September 2, 2014 • 30 mins
Join Robert and Julie as they explore what is to enter "the flow state," a place of both clarity and ecstasy that some say leads to ultimate contentment. So how do you achieve it and why are game designers so interested in it?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and um, Julie, go with
the flow, Douglas, Yeah, that's your thing. Yeah, I mean
it really should be all of our things, right, you
(00:23):
could go with the flow to experience what we have
come to know as flow states. Yeah, and uh, you know,
being in the flow creates a lot of different ideas
and the brain about what that is. Um, you know,
it's a kind of altered state. We should mention that.
For me, I think about a river flowing and I
(00:43):
always think about that phrase, Um, don't push the river,
it moves all by itself. Now that's meant to suggest like, hey,
don't try to do things before you're ready to do them,
or just trying to impose your own agenda onto things.
But it also reminds me of flow in the sense
that you cannot push the state of flow that we
(01:03):
sometimes fall into. You kind of have to submit to it. Yeah.
The model that I always come back to is that
of surfing, and it's not based on extensive surfing. I
only surfed surfed once with when I was visiting a
friend in a way. Uh, and he insisted, you know,
all right, keep coming, come out, try surfing. I'm okay,
I'll try it, and you just and kept insisting, or
I keep at it, keep at it. You're not really
(01:25):
surfing it. You're just paddling among the waves. And I'm
the whole time, I'm thinking, I really just want to
go back to the beach and get back on dry
land because there's a lot of work and it's not
really that fun. But is anyone who's served or even
boogiebird boarded, I guess uh, I can tell you. There
comes a point where you're you're you know, you're paddling,
You're paddling, You're laying on that board and you're just
(01:46):
you're just working your butt off to keep up with
the wave. And then the wave catches you and you
don't have to paddle, and that's the point where you
would climb up on the board and everything because the
board is being propelled by the wave instead of I you.
And that is, for me, is what flow state feels like.
If I'm if I'm writing, if I'm painting, if even
(02:07):
if I'm doing some sort of you know, a manual
sort of labor task, in the backyard sometimes um, not
very often, but it happens, is that you reach that
point where you're not you know, it's almost like you're
not having to work at it anymore. You're you're being
pulled by this force that seems outside of you. Yeah. Um.
Dr Ned Hollowell at Harvard Medical School described it as
(02:29):
flow being a doorway two more that most of us seek.
So I like this idea, I said, you know, submitting
to it, um, And some people say they slip into it.
But again, this doorway, this portal that feels like you're
you're just you know, you're in a different state that
you've left your body in a way. But at the
(02:50):
same time that's you're full of awareness and clarity and
things seem effortless, and that's this beautiful place to be.
So we're going to try to explore this a little
bit more today. And by the way, we have listener
David to thank for this. He is a lecture in
game design at Glasgow Caledonian University and uh, he wanted
(03:13):
to open more of this up to us. We've talked
about flow in the past, but we really haven't done
a deep dive on it. So it's been pretty fascinating,
So thank you, David. Yeah, because flow has come up
in the past on podcast episodes, and I feel like
it's a it's one of these concepts. It's not difficult
at all to grasp the essence off because I think
by some estimates, twelve percent of people would not know
(03:37):
what we're talking about here when we maybe just have
to imagine flow. But for the rest of us, flow
is something that at least occasionally pops up in your
life and you and you're like, yes, that is flow state.
That is what I want to aim for every day.
And this idea of flow, at least the idea of it,
not the term has been around for so long. I
mean Aristotle was trying to figure out what this is.
(03:57):
Abraham Maslow of maslow Hierarchy of Needs fame he called
these sessions of extraordinary experiences are peak experiences. And finally
we have someone by the name of me Hi Chick
sent me Hi who came along and really studied this
in earnest Yeah, Chicks and me High, Hungarian psychology professor.
(04:21):
He immigrated the United States at the age of twenty
two um Currently at Claremont Graduate University. He's the former
head of the Department of Psychology at the University of
Chicago and of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at
Lake Forest College. In addition to all of this, though,
he also was at one time an avid rock climber,
which is key, that's right, And in the seventies at
(04:42):
the University of Chicago, he was trying to really figure
out what this experience was because he's climbing these rocks, right,
he's engaging, and he's just living in the moment. He's
flowing with it yep. And he says, these exceptional moments
are what I have called flow experiences. He says, the
metaphor of flow is one that many people have used
to describe the sense of effortless action they feel in
(05:03):
moments that stand out as best in their lives. Athletes
refer to it as being in the zone, religious mystics
as being in ecstasy, artists and musicians as aesthetic rapture.
I love the aesthetic rapture. You're visited by the muse, right,
the muse has has ventured into your little universe from
somewhere beyond and is somehow commanding your efforts. So for
(05:26):
ten years he studied this in earnest all over the
globe and surveyed a number of people. And we'll talk
a little bit more about his methods in a moment.
But um, one of the things that kept coming up
besides this idea of it being effortless, was this quality
of fluidity. And that's where he came up with that
(05:46):
term flow. I like, so let's break it down. What
are the qualities of flow? Well, first of all, we've
got to talk about goals. There's a clear set of
goals that require appropriate responses. Uh And and that's that's
key here. Imagine rock climbing, because that's a great example
to come back to. There. There's some clear goals in
place here. You've got to stay attached to that rock
(06:07):
wall and not fall off. You want to move up,
but not down at least until you're ready to reverse directions.
You want to reach from, you know, from one hand
hold to another, from one foothold to the next. There's
a clear set of goals in place. Yeah, or think
of even like chess or tennis, which have a lot
of rules to follow. Right, it's a very black and
white universe, and this is something that doesn't necessarily exist
(06:30):
out and you know, outside of the flow state, right,
this black and white universe. Yeah, I mean life is
often really complicated where any given choice that we make,
we have to think, is this the best choice? Am I?
