Alisa Dammer: Science and Tech Backed Approach to Increase Productivity

This talk covers the concept of productivity and its relation to the psychological state known as flow, presented by Alisa Dammers, who has a background in mathematics and computer science. The speaker shares insights gained from analyzing scientific literature on flow, highlighting its biological underpinnings and applicability across various tasks, particularly in coding. The presentation explores the four main phases of flow, which include struggle, release, flow, and recovery, and discusses how to recognize and enhance this state using methods like self-monitoring and biometric data. Dammers emphasizes the importance of personalizing strategies to enter flow, such as managing environmental and behavioral factors, to improve overall productivity and well-being.

[Music] ladies and Gentlemen please welcome our next speaker Alisa dammer presenting the topic science and techb approach to increase productivity hello everyone I hope you're having a great time so just a spoiler alert I will try to keep this talk not that theory heavy and not that Tech heavy I do have some analysis but I don't know if we have enough time to go in details over

it so I guess I'll leave it out but you can vote on slideer if you want to see it in detail let's do it like that right so let me also do some time management so today I wanted to talk about vague thing called productivity but I want to narrow down the topic to the area of flow and I will explain why in a second so a

little bit about me spoiler alert I'm not professionally trained in medicine or Neuroscience it's just some weird hobby of mine to read about it to learn about it but I am professionally trained in mathematics and computer science so over years I was collecting data from tracking from journals and everything and looking for a patterns again a very weird hobby of mine and then I realized that there

are some reoccurring and consistent things that are connected to productivity happiness flow stuff like that and I thought huh how does it work in my brain am I creating a junky out of me am I actually creating some damaging patterns or am I on the right track so this talk is an approach top down where I go through the current scientific literature I will show you how

I filtered down specific papers because there is no single opinion in science and we'll show you how to use this data to your advantage so a little bit about me machine learning engineer this is why I get my or how I get my uh hands on the data and nerding around with data so the structure of this topic or this presentation would be as follows I will

set the scope why flow how flow what specific task and what we going to take specific look at as well as methodology of how I was choosing the papers and what I was looking at so that you can on your own maybe replicate them if you want to then we will go in every stage of the flow according to the theory uh and see how you can

perceive the state and what you can do about it if you want to then I'll show you the possible analysis tabs for you for your everyday uh life or even maybe your workplace to improve I will briefly mention some additional factors that are currently not considered by science seriously like they are hard to estimate they can be positively or negatively correlated with the state of flow but

something maybe Universal or way too big to be included in researches then I would like to go over a very simple summary and then go into the QA session and again if you want me to show you the actual an is on how I would work with raw data and what I would look at in details just please vote on slide or like somebody put an question

in I want to see the analysis so productivity what is it it's a very vague thing it's a measurement of an input to Output ratio within the time frame and if I were to tell you about how to improve your productivity this either will take years to talk about because it's so non-specific and and very situational from person to task to even day time of the day

but I wanted to give you something more um real something you can Implement and one thing across different scientific and Science pop literature was flow so the hypothesis of this talk is that this is something biologically scalable and can be used by every single human in pretty much every single task let's dig deeper into what flow is just to set this stage and have the same understanding

um according to the original and official definition it's a mental state characterized by super absorption or by of the task you don't have a feel of yourself you don't think about yourself you don't have the feeling of the time passing you are in the task you are the task and also it's super nice experience so that normally you want to repeat it the state can be um

described with this several points like extreme Focus loss self self of sense loss of time tracking deep calm State it's not necessarily happiness it will depend on the person will depend on the task as we will see but generally speaking it's a positive experience and according to the literature there are four main phases and the fifth one is an additional one that is more not automatic but

it can improve the previous four and I will go into every single one of them limitations or and scope of this talk is I've chose coding task as the main flow activity because we can also talk about sports like there are so many researchers about Elite athletes on how they utilize the super Focus to get the advantage in their performance but at the same time if we

talk about it you might already have a hunch that it's it's not really compatible with cognitive task where you sit calm versus you move around like the areas in your brain that are engaged in this type of task are very different so there is no point in comparing this tasks then also coding task gives us an opportunity to have very clear task definition clear goal and very

clear feedback which is Paramount for flow entrance then I've chosen the uh researchers that have very hypothesis it's not about systemic uh changes in the body but rather this part of the brain works this part of the brain works I know that this one is at some point is activated uh so that I can find other um research papers that link it or give me more information

