscience can oversimplify these incredibly complex brain functions. Is it really as clean as 'turn off this part of the brain and you become a genius'? Mark: That's a very fair and important critique. And Kotler, being a science journalist, is aware of it. It’s not a simple on/off switch. He quotes neuroscientist Arne Dietrich, who calls it an 'efficiency exchange.' You're trading one mode of thinking for another. It’s a cascade of neurochemical changes—dopamine, norepinephrine, anandamide—that create the conditions for this shift. Michelle: So it’s less like flipping a light switch and more like a symphony conductor bringing one section of the orchestra down while bringing another up to a crescendo. Mark: Exactly. The effect is a quieting of the self-monitoring and a massive amplification of performance, but the underlying mechanism is a complex, dynamic dance. The key takeaway isn't the exact brain region, but the principle: peak performance comes from a state of less internal friction, not more mental effort.

Michelle: That makes a lot of sense. So, if we tie these two big ideas together, the path to the 'big I' Impossible is paved with a series of these 'small i' impossibles. And the vehicle we use to travel that path is our ability to intentionally trigger this state of flow, which is a learnable, biological skill. Mark: You've got it. And for me, the most profound takeaway in the entire book is a simple, powerful sentence from Kotler: "We are all capable of so much more than we know." He argues that what holds most people back isn't a lack of talent or resources. It's what the psychologist William James called the 'habit of inferiority.' Michelle: The habit of inferiority. That hits hard. It’s that voice that tells you not to even try because you'll probably fail. Mark: Yes. It's the self-imposed limitation. Kotler says the only real way to discover if you're capable of pulling off the impossible is by attempting to pull off the impossible. This book is, at its heart, a practical, science-backed manual for making that attempt. It’s a playbook for impractical people with unreasonable expectations for their lives. Michelle: I think a lot of our listeners can probably relate to that. So what's one small thing someone could do today to start breaking that habit? To take that first step? Mark: It's surprisingly simple. Find one task you've been putting off. Something that feels just a little beyond your comfort zone, that gives you that flicker of anxiety. Then, set a timer for just 25 minutes, turn off all notifications, and give it your undivided attention. That's it. Michelle: You’re not even saying you have to finish it. Mark: Nope. The goal isn't completion; it's engagement. You're creating the perfect conditions for a 'microflow' state and actively training your brain to push into discomfort. You're starting to challenge that habit of inferiority, one 25-minute block at a time. Michelle: That feels incredibly doable. We'd actually love to hear what your 'lowercase i' impossible is. Find us on our socials and let us know what you're tackling. It’s inspiring to see what everyone is working towards. Mark: Absolutely. It all starts with that first step. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.