Am I engaging with life correctly? Am I raising my
child right? Because I'm hearing right answers and wrong answers
all over the board. But then you go to the
(06:50):
checkers board, You go to the chess board, and there
there are a clear set of rules in play, and
and it's a it's a smaller universe. It's the universe
that makes a lot more sense in that self contained
universe would be the second quality of flow. So chick
sept me High says that you know, if you perform
a religious ritual, you play a musical piece, we have
(07:10):
a rug all of that that that's a very self
contained universe in which you can apply those rules. Ritual
is key because because the whole part of this too
is that you're acting without questioning what should be done
or how it should be done to be a religious
ritual or this uh, this this job that you do
every day, there's a certain way to do it. You
(07:31):
do it well, you know that you're gonna get results.
From it and you just give yourself over to the activity. Now,
the third quality of flow would be mediate feedback. So
you're in it right, your your playing tenants, your playing chess,
you're rock climbing, and you are getting feedback from your environment,
from your brain, from your your muscle memory, from your
(07:52):
neuronal memory about what's going on and how well you're
performing at this task. Right, you're climbing that rock wall,
You're gonna know right away if that was a good move.
You know, you're gonna either either you're gonna slip a
little bit, or you're gonna realize, well, I'm I really
need to move this way up the wall. Or you're
playing chess, you move that piece. Uh. You know, you
might be engaged in all sort of a longer game
(08:13):
strategy wise, but for the most part, you're going to
find out right away if that was a wise move
to make right, which kind of gives you a sense
of control and mastery. And that leads to the fourth
quality of flow, which is a manageable challenge because, as
you say, if if during this feedback process you're getting
some information that you need to tweak things, then you
(08:34):
have that control and you can rise to the challenge.
So your skill level would be well matched with the
task at hand. Um, but the task would be just
difficult that you'd have to really stretch your skills without
snapping them in order to meet it. Yeah, like you
hear people about talking about going into beast mode, right,
(08:55):
like you'er knowally, if they're going into beast mode, they're
probably doing something that in ages their their strengths. It
forces them to go to to up their act a
little bit. But it's not super easy, but it but
it is within reach. Um. An easy way to to
think about this is just think about jobs that you've done.
I mean, we've all had jobs. Say, uh, you've worked
on a factory line. Not to say that all factory
(09:17):
line is drudgery, but but it certainly can be, especially
if the task is just you know, doing one silly
thing after the other and there's no real flow to it.
It's just it's just monotonous and it's and it's you know,
beneath your your overall abilities, uh, that is falling below
the the flow state. Likewise, if you find if you're
(09:39):
thrown into if you're on a job and you're thrown
into a new task, that you really are not comfortable with,
you don't know your way around a program or or
the office space, then it's it's it's a it's a
frustrating situation. And that's uh, and that's beyond the flow state, right,
So you have to have that thing that again is stretching,
that's not snapping your brain in your body. Yeah, I
(10:00):
mean the passage of time flows into this too, right,
because when you're in the flow state, time just clicks
by like that, right, because you're just you're just sailing
through it. But if you're doing something just boring as well,
it's gonna it seems like the day last forever. If
you're frustrated at the first day of work, when you're
out of your element, it just seems to take forever. Well.
I mean a good example of this is have you
(10:21):
ever been writing or researching or doing something that's really
pleasurable and you just keep ignoring the signals from your
bladder that that it needs to be tended to and
you can, Yeah, I'll get to you, I get to you.
And that's how I always know that I'm in a
flow state, because yeah, I know that's some sort of
biological consequence going on right now, but I don't have
time for it. I'm in the flow. And that's what's
(10:43):
so incredible, because you are in that state of this
kind of black and white tones is self contained universe,
and it's a refuge where everything else, all the great
tones of life just recede into the background. And then
this feels like there's some sort of fundamental element of
the core of yourself that you're able to express, that
you have some sort of access to that. And some
(11:04):
people call it the news, right, Yeah, And of course
it goes without saying that in all of this, you're
shutting off that default mode network, those that, you know,
the nagging voices and concerns about the past in the future.
You really become the act. You become the thing you're doing.
It's almost like a superhero, you know, where it's you're
no longer the journalist Clark Kent. You've stripped off your
(11:25):
your boring work clothes and you've become this this thing,
this this ideal version. Yeah, and we've seen this before
and we've talked about it in jazz musicians who are
able to dim the lights in their prefrontal cortex, that
that part of your brain that is all is responsible
for executive function, and we'll say all this sort of nagging,
annoying things like it's just really good, are you? Is
that a great note that you just wrote that you
(11:47):
just played. It dims all of that in order for
the rest of your brain to fully engage in creation
at that very moment. All Right, we're gonna take a
quick break, and when we come back, we will talk
about who enters, flow and out much. Alright, we are
back and we're gonna talk a little bit more about
(12:09):
me how to sent me high? And Um wanted to
talk about his experience sampling methods. So again within this
tenure global study, it's something that he employed to create
at some points a virtual film strip of a person's
daily activities and experiences. And we're talking about twenty respondents
who were outfitted with a pager or a watch would
(12:33):
which would go off at random times within each two
hours segment, and that would prompt the person to stop
what they were doing right down in the book, UM,
where that person was, what that person was doing, thinking
about who they were with, and then that person would
rate their state of consciousness on various numerical skills. So
(12:53):
what they did as they amassed something like seventy thousand
pages from people and went for to all those pages
at their Chicago lab, and they tried to figure out
this sort of quantitative and qualitative way to get at
this idea of flow and come up with some statistics. Yeah,
and some of the statistics are are pretty pretty impressive.
(13:16):
Says that roughly one in five Americans claims to interflow
as much as several times a day, whereas about fifteen
percent say they never uh entered this mode never happens
for them. Um, and the frequencies he says, seem to
be quite stable and universal. For instance, they conducted a
survey of six thousand, four hundred exty nine Germans UM
(13:37):
and the same you know, same questioning, same same rigmarole uh,
and they found that that those who entered flow off
and sometimes rarely and the never don't range was around
twelve percent. Yeah, so it's pretty universal here UM across
cultures that people experience the state of flow. And moreover,
(13:58):
check sent me high and to his colleagues found that
people reported that they felt happier when they dipped into
those states to flow. In other word, their overall happiness,
writing happened to be larger than their non flow state counterparts,
and they found that that flow generally occurs when a
person is doing his or her favorite activity. You know,
(14:20):
so again you're you're gardening, you're engaging with your art
or your cooking or whatever. Uh. It also occurs though,
when when one is driving, when you're talking to friends, um,
a lot. Surprisingly, it occurs a lot at work, I said.