on what is actually about and how probable is it that this is correct hypothesis also I included mostly reproducible researchers meaning they are using some sort of tracking that that you can either by proxy or directly reimplement also they don't have really weird group of participants like Elite athletes I mean probably somebody is here a very cool Sportsman but I don't think that it applies to everybody

it doesn't apply to me so General participation group there is no specific age restriction there is no specific ethnicity restriction the idea is that it's generalized state uh the outcome might be practical so the experiment is very um concrete and precise and ideally the researchers were using consumer grade trackables and variables I was not including any two theoretical uh papers for instance there was one that said

let's assume this theoretical situation of a flow directly no it must not be impractical mean meaning if they are probing one specific brain area that is very big and science right now is not really agreeing on what it does then it also was excluded suspicious um some papers are very opinionated and I don't think that this is a good General sign of equality so these things were

also excluded limited citations meaning the paper should not be way too uh fresh it must be cited uh by other similar works or uh journals so it must be known in the community or the author of this new paper is welln and established author of the same or similar topics in the past and if the results are amazingly good red flag take another thing to um say

I definitely brought in my personal bias when I read the paper I do have a special like amount of papers I already read and I have understanding or at least I think that I have an understanding of what I'm looking at and looking for so just be careful there is my personal bias uh complex cealing I'm Neuroscience so whenever I was reading about the brain region I

was like uh nope this type of papers were also they are included in the reference and you can read them and ask chbt to translate you to them but be careful with the translation is not exactly correct but still they are not the main body of this uh presentation and Science pop references I did include some books by psychologist by journalists that dabble in this topic because

they have a really nice summary that is going over these papers as well so flow is a main topic programming task or cognitive logical work uh simple mechanism research of the simple mechanism reproducible results trustworthy and practicality are the things that I was looking at so another thing is biological markers I was looking at the mostly researches that we're using uh variables as I already mentioned several

times so heart rate monitors uh heart rate variation is one of the primary things that we will be looking at electrodermal activity can be also measured by your watches for instance respiratory rate and stuff pupilary response and facial expression is can be implemented in your home settings but it's not reliable because of incredible personalization like nobody Smiles the same way and uh EG there are advancement on

the consumer grade uh market for EGS but these things are mainly for sleep and they are also not reliable because not enough um proper research is done on that and not enough s pop literature is out there to actually understand for a normal person if the thing works or not so NE neurological mechanisms um as I already said you saw the slide we're going to go over

stages struggle release flow and recovery and reflection um flow Dimensions that you need to think about always like flow has three dimensions that are prerequisite to enter and six that can basically say you were in a flow or not so they are Hallmarks um you can read it a bit but but I will reference to it a little bit later as well so in this table uh

you can check it out later for yourself as well these slides will be online as well as they are on my GitHub profile you can check it all out at your own pace so every stage is about specific part of the journey for instance struggle is about setting your goal and identifying the next steps and as well as identifying whether you need it why you need it

setting up your internal reward risk balance it's characterized by increase anxiety state and normally uh but at the same time you get this Gess like okay challenge accepted um normally you would use fmri e gcg readings on this this is not exactly very well replicatable then in release phase this is the commitment phase where you say okay I know how to solve this I decided my path

and I'm confident that this specific thing I can do so this is the relaxation uh period but not to the point where you like sleep uh it's just a slight relaxation from the anxious State before uh this is also where your body goes into an intricate balance like every single millisecond your brain and your body will assess external stimul are you hungry am I hungry am I

still good can can I do this and decide yes yes yes or no the moment you say no you're out of flow flow is this balance however long it will take and until you're either done with your task and you achieved your goal or the internal balance is broken in some way and Recovery phase is when you get out of this state and you feel exhausted because

the flow state is increased resource consumption State and this is the first place where you can use questionary because obviously if you try to answer a question am I'm a flow now you're out the reflection is an optional phase it's a learning phase but not like a learning new skill thing but rather consolidate your memories and what can I do about it did I like it more

self-reflection so it's relaxed learning also can be tracked with questionary can't be really tracked with any variable or hardw variation because again it's way too different for every certain person and there are some researchers that try to do this and assess the state but there were no consistency among the readings and the outputs so you cannot use uh any tracking devices here so let's go into struggle

