Investigating ‘Flow State’ With The Bassist From Phish

[MUSIC PLAYING] FLORA LICHTMAN: I’m Flora Lichtman. And you’re listening to Science Friday.

[PHISH, “FARMHOUSE”] Welcome, this is a farmhouse

FLORA 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 has toured 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, 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 Appelbaum from the University of California, San Diego. Great to have you both here.

MIKE GORDON: Thanks for having us.

GREG APPELBAUM: It’s a pleasure.

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

MIKE GORDON: 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, OK, 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. If you only listen to yourself, then it’s going to be a very bad conversation.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [CHUCKLES] We’ve had those on Science Friday here and there.

MIKE GORDON: 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. 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Why not? Is it just that it’s too overwhelming to call it what it feels like?

MIKE GORDON: 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, oh, 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [CHUCKLES]

MIKE GORDON: But it’s different for each person. So I don’tt 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.

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

MIKE GORDON: 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 have never seen the band, I say, well, you’re going to 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 day it will just sound terrible– not really. I mean, there’s a certain benchmark.

So then within the same kind of jam, we really don’t know where it’s going to go. And so I’d like to make an example of this. One song is “Bathtub Gin.” We’ve been playing it for forever.

[PHISH, “BATHTUB GIN”]

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 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.

And the dream state starts to– it starts to float. And then what happens, after a while, we’re on this chord, and 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 going to 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. And then at the very end, it just gets really high energy, and nothing is held back. And it’s just raging energy.

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

MIKE GORDON: For me it is, yes, because it’s not performing. It’s not trying to be cool. It’s 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.

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

GREG APPELBAUM: 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?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, can we measure it? Can you look at my brain and say, oh, yes, you’re in a flow state?

GREG APPELBAUM: 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 our secret weapon, which is Mike’s longtime producer and sound engineer, Jared Slomoff, whose job is to find those moments of musical articulation that are amazing, that are the flow. And with this three-pronged approach, we could then say, OK, 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.

FLORA 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.

GREG APPELBAUM: Exactly.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA 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.

GREG APPELBAUM: 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is that a compliment?

MIKE GORDON: I take it as a compliment.

GREG APPELBAUM: It’s given as a compliment.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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

GREG APPELBAUM: There are probably similarities and differences. But when we look 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 system might connect more with deeper respiration.

I mean, all of this is kind of what Mike was talking about, which is kind of a reduction in conscious effort. 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hmm. Mike, does that description match what it feels like for you, sort of a loss of sense of time? How would you put it into words?

MIKE GORDON: Yeah. I mean, so 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 onstage with all the people around.

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

MIKE GORDON: 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 keeping track. So I think the flow state is more– what’s the word– malleable [CHUCKLES] than we realize. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to cultivate and to get there in the first place.

GREG APPELBAUM: Just to unpack a little bit about our ability to detect a physiological signal, we spend 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Signal to noise of what?

GREG APPELBAUM: Of the brainwaves that we’re recording and the heart rate measurements that we’re recording. And–

MIKE GORDON: Versus the background noise, which is just maybe static from your muscles moving, et cetera.

GREG APPELBAUM: Exactly, and our ability to 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–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Is that a compliment?

MIKE GORDON: I take it as a compliment.

GREG APPELBAUM: It’s given as a compliment.

MIKE GORDON: It doesn’t mean that I’m the alpha male or anything like that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I don’t know what an alpha wave is.

GREG APPELBAUM: Yeah, so the brain is oscillating. It’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 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.

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

MIKE GORDON: 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 Xen Box, 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 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.

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

MIKE GORDON: 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.

GREG APPELBAUM: 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 music as communication with a 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 measurement devices, like more alpha activity, for example, that can be translated into a sound effect or a lighting effect or some–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Oh, cool.

GREG APPELBAUM: –type of musical pedal that he could operate with his brainwaves.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So you can be in your flow state, but there can be effects that helps– that cues the audience, too.

MIKE GORDON: Well, the effects help get in the flow state. The idea for me is to make it autopilot. And yeah, it would 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 my ultimate goal.

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 night, because it’s such a different level of being human. And it doesn’t feel cosmic or out in the middle of La-La Land. 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-actualization. And I think it could happen if someone were with a loved one watching a sunset or singing music with their daughter, [CHUCKLES] which I get to do, or whatever.

And but I found it through music and my bandmates have, too. And 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. But experiencing it, people change their whole lives, whether they’re playing or going to listen and experience it, for years. So it’s intangible.

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

MIKE GORDON: Thanks.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Mike Gordon is the basis for Phish. And Dr. Greg Appelbaum 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.

GREG APPELBAUM: Pleasure.

MIKE GORDON: Thanks for having us.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Today’s episode was produced by Dee Peterschmidt. I’m Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.

Copyright © 2025 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday’s programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/