Very rarely would they see people who would actually enter
this flow state during passive leisure activities such as watching
(14:41):
television or just sort of kicking back in your backyard. Now,
I have read that in rare occurrences you can have
a state of flow with with television, but it has
to be something that is so incredibly engaging that you
meet the conditions of flow. Um. Now we know about
television and the quality of it, So there's I would
(15:02):
say overwhelmingly there. There may not be shows that engage
people to that extent except for True Detective. Yeah, I
was just thinking about it. Yeah, shows like like True
Detective or I'm I'm really enjoying the nick right now.
You you engage in these shows and you do feel
sort of pulled along by their own energy. Um, and
it time's easy to take that for granted, especially if
(15:23):
you're in kind of a draft of good television. Yeah,
those are the worst, all right. So we talked about
those conditions to flow. What are they, especially if you
consider this in the context of television, something that you're watching.
You have to be completely involved with what you're doing.
That's one condition. Yeah. So again it's everything shut off
to the point where you you're forgetting that you need
to be somewhere or that you need a urinate. Yes,
(15:45):
a sense of ecstasy of being outside everyday reality. Great
inner clarity. You have a sense of what needs to
be done and how to do it. Yeah, everything's like
it's almost like bullet time, or like any any sequence
in a film home where a hacker is doing something
on a computer. They're like, oh, this is and he's
in a flow state. He's just completely cut out. He's
just living it. Yeah, I'm I'm doing the Sandra Bolock
(16:08):
like crazy keyboard fingers right now Internet. Um, I love that,
Like she's not even really typing real things. There. Then
there's a confidence that the activity is doable, so the
skills are adequate to do the task exactly. Yeah, nobody's
in a flow state being thinking it might work. I
don't know. No, you're you're owning it a sense of serenity,
(16:28):
you have no worries about the self and feelings of
growing beyond the boundaries of the ego. Right, that's right.
The default mode network is shut down. It's dim to
the background and not hearing it. Yeah, it's kind of
a meditative quality to it. You have a sense of
timelessness and intrinsic motivation. Whatever produces flow becomes its own reward.
(16:49):
So we're talking about in terms of work, work for
work's sake. Yeah, it's one of those things where you know,
somebody's writing and it's not about oh, where am I
going to try and sell this short story, or or
you know who's gonna who's gonna read this? Or what
am I gonna do with it? No, it's it's or
even what am I it's gonna be like when I
try and edit this in a month. It's about the
act of writing. It's about being caught up in what
(17:09):
you're doing. And you know, a lot of times I'll
work at night because I just find that it's another
part of the day that I'm productive and it allows
me to kind of mull over some of the stuff
that we talk about our research, and I have to
tell you that I look forward to it, like I
sit there and think about sitting at my kitchen table
and really like getting into the work and perhaps even
(17:31):
having like a bowl of popcorn next to me, um
my dinner popcorn. So it's not too surprising then that
one of chicks sent me high as findings is that
people have more occasions of flow on the job than
in their free time. Yeah, this is interesting because I'm
just on a surface level, it's easy to say, well,
(17:51):
you know, work is drudgery and at home that's where
you're going to do the things that you really live for.
But when you think about our work tasks, a lot
of times those tasks are going to line up with
those requirements for flow, because you're gonna have well. Well,
the example that always comes to my mind when I
think about this is when I worked at newspapers and
I've pageinated, so I'm physically I'm not physically building it,
(18:14):
but on a screen, and like in design, I'm building
a front page of the newspaper and then the interior pages.
It's basically tetris with words and pictures, you know, making
it all fit together in a readable sense. Um. It's
not something that I was passionate about. It was something
that I could do, and it was a very you know,
self contained universe. Here it is on the page. Things
(18:35):
are fitting in the page, there are rules in play,
there's a definite goal in mind, and then I would
end up losing myself in this flow state of this. Uh,
this this work task that I would never do outside
of work and certainly haven't haven't done since I left newspapers. Yeah,
I would say this. I've experienced the same thing with
database management, putting queries together. And again there's it's matching
(18:59):
the skill level to the challenge, you know, and kind
of bumping that up and saying, can I can I
tweak this a little bit more? Can I get a
little bit more out of it? And it does put
you squarely into that moment which I think is so
important for this now chicking certainly high. Also, he does
point out that especially uh, you know, in in America
and in the West, we we have this idea that's
(19:22):
often passed down to us that work is not supposed
to be fun or engaging or enjoyable. That it's supposed
to be drudgery, and so it's easy to fall into
that trap. He also adds the caveat that that, yes,
there are going to be people that are stuck in
jobs that do not give them any level of satisfaction
and that's just an unfortunate reality. And though and oftentimes
that can be difficult to get out of those uh environments.
(19:44):
But but that, but that you do see more just
based on the E s M studies that he conducted,
you do see more occasions for flow on the job
than in the free time, because again, there are rules
in places, a task to be done, and if you
have the skills to do it, then you have the
possibility to interflow state. Yeah, and it is kind of
a bummer if you're not into your job, you don't
feel a challenge, then that could obviously create obstacles to
(20:06):
feeling like you're in the flow state or could enter it.
And some behind us say like maybe you could build
in challenges or reframe it in a way that you
could enter a state of flow. Um, maybe that's a
bit reductionist, maybe not, but it's interesting nonetheless, and discussing
it now, corporations are wild about this idea, because what
(20:28):
happens when you're in a state of flow, You get
more work done, take fewer breaks, You're you're not even
bothering to urinet, you're wasting water. It's true win win
for everyone. And the Mackenzie Quarterly conducted a ten year
study that basically basically corroborates this. They found that top
executives engaged in a state of flow, we're five times
(20:50):
more productive than their non flow counterparts. That's five more productive.
So it would make sense that people would try to
game this, and and I think about gaining it, think
about video games, which we'll talk about in a moment,
but I also think about something called the Flow Genome Project.