um in struggle as I already mentioned you are very anxious stressed out you identify why you want to do this specific thing is it because you have an external stimuli you will be fired and the risk is high if you won't suceed or you want to learn it you present something at the conference and you really really want to shine it's your internal value the how does

it feel so uh the dopamine system fires up the norrine system also fires up it's like I want this it's important for me I want that bad that I don't want to watch something before I don't need to drink coffee now I'm good so your P are dilated because it's first of all cognitive um work as well as slight stress shallow breaths and increased respiratory rates so

normal state would be like again please do uh take it with a grain of salt you might have a different reaction to challenge because of your mindset and the background but this is the most common pattern then your HRV is lower and it has patterns of increased sympathetic nervous system activity which is phytolight so basically before the biss of flow you anxious and you have an increased

body temperature because again you are stressed you are moob mobilizing all of your resources two things to look at on your variables would be uh your respiratory rate it is increased and so for instance whatever you had the previous level it needs to go up and at the same time if you have an advanced uh reporting on your watches for instance then you will also see stress

increase based on the uh sympathetic nervous activation in the release phase uh the all right before I forgot so on the lower left part the three brains this is an interesting part normally you think about yourself a lot can I do this what will happen to me if I don't do this am I good enough uh the default mode network is almost always on and this is

one responsible for this type of thoughts as well as the time perception also depends on whether this part of the brain is active or not because if you don't think about yourself you also don't put things into perspective and the time speeds wait the time speeds up so you think you did nothing but several hours passed by and in the opposite if you are stressed especially in

some social situations you go several hundreds a mile per second you come up with so many scenarios what have you said was it okay was it not but in reality it's just a second time pass so in the release phase the um resources is normally shared between default mode Network and Central executive Network and now the focus is Shifting to CN where you start concentrating on the

task as well as you utilize your working memory a lot and this part of the brain is basically juggling the information that it gets from the external output and stimuli and your internal systems as well as you now know what to do so your respiratory rate is stabilizing it is still higher in comparison to the rest State rest state is when you sleep this is the lowest

pattern and the most stable pattern you will see and um the parasympathetic system because you are comaling down is coming up online so your PES are still dilated so if somebody looks at you they will see something like this um The increased breast depths you are breathing slower and deeper but yet fast in comparison to the rest State the heart rate variation is improving meaning your heart

is starting to beat more normally it doesn't have very specific patterns it just it does its own thing and you have a slightly decreased body temperature flow now you've cleared all the uh obstacles in front of you and you have no self awareness whatsoever you do exhibit some moderate stress Market markers because you still are thinking hard and you produce like you are exerting a lot of

resources uh mental and physical you have no sense of time because again you have no self reflection at this point you have extreme Focus Central executive network is highly active and every waking millisecond your brain is as I mentioned before evaluates the external stimul somebody came to your desk there is a pigeon outside of your window or an message pops up um you evaluate how important this

is versus what you're doing now as well as you're evaluating the error rate for instance if you very simple example if you have your code and you run the test if the tests are still green and you can proceed you will continue coding if for some reason there is a bug in your code that you identified then this is a uh stimulate external stimul important to a

task that can take you out of this flow it will your General State of Mind you have sense of control and joy and happiness or at least like deep calm State because you not in a hurry you're not in a danger you are in a challenge State on your terms the pattern that you would see on the graphs on your trackers would be uh stress low still

above the restful State uh you will have stabilized but heightened body temperature slightly dilated pupil and potentially irregular time between breasts as well as slightly above normal heart rate variation so if you just put the measurements of your sleep next to the flow the there are going to be some deviations and if we out like plot the breast uh respiratory rate the respiratory rate then the flow

state will be a little bit higher but exhibit almost the same pattern in recovery so let's say you fix this feature you finished it it works you can close the ticket now you reached your goal uh this is where you get out of the flow because there is no input for the specific task left or the other reasons to get out of flow is your resources are

insufficient you want to go to the toilet you are too thirsty you are too sleepy like physiologically you are not capable of handling the State anymore or there is some urgent uh situation that you need to take care of and it takes precedent over your current task for instance your your boss comes to a desk and like I need this report now you have to switch so

in this state it characterizes by constricted peoples more constricted than within the rest State you have decreased breast depths normalized time between breasts HRV is un uh there are no clear pattern among all participants and all studies because the recovery phase is where your body decides on how to replenish the energy and it is highly um personalized you might decide to just lay down to meditate to

sleep to eat to go for a walk to do Sports and like right after this activity so the readings would be do and this is also the moment where parasympathetic system is taking over completely and pushes your body into resting state reflection is an optional state or optional stage that is not mentioned in all or 90% of the researches that I read because it's not a necessary

stage it is something intentional so if you want to improve the currence of flow or the duration of flow stage itself or short the other stages you need to actively approach this and decide if you have some disadvantages or vors that kind of put you into distor state or you want to create a new habit that will help you um get into Focus state or not care

more um in this state you have slightly delated peoples because you do learning you do memory consolidation both default mode work with slightly focus on yourself because you evaluate your own experience and well then you are in the center of uh attention you have normalized temperature you have normalized breast patterns and absolutely normal waking pattern of HRV so your heart is not going into overdrive it's not

under workking or overworking it's just it it exists this state is necessary for active improving of the flow you can forget about this if you want to track your general patterns like behavioral patterns and come to it later if if you want to have more directed uh approach to this so how do you analyze the whole thing first of all you need to understand your Baseline patterns

and also you saw that the questionary pops up only in one phase if we consider uh reflection an optional stage why is it because it's highly subjective State uh there are no um similar patterns across people like even if two developers are sitting next each other and from their words they were in the flow they might have very different readings because of the background that they have

because of the perception of the risk because of genetics so you will feel in different questionaries at the end of the day or right after or when you are able to identify that you just been in the flow um you will create sort of a binary features with this day good this day bad this day bad this the good stuff uh afterwards I encourage you to check

for biometric data to support your subjective experience so you would again for this specific coding task you would search for this what curve in your HRV in your Bri patterns I think Garmin and the most watches actually have this um graph so you can just look at those and also you should reflect on details so identify the days or if you have the time which is amazing

but be aware of the biases um of time frame for a flow then you can also Identify some Behavioral or environmental factors like coffee makes me too awake to go into flow but when I drink green tea this is fine or painkillers for instance uh increase my focus or uh talking to Jeff completely destroys my focus I don't know then once a week so this is every

day once a week check trends for binary events so how many of the flow instances you have how do they correlate with the day with the specific ideally again if you have this data this details of the data uh what time of the day correlates with and uh also think about some binary events that it can contribute to the flow or are very close to the flow

for instance there's an interesting thing that says sports right before cognitive um exercise is mostly destructive where coffee 30 minutes an hour before uh cognitive work or flow inducing uh exercise is undes undecided depending on how you react to caffeine so for days with flow currents compare binary events and also you can go like for now we're talking about flow as a binary constract there is or

there is none but but for days without flow currency you also compare the trends and try to identify ideally you also put information like have I tried then reflect on similarities and deviation pull plot the graphs together on the timeline and see if there are reoccurring patterns do it over multiple days regarding the self assessment for every single activity there is a specified questionary that is designed

to capture the state of and sometimes also the depth of flow um this is something I think is not necessary for us to talk about where the flow is a spectrum or just a binary state but in this case it's something like within the nine Dimensions that you have did you feel in control did you think about yourself uh do you like what you did or did

you like what you did would you like to do it again so this is all estimates the strength of those nine Dimensions the boxes that I've showed you you should you are not obliged to use 0 to five scale you can use whatever scale but please do keep it consistently so what would you use for tracking um there are some things and some like for instance you

can use watches watches use uh lighter materal like they shine line to your skin and then read the reflect light energy and compare it and on the difference alone they do it like several hundred times within a second and identify the bits how fast your blood goes through your body between the bits as well as how saturated is it with oxygen so it identifies breathing pattern stress

rest leap blood pressure not really it can be deferred but not accurately then there is also ECG electrocardiogram straps the problem with those is you have to put them one specific time meaning you are anticipating flow enterence but it's not given so you are creating specific bias in your data still can be used it is way more detailed in comparison to watches but at the end of

the day it measures thing what you can look at at the apps as well you don't have to get the raw data because it's surprisingly hard for every single brand that I tried with you can look at the general Trends you definitely should look at anomalies and anomaly trends do not react to a normally right way because there are different things that can happen and check out