And this was founded this project by Stephen Coottler, who
(21:13):
is a journalist, a novelist and he wrote The Rise
of Superman, and by Jamie Wheel, the director of the
program of the Flow Genome Project. Now it says genome,
but really there's nothing, there's nothing here to do with
genetic material um. They're talking about it more in a
way of trying to get the core components of flow
(21:35):
defined and decoded. And what they say is that you
could do this, you can you can take flow and
you can really bump up your performance, And they used
athletes to study this. Now, Cotler personally got involved with
this project because he had lyne disease and he says
that he was bed ridden for a couple of years
(21:56):
and as a way to try to rehabilitate, he began
to you surf. And as a science journalist, he was
astounded to find himself and what he felt like was
at this magical moment and not being someone who would
just say, oh, I haven't had a magical mystical moment,
he tried to figure out what was going on and
(22:16):
that's when he really started to do a ton of
research into state of flow. Now, Coler, writing in his
book of the Rise of Superman, found a couple of
different things about athletes that's really interesting. Um. He said
that the fight or flight response, also known as the
adrenaline rush, would seem to be opposite of flow, okay,
(22:37):
but he said that the two highs are actually linked.
He says that risk heightens focus and flow follows focus,
and he seems he says that uh fight or flight
response will actually prime the body chemically and psychologically for
the flow state and he said that athletes report moving
through one to get to the other. Now, he's got
a Ted talk if you guys are interested in learning
(22:58):
more about that, and he also has a Google talk
that he gave. But just to kind of give a
quick and dirty of the neuro anatomy as they call it,
of flow, let's talk about four stages here. Jamie Wheel
discusses this in length, and he says that at the
outset of flow, we're faced with a problem. Right, especially
in the context of an athlete. Okay, you want to
(23:19):
make a better time than needed before, you want to
win the race, or it's just yeah, they're the gun
has gone off and it's time to run, or there's
a there's a football player coming at you and he's
trying to tack with you. Let's call it the panic
moment um. This is when your prefrontal cortex, the executive
function of your brain, wants to solve that problem. And
you have the amygdola very active amygdola processing fear fear of,
(23:43):
and you've got your brain toggling between these states, and
you have beta waves which are really active going on
at the same time. Now, he says that especially in athletes,
um you have the person then trying to confront that
fear and trying to instill what you might call a
relaxation response, and in doing so, taking a breath and
(24:05):
trying to cultivate that response. You have nitric oxide flushing
away cordisal, which we know is a stress hormone, and
nora EP and f ROM and those faster beta waves
are then replaced by these slower alpha ones, and you
have dopamine, and you have endorphins showing up on the scene.
And now now the conditions are just right for you
(24:27):
to go into a state of flow, and he says
that you get these um a deeper, slower state going
on in your brain. Now, imagine this to an athlete
who is moving maybe at top speeds. All of this
is going on. To think that your brain is now
moving into theta waves and then into gamma waves rolling in,
and he says that this is when your brain kind
(24:49):
of gets those lightning bolts of insight or that sense
that you're just experiencing something mystical or great, or you're
at the peak. Now he says that it doesn't necessarily stop.
They air that in order for you to actually game
that performance, you have to let that experience coalesced. And
how do you do that? You gotta sleep, of course, right,
(25:10):
and you let all of that stuff marinate your brain
for a while. And as we know, um with performance
in any activity, if your brain dreams about it, you're
probably gonna be able to boost your performance, especially if
you're aware that these are the states that inform flow
in performance. Yeah, and this is a fight or flyping
to it. It makes perfect sense even outside of the
context of sports, because you know, you're at the playground,
(25:33):
your kids on a ladder or something and they start
to fall. You don't think about what you're doing. It
just kicks in. You do it. It's in, you enter
into kind of a mini flow state just to do
what needs to be done. And it's interesting that you
say that, because when Cotler and we all are talking
about this, they're talking about it in a kind of
survival framework that basically athletes and other people are tapping
(25:56):
into this idea of flight or fight survival, getting into
that flow, getting to that moment where you can really
control it. Now, what Cotler says is that this kind
of high can be problematic because it can become addictive
and just to to Um, step back from this for
a second. I should mention that they're coming at this
from a very very narrow framework. They're talking about athletes
(26:20):
are talking about gaming survival instincts. There are other types
of flow, and so when I talk about coming or
thinking about working on my stuff at the kitchen table,
that's a kind of that's a nice version of flow, right,
that's like, oh, that's pretty much like Kitton farts and rainbows. Um,
I'm not in the other state of flow where maybe
I didn't have enough time to prepare for the podcast,
(26:42):
and now it's the eleventh hour and I've got to
get it done da da, and I have to force
myself into flow or else well, you know, you frame
that as a negative flow, but it's still flow, and
it's still you still end up losing yourself in the moment.
Like I mentioned newspapers earlier, and like newspapers, by the
very nature our last minute, I mean, you're just always
dealing with those deadlines. You're we're working up to the
(27:02):
last minute, you're over the deadline, but you're still learning
that flow state to get it done well. And when
I worked at a weekly I definitely would experience that high.
But it is not my preference, however, to come to
the table like that. Um. Now, again, this is very
a narrow framework that these guys are are working from.
This is very new. They even say this sort of
(27:23):
neuro anatomy of flow is yet to be fully informed.
But I should say that it does give us an
even better idea of why there is so much cognitive
flow academia talk involved in game design. Yeah. I mean, indeed,
(27:44):
think back to again to the qualities of flow and
what what kind of what it takes to get to
a flow state. You need a self contained world, you
need rules in place, you need a black and white
idea of what's good and what's bad. I mean, think
about any video game that you have ever engaged with.
You're dealing with that kind of a system. Is a
sell contain little world, maybe a sandbox world, their rules
in place. There's good guys, there's bad guys. There's things
(28:05):
you're trying to achieve. They're tassie, You're you're clicking off
the list. And most importantly of all, the difficulty is
not too great. Um. And if it is too great,
you can probably go into a little menu and scale
it down a bit. Until just the level that you're
comfortable with. Yeah, are game designer at listener, David says,
this is why many big commercial games designers try to
(28:26):
deliberately foster flow in the player, because why, well, the
more flow you're in, the more you're gonna play that game,
and the more you're gonna buy. Right, So it would
make sense that they they've created this world in which
survival is also paramount um and keeps you within the
confines of it. So you're stuck in the flow, but
(28:46):
in a good way. Yeah, I mean for the most part.