for seasonality the problem with this data is infrequent sampling none of the devices on the consumer grade do it on the level to be able to use for neurological assistance the in best case readings are every 30 seconds your heart rate variation is in milliseconds so you can imagine that this time series is not really applicable uh it's hard to get raw data surprising but fact um

aggregated data is presented in sometimes really mean way uh it's sometimes really dumb like moving average instead of actual Trend computation and also timing basis if you're using something that you actively need to turn on you're already creating a a bias mental state flow experience and stress and mood can be assessed from your subjective questionary and same thing you can identify Trends CYCC components for instance I

can always be on flow on Monday but Friday not a chance um anomalies and shifts this data creates a huge amount of biases because the person is very complex and the psychological State and physiological State plays The crucial role here basically if you're hungry very low chance that you can concentrate on anything or otherwise if you work the other way around and also the body adapts really

fast so something that worked for you two weeks ago might not be as effective in two weeks also in consistent scale your perception of how I like what is good is changing over time especially if you are on the same level all the time notebook I told you I will show you if you want it in additional factors General Health higher happiness autonomy over a task like

you decide what you do and certain level of skill it is all required to have like if you unhappy stressed ful or downright fearful there is very low chance that you will succeed in focusing on anything at the same time illness like things make sense right negative mindset perceived risk is too high for instance if you will get fired if you won't finish this task well you

probably will focus but this is not going to be a flow State you're not going to enjoy this and genetics is an interesting one there is definitely an evidence that you might be more prone or less prone to Flow State but you need need a special environment and occasion to activate your advantage so I would put it as who knows also you can't really assess whether you

predisposed or not so take into account this Dimension skill-based challenge clear goals and clear and fast feedback as absolute prerequisite um mergin affection and awareness High concentration sense of control over the activity loss of self awareness loss of sense of time and the autotelic nature of the experience is something that will tell you yes this Focus ST uh session was a flow keeping this all in mind

if you want to improve your flow entry or occurrence you have to concentrate on specific things and ask several questions like what is my main problem how I cannot concentrate if I can't concentrate why can't I I don't like people around me I need music what type of music do I need and then you ask questions like okay if I introduce this thing can I keep it

up how can I measure it so that I need to put this into my questioner right I listen to music what type of music how long and uh do consider some side effects and compound things for instance if you say oh I am a wiling I need to do more Sports no chance that in one week you will have succeeded in increasing your focus more probably you

will have a decrease in your focus ability because the beginner state of uh doing sports is consuming your and plating your body resource instead of building them up so there is a compound effect to take into account so if you want to be super analytic about it then you would establish a baseline like no additional Factor you just leave your life you just uh track your things

and for two to four weeks then you choose one thing that is absolutely different from your normal behavior and you start tracking the whole thing again with this one additional Factor you will plot after two to four months or like two four weeks you will plot the graphs of the same timeline like Monday to Monday Tuesday to Tuesday this time frame against each other to see if

there were any deviations and please do start as I mentioned before from the questionaries and binary type of data and then go into thing and then depending on that you will see either an improvement nothing or or decrease and then you can decide whether you want to keep this pattern or not so thank you for your attention this is the main thing the resources you can see

here and let's go into the questions first or if you want to I can tell you more about what I did to improve my focus so how how do we do you tell it seems like we go the questions is it okay yeah of course yeah okay we have several of those after I finished my flow is there some minimal length of time after which the next

flow can occur yes um it will be personally detectable but you cannot go into sucess like next flow session until you have planish share resources so you have to feel the same level of alertness and fitness as in the first start I can't tell you exactly how much in time there is but the minimum span is to go to the toilet drink some coffee take a meditation

or a small nap uh do we have questions from audience who are not into Slide the platform maybe you want to just raise your hand and ask something directly oh everything is written everything is written SL okay uh how long the flow phase could last also I didn't put a specific time uh onto the graph because it's impossible to identify also because it's a very subjective State

um arguably or like the hardest evidence of the flow end is when you feel yourself again let's say like when you identify that your internal me is back online um it can so flow construct as a continuous thing can go from micr flow there is such a thing in the research um field microflow is something up to couple of minutes like you are so absorbed into reading

an email writing an email so couple of minutes down to several hours of uh very strenuous activity for instance Sports can be also uh flow inducing it is actually the first task that people try to replicate flow with and depending on how fit you are how much rewarding the whole thing is you can go out to several hours uh what about when people interrupt my flow and

that is an interesting question and it's a little bit relatable to yesterday's uh first keynote when Pier Le talked about that through the day there are more or less 40 various interruptions phones updates colleagues and so on and so on mhm so if you want to introduce the concept of flow to improve the overall productivity of your team you need to keep an eye or like for

instance as a team lead or like a organization if you care about this you need to take into account several things people are different for instance I need an absolute cavik feeling to be productive like everything needs to be dark and I only need to have my uh screen in front of me I need finally enough big earphones on my ears not because of the music and

the quality but because of the feeling that it embraced me and uh kind of isolates me from my colleagues and stuff so ideally in a team you would identify which things work for you like you have a list of my distractions and my let's call them Improvement factors you can check if the uh office is compatibly divided between different developers because some need to talk as the

part of the struggle phase they need some reassurance maybe or they need to bounce ideas and make sure that yep they got it they have an idea or you are the isolation type person and you need to just sit alone so figure out with your colleagues what works for you um and try to Zone your office into similar factors and see how that works so you have

to be proactive if I understand the question correctly uh you have to be proactive about your your own experience and what works for you because if you don't know nobody knows what did you do to improve your own flow besides big headphones yeah so one of the problems why I even started the whole topic is I was severely burned out to the point that I have no

focus at all for nothing and after some restoration phase I was able to start coding again but I realized that I'm easily distracted uh I tried out different things I went to cafes to work with headphones on headphones in I try different music I do have a small program that analyzes type of music and correlates it with whether it was in flow or not and interesting enough

for me I understood that I like really hardcore like evil almost techno Style so yeah electronic music for the win but uh in research they mostly and also Science pop literature they quote classic music didn't work for me but I know people who it worked with I talked to multiple people and figured out that one of my bosses for instance he needs absolute wide space and now

no one in a huge office like he needs to be alone in a beam of light everything needs to be white like a clean slate so this is how he diminishes the um distruction so what I drink coffee 30 minutes before I start working I uh my whole office room I work from home is super dark it's green Lush color with a specific colors as well as

identified that I can focus well when I have a very specific lightning and it's um LED in red uh Focus or like this red lights everything for instance a friend of mine tried to work in my office as well and he set everything up with really bright blue lights work for everybody differently so play around figure out I would say how much more productive we are in

the flow there is no specific number on this because we cannot reliably tell you that yes you've been in flow 75 minutes every day but there are estimates that that either very scientific for instance how fast how much faster are you on answering the same questions or similar questions math questions or how much faster you are in general in react time the estimate is around 500 times

on more efficient efficient on solving mathematical problems and uh around 3 to 700 again it's a very high range more productive and efficient on cognitive task in general also I have to mention here that one side effect of flow is General increase in happiness so for instance positive psychology School the grandfather of the flow theory is also the grandfather of the positive psychology he saw the correlation

in increased perceived happiness um within the same uh Behavior every day when people were going into the Flow versus people who were not all right and maybe one or two more more maybe last ones what are the flow exercises meditation so basically if you will be able to uh decrease the anxiety during the struggle phase it will help you out um as well as meditation mindfulness or

growth mindset let's put it also in uh the exercise basket um will if you stress less everything you do to stress less will improve your flow entry uh coffee is a really interesting one because technical coffeine increases your sympathetic nervous system activity but at the same time it's sort of a soul drink for many people they associate it with the work or like happy feeling they like

the taste and this perception of caus can be uh more like can d stronger on their Ral State than coffeine so again you will have to figure out for yourself Alisa you said meditation yes so let's repeat after me um okay okay okay I'm just kidding maybe it's individual thing maybe maybe we need to find as you say our own ways and uh okay last question uh

it didn't get most of the likes but I I wanted to ask this one I've heard that in Flow State you can make more mistakes what's your take on that uh this is an interesting one because one of the mechanism why you are keeping in the flow state is the assessment of your like your brain assesses the ratio of Errors to correct output meaning whatever you do

needs to have a quick so in this sense it is incorrect that you will do more mistakes but it can be the case depending on the task it can be the case that you do not perceive them as mistakes so I would say it's a little bit theoretical question and it will require the very strong and serious definition what is mistake and what is the um cost

of the mistake because your brain in the Flow State can tolerate specific number of mistakes until it says no I can't do this