I mean, certainly, you know, we talked about early about
the possibility of addiction to the flow state, and certainly
there are people who deal with with with gaming addiction
where that game just becomes the flow state you during
that game is just so nice and so addictive you
just keep coming back to it again and again, to
the detriment of other things in your life. For that matter,
(29:08):
you can easily imagine want somebody who has become addicted
to the flow state at work to the point where
they're neglecting other aspects of their lives. Now you have
to point out that children are constantly engaged in a
state of flow. Of course they are. And Dr Seuss
actually described adults once as obsolete children, so in a way,
(29:29):
it's it's us getting back to that sense of play.
And I wanted to read a quick thing from Charlie Hone.
He's an author who's um entered the Ted Gladiator Arena
himself to talk about this, and he wrote a blog
entry for the School of Life and says, I have
to approach work as play. Otherwise my work sucks when
I tackle a problem with a sense of play voluntarily
(29:52):
because I'm inherently attracted to it. My creativity and optimism
and happiness, or I become fascinated with the world, I
fall in love with people, and whoever I'm working with
helps me make the game more fun or positive energy
becomes contagious. That's where my best works has come from.
And I thought, well, that's a nice way to perhaps
cap offs and flow. Yeah. Hey, so there you go
(30:13):
the flow state. As always, be sure to check out
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you'll
find all the podcast episodes, all the blog posts, all
the videos, as well as links out to our various
social media accounts. And hey, we would love to know
about your flow experiences are There are certain times of
the day that you get into the flow, or certain
sort of things that you do that are sure to
put you into that state. Please share it with us,
(30:35):
and you can do so by writing an email to
blow the mind at how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and um, Julie, go with
the flow, Douglas, Yeah, that's your thing. Yeah, I mean
it really should be all of our things, right, you
(00:23):
could go with the flow to experience what we have
come to know as flow states. Yeah, and uh, you know,
being in the flow creates a lot of different ideas
and the brain about what that is. Um, you know,
it's a kind of altered state. We should mention that.
For me, I think about a river flowing and I
(00:43):
always think about that phrase, Um, don't push the river,
it moves all by itself. Now that's meant to suggest like, hey,
don't try to do things before you're ready to do them,
or just trying to impose your own agenda onto things.
But it also reminds me of flow in the sense
that you cannot push the state of flow that we
(01:03):
sometimes fall into. You kind of have to submit to it. Yeah.
The model that I always come back to is that
of surfing, and it's not based on extensive surfing. I
only surfed surfed once with when I was visiting a
friend in a way. Uh, and he insisted, you know,
all right, keep coming, come out, try surfing. I'm okay,
I'll try it, and you just and kept insisting, or
I keep at it, keep at it. You're not really
(01:25):
surfing it. You're just paddling among the waves. And I'm
the whole time, I'm thinking, I really just want to
go back to the beach and get back on dry
land because there's a lot of work and it's not
really that fun. But is anyone who's served or even
boogiebird boarded, I guess uh, I can tell you. There
comes a point where you're you're you know, you're paddling,
You're paddling, You're laying on that board and you're just
(01:46):
you're just working your butt off to keep up with
the wave. And then the wave catches you and you
don't have to paddle, and that's the point where you
would climb up on the board and everything because the
board is being propelled by the wave instead of I you.
And that is, for me, is what flow state feels like.
If I'm if I'm writing, if I'm painting, if even
(02:07):
if I'm doing some sort of you know, a manual
sort of labor task, in the backyard sometimes um, not
very often, but it happens, is that you reach that
point where you're not you know, it's almost like you're
not having to work at it anymore. You're you're being
pulled by this force that seems outside of you. Yeah. Um.
Dr Ned Hollowell at Harvard Medical School described it as
(02:29):
flow being a doorway two more that most of us seek.
So I like this idea, I said, you know, submitting
to it, um, And some people say they slip into it.
But again, this doorway, this portal that feels like you're
you're just you know, you're in a different state that
you've left your body in a way. But at the
(02:50):
same time that's you're full of awareness and clarity and
things seem effortless, and that's this beautiful place to be.
So we're going to try to explore this a little
bit more today. And by the way, we have listener
David to thank for this. He is a lecture in
game design at Glasgow Caledonian University and uh, he wanted
(03:13):
to open more of this up to us. We've talked
about flow in the past, but we really haven't done
a deep dive on it. So it's been pretty fascinating,
So thank you, David. Yeah, because flow has come up
in the past on podcast episodes, and I feel like
it's a it's one of these concepts. It's not difficult
at all to grasp the essence off because I think
by some estimates, twelve percent of people would not know
(03:37):
what we're talking about here when we maybe just have
to imagine flow. But for the rest of us, flow
is something that at least occasionally pops up in your
life and you and you're like, yes, that is flow state.
That is what I want to aim for every day.
And this idea of flow, at least the idea of it,
not the term has been around for so long. I
mean Aristotle was trying to figure out what this is.
(03:57):
Abraham Maslow of maslow Hierarchy of Needs fame he called
these sessions of extraordinary experiences are peak experiences. And finally
we have someone by the name of me Hi Chick
sent me Hi who came along and really studied this
in earnest Yeah, Chicks and me High, Hungarian psychology professor.
(04:21):
He immigrated the United States at the age of twenty
two um Currently at Claremont Graduate University. He's the former
head of the Department of Psychology at the University of
Chicago and of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at
Lake Forest College. In addition to all of this, though,
he also was at one time an avid rock climber,
which is key, that's right, And in the seventies at
(04:42):
the University of Chicago, he was trying to really figure
out what this experience was because he's climbing these rocks, right,
he's engaging, and he's just living in the moment. He's
flowing with it yep. And he says, these exceptional moments
are what I have called flow experiences. He says, the
metaphor of flow is one that many people have used
to describe the sense of effortless action they feel in
(05:03):
moments that stand out as best in their lives. Athletes
refer to it as being in the zone, religious mystics
as being in ecstasy, artists and musicians as aesthetic rapture.
I love the aesthetic rapture. You're visited by the muse, right,
the muse has has ventured into your little universe from
somewhere beyond and is somehow commanding your efforts. So for
(05:26):
ten years he studied this in earnest all over the
globe and surveyed a number of people. And we'll talk
a little bit more about his methods in a moment.
But um, one of the things that kept coming up
besides this idea of it being effortless, was this quality
of fluidity. And that's where he came up with that
(05:46):
term flow. I like, so let's break it down. What
are the qualities of flow? Well, first of all, we've
got to talk about goals. There's a clear set of
goals that require appropriate responses. Uh And and that's that's
key here. Imagine rock climbing, because that's a great example
to come back to. There. There's some clear goals in
place here. You've got to stay attached to that rock
(06:07):
wall and not fall off. You want to move up,
but not down at least until you're ready to reverse directions.
You want to reach from, you know, from one hand
hold to another, from one foothold to the next. There's
a clear set of goals in place. Yeah, or think
of even like chess or tennis, which have a lot
of rules to follow. Right, it's a very black and
white universe, and this is something that doesn't necessarily exist
(06:30):
out and you know, outside of the flow state, right,
this black and white universe. Yeah, I mean life is
often really complicated where any given choice that we make,
we have to think, is this the best choice? Am I?
Am I engaging with life correctly? Am I raising my
child right? Because I'm hearing right answers and wrong answers
all over the board. But then you go to the
(06:50):
checkers board, You go to the chess board, and there
there are a clear set of rules in play, and
and it's a it's a smaller universe. It's the universe
that makes a lot more sense in that self contained
universe would be the second quality of flow. So chick
sept me High says that you know, if you perform
a religious ritual, you play a musical piece, we have
(07:10):
a rug all of that that that's a very self
contained universe in which you can apply those rules. Ritual
is key because because the whole part of this too
is that you're acting without questioning what should be done
or how it should be done to be a religious
ritual or this uh, this this job that you do
every day, there's a certain way to do it. You
(07:31):
do it well, you know that you're gonna get results.
From it and you just give yourself over to the activity. Now,
the third quality of flow would be mediate feedback. So
you're in it right, your your playing tenants, your playing chess,
you're rock climbing, and you are getting feedback from your environment,
from your brain, from your your muscle memory, from your
(07:52):
neuronal memory about what's going on and how well you're
performing at this task. Right, you're climbing that rock wall,
You're gonna know right away if that was a good move.
You know, you're gonna either either you're gonna slip a
little bit, or you're gonna realize, well, I'm I really
need to move this way up the wall. Or you're
playing chess, you move that piece. Uh. You know, you
might be engaged in all sort of a longer game
(08:13):
strategy wise, but for the most part, you're going to
find out right away if that was a wise move
to make right, which kind of gives you a sense
of control and mastery. And that leads to the fourth
quality of flow, which is a manageable challenge because, as
you say, if if during this feedback process you're getting
some information that you need to tweak things, then you
(08:34):
have that control and you can rise to the challenge.
So your skill level would be well matched with the
task at hand. Um, but the task would be just
difficult that you'd have to really stretch your skills without
snapping them in order to meet it. Yeah, like you
hear people about talking about going into beast mode, right,
(08:55):
like you'er knowally, if they're going into beast mode, they're
probably doing something that in ages their their strengths. It
forces them to go to to up their act a
little bit. But it's not super easy, but it but
it is within reach. Um. An easy way to to
think about this is just think about jobs that you've done.
I mean, we've all had jobs. Say, uh, you've worked
on a factory line. Not to say that all factory
(09:17):
line is drudgery, but but it certainly can be, especially
if the task is just you know, doing one silly
thing after the other and there's no real flow to it.
It's just it's just monotonous and it's and it's you know,
beneath your your overall abilities, uh, that is falling below
the the flow state. Likewise, if you find if you're
(09:39):
thrown into if you're on a job and you're thrown
into a new task, that you really are not comfortable with,
you don't know your way around a program or or
the office space, then it's it's it's a it's a
frustrating situation. And that's uh, and that's beyond the flow state, right,
So you have to have that thing that again is stretching,
that's not snapping your brain in your body. Yeah, I
(10:00):
mean the passage of time flows into this too, right,
because when you're in the flow state, time just clicks
by like that, right, because you're just you're just sailing
through it. But if you're doing something just boring as well,
it's gonna it seems like the day last forever. If
you're frustrated at the first day of work, when you're
out of your element, it just seems to take forever. Well.
I mean a good example of this is have you
(10:21):
ever been writing or researching or doing something that's really
pleasurable and you just keep ignoring the signals from your
bladder that that it needs to be tended to and
you can, Yeah, I'll get to you, I get to you.
And that's how I always know that I'm in a
flow state, because yeah, I know that's some sort of
biological consequence going on right now, but I don't have
time for it. I'm in the flow. And that's what's
(10:43):
so incredible, because you are in that state of this
kind of black and white tones is self contained universe,
and it's a refuge where everything else, all the great
tones of life just recede into the background. And then
this feels like there's some sort of fundamental element of
the core of yourself that you're able to express, that
you have some sort of access to that. And some
(11:04):
people call it the news, right, Yeah, And of course
it goes without saying that in all of this, you're
shutting off that default mode network, those that, you know,
the nagging voices and concerns about the past in the future.
You really become the act. You become the thing you're doing.
It's almost like a superhero, you know, where it's you're
no longer the journalist Clark Kent. You've stripped off your
(11:25):
your boring work clothes and you've become this this thing,
this this ideal version. Yeah, and we've seen this before
and we've talked about it in jazz musicians who are
able to dim the lights in their prefrontal cortex, that
that part of your brain that is all is responsible
for executive function, and we'll say all this sort of nagging,
annoying things like it's just really good, are you? Is
that a great note that you just wrote that you
(11:47):
just played. It dims all of that in order for
the rest of your brain to fully engage in creation
at that very moment. All Right, we're gonna take a
quick break, and when we come back, we will talk
about who enters, flow and out much. Alright, we are
back and we're gonna talk a little bit more about
(12:09):
me how to sent me high? And Um wanted to
talk about his experience sampling methods. So again within this
tenure global study, it's something that he employed to create
at some points a virtual film strip of a person's
daily activities and experiences. And we're talking about twenty respondents
who were outfitted with a pager or a watch would
(12:33):
which would go off at random times within each two
hours segment, and that would prompt the person to stop
what they were doing right down in the book, UM,
where that person was, what that person was doing, thinking
about who they were with, and then that person would
rate their state of consciousness on various numerical skills. So
(12:53):
what they did as they amassed something like seventy thousand
pages from people and went for to all those pages
at their Chicago lab, and they tried to figure out
this sort of quantitative and qualitative way to get at
this idea of flow and come up with some statistics. Yeah,
and some of the statistics are are pretty pretty impressive.
(13:16):
Says that roughly one in five Americans claims to interflow
as much as several times a day, whereas about fifteen
percent say they never uh entered this mode never happens
for them. Um, and the frequencies he says, seem to
be quite stable and universal. For instance, they conducted a
survey of six thousand, four hundred exty nine Germans UM
(13:37):
and the same you know, same questioning, same same rigmarole uh,
and they found that that those who entered flow off
and sometimes rarely and the never don't range was around
twelve percent. Yeah, so it's pretty universal here UM across
cultures that people experience the state of flow. And moreover,
(13:58):
check sent me high and to his colleagues found that
people reported that they felt happier when they dipped into
those states to flow. In other word, their overall happiness,
writing happened to be larger than their non flow state counterparts,
and they found that that flow generally occurs when a
person is doing his or her favorite activity. You know,
(14:20):
so again you're you're gardening, you're engaging with your art
or your cooking or whatever. Uh. It also occurs though,
when when one is driving, when you're talking to friends, um,
a lot. Surprisingly, it occurs a lot at work, I said.
Very rarely would they see people who would actually enter
this flow state during passive leisure activities such as watching
(14:41):
television or just sort of kicking back in your backyard. Now,
I have read that in rare occurrences you can have
a state of flow with with television, but it has
to be something that is so incredibly engaging that you
meet the conditions of flow. Um. Now we know about
television and the quality of it, So there's I would
(15:02):
say overwhelmingly there. There may not be shows that engage
people to that extent except for True Detective. Yeah, I
was just thinking about it. Yeah, shows like like True
Detective or I'm I'm really enjoying the nick right now.
You you engage in these shows and you do feel
sort of pulled along by their own energy. Um, and
it time's easy to take that for granted, especially if
(15:23):
you're in kind of a draft of good television. Yeah,
those are the worst, all right. So we talked about
those conditions to flow. What are they, especially if you
consider this in the context of television, something that you're watching.
You have to be completely involved with what you're doing.
That's one condition. Yeah. So again it's everything shut off
to the point where you you're forgetting that you need
to be somewhere or that you need a urinate. Yes,
(15:45):
a sense of ecstasy of being outside everyday reality. Great
inner clarity. You have a sense of what needs to
be done and how to do it. Yeah, everything's like
it's almost like bullet time, or like any any sequence
in a film home where a hacker is doing something
on a computer. They're like, oh, this is and he's
in a flow state. He's just completely cut out. He's
just living it. Yeah, I'm I'm doing the Sandra Bolock
(16:08):
like crazy keyboard fingers right now Internet. Um, I love that,
Like she's not even really typing real things. There. Then
there's a confidence that the activity is doable, so the
skills are adequate to do the task exactly. Yeah, nobody's
in a flow state being thinking it might work. I
don't know. No, you're you're owning it a sense of serenity,
(16:28):
you have no worries about the self and feelings of
growing beyond the boundaries of the ego. Right, that's right.
The default mode network is shut down. It's dim to
the background and not hearing it. Yeah, it's kind of
a meditative quality to it. You have a sense of
timelessness and intrinsic motivation. Whatever produces flow becomes its own reward.
(16:49):
So we're talking about in terms of work, work for
work's sake. Yeah, it's one of those things where you know,
somebody's writing and it's not about oh, where am I
going to try and sell this short story, or or
you know who's gonna who's gonna read this? Or what
am I gonna do with it? No, it's it's or
even what am I it's gonna be like when I
try and edit this in a month. It's about the
act of writing. It's about being caught up in what
(17:09):
you're doing. And you know, a lot of times I'll
work at night because I just find that it's another
part of the day that I'm productive and it allows
me to kind of mull over some of the stuff
that we talk about our research, and I have to
tell you that I look forward to it, like I
sit there and think about sitting at my kitchen table
and really like getting into the work and perhaps even
(17:31):
having like a bowl of popcorn next to me, um
my dinner popcorn. So it's not too surprising then that
one of chicks sent me high as findings is that
people have more occasions of flow on the job than
in their free time. Yeah, this is interesting because I'm
just on a surface level, it's easy to say, well,
(17:51):
you know, work is drudgery and at home that's where
you're going to do the things that you really live for.
But when you think about our work tasks, a lot
of times those tasks are going to line up with
those requirements for flow, because you're gonna have well. Well,
the example that always comes to my mind when I
think about this is when I worked at newspapers and
I've pageinated, so I'm physically I'm not physically building it,
(18:14):
but on a screen, and like in design, I'm building
a front page of the newspaper and then the interior pages.
It's basically tetris with words and pictures, you know, making
it all fit together in a readable sense. Um. It's
not something that I was passionate about. It was something
that I could do, and it was a very you know,
self contained universe. Here it is on the page. Things
(18:35):
are fitting in the page, there are rules in play,
there's a definite goal in mind, and then I would
end up losing myself in this flow state of this. Uh,
this this work task that I would never do outside
of work and certainly haven't haven't done since I left newspapers. Yeah,
I would say this. I've experienced the same thing with
database management, putting queries together. And again there's it's matching
(18:59):
the skill level to the challenge, you know, and kind
of bumping that up and saying, can I can I
tweak this a little bit more? Can I get a
little bit more out of it? And it does put
you squarely into that moment which I think is so
important for this now chicking certainly high. Also, he does
point out that especially uh, you know, in in America
and in the West, we we have this idea that's
(19:22):
often passed down to us that work is not supposed
to be fun or engaging or enjoyable. That it's supposed
to be drudgery, and so it's easy to fall into
that trap. He also adds the caveat that that, yes,
there are going to be people that are stuck in
jobs that do not give them any level of satisfaction
and that's just an unfortunate reality. And though and oftentimes
that can be difficult to get out of those uh environments.
(19:44):
But but that, but that you do see more just
based on the E s M studies that he conducted,
you do see more occasions for flow on the job
than in the free time, because again, there are rules
in places, a task to be done, and if you
have the skills to do it, then you have the
possibility to interflow state. Yeah, and it is kind of
a bummer if you're not into your job, you don't
feel a challenge, then that could obviously create obstacles to
(20:06):
feeling like you're in the flow state or could enter it.
And some behind us say like maybe you could build
in challenges or reframe it in a way that you
could enter a state of flow. Um, maybe that's a
bit reductionist, maybe not, but it's interesting nonetheless, and discussing
it now, corporations are wild about this idea, because what
(20:28):
happens when you're in a state of flow, You get
more work done, take fewer breaks, You're you're not even
bothering to urinet, you're wasting water. It's true win win
for everyone. And the Mackenzie Quarterly conducted a ten year
study that basically basically corroborates this. They found that top
executives engaged in a state of flow, we're five times
(20:50):
more productive than their non flow counterparts. That's five more productive.
So it would make sense that people would try to
game this, and and I think about gaining it, think
about video games, which we'll talk about in a moment,
but I also think about something called the Flow Genome Project.
And this was founded this project by Stephen Coottler, who
(21:13):
is a journalist, a novelist and he wrote The Rise
of Superman, and by Jamie Wheel, the director of the
program of the Flow Genome Project. Now it says genome,
but really there's nothing, there's nothing here to do with
genetic material um. They're talking about it more in a
way of trying to get the core components of flow
(21:35):
defined and decoded. And what they say is that you
could do this, you can you can take flow and
you can really bump up your performance, And they used
athletes to study this. Now, Cotler personally got involved with
this project because he had lyne disease and he says
that he was bed ridden for a couple of years
(21:56):
and as a way to try to rehabilitate, he began
to you surf. And as a science journalist, he was
astounded to find himself and what he felt like was
at this magical moment and not being someone who would
just say, oh, I haven't had a magical mystical moment,
he tried to figure out what was going on and
(22:16):
that's when he really started to do a ton of
research into state of flow. Now, Coler, writing in his
book of the Rise of Superman, found a couple of
different things about athletes that's really interesting. Um. He said
that the fight or flight response, also known as the
adrenaline rush, would seem to be opposite of flow, okay,
(22:37):
but he said that the two highs are actually linked.
He says that risk heightens focus and flow follows focus,
and he seems he says that uh fight or flight
response will actually prime the body chemically and psychologically for
the flow state and he said that athletes report moving
through one to get to the other. Now, he's got
a Ted talk if you guys are interested in learning
(22:58):
more about that, and he also has a Google talk
that he gave. But just to kind of give a
quick and dirty of the neuro anatomy as they call it,
of flow, let's talk about four stages here. Jamie Wheel
discusses this in length, and he says that at the
outset of flow, we're faced with a problem. Right, especially
in the context of an athlete. Okay, you want to
(23:19):
make a better time than needed before, you want to
win the race, or it's just yeah, they're the gun
has gone off and it's time to run, or there's
a there's a football player coming at you and he's
trying to tack with you. Let's call it the panic
moment um. This is when your prefrontal cortex, the executive
function of your brain, wants to solve that problem. And
you have the amygdola very active amygdola processing fear fear of,
(23:43):
and you've got your brain toggling between these states, and
you have beta waves which are really active going on
at the same time. Now, he says that especially in athletes,
um you have the person then trying to confront that
fear and trying to instill what you might call a
relaxation response, and in doing so, taking a breath and
(24:05):
trying to cultivate that response. You have nitric oxide flushing
away cordisal, which we know is a stress hormone, and
nora EP and f ROM and those faster beta waves
are then replaced by these slower alpha ones, and you
have dopamine, and you have endorphins showing up on the scene.
And now now the conditions are just right for you
(24:27):
to go into a state of flow, and he says
that you get these um a deeper, slower state going
on in your brain. Now, imagine this to an athlete
who is moving maybe at top speeds. All of this
is going on. To think that your brain is now
moving into theta waves and then into gamma waves rolling in,
and he says that this is when your brain kind
(24:49):
of gets those lightning bolts of insight or that sense
that you're just experiencing something mystical or great, or you're
at the peak. Now he says that it doesn't necessarily stop.
They air that in order for you to actually game
that performance, you have to let that experience coalesced. And
how do you do that? You gotta sleep, of course, right,
(25:10):
and you let all of that stuff marinate your brain
for a while. And as we know, um with performance
in any activity, if your brain dreams about it, you're
probably gonna be able to boost your performance, especially if
you're aware that these are the states that inform flow
in performance. Yeah, and this is a fight or flyping
to it. It makes perfect sense even outside of the
context of sports, because you know, you're at the playground,
(25:33):
your kids on a ladder or something and they start
to fall. You don't think about what you're doing. It
just kicks in. You do it. It's in, you enter
into kind of a mini flow state just to do
what needs to be done. And it's interesting that you
say that, because when Cotler and we all are talking
about this, they're talking about it in a kind of
survival framework that basically athletes and other people are tapping
(25:56):
into this idea of flight or fight survival, getting into
that flow, getting to that moment where you can really
control it. Now, what Cotler says is that this kind
of high can be problematic because it can become addictive
and just to to Um, step back from this for
a second. I should mention that they're coming at this
from a very very narrow framework. They're talking about athletes
(26:20):
are talking about gaming survival instincts. There are other types
of flow, and so when I talk about coming or
thinking about working on my stuff at the kitchen table,
that's a kind of that's a nice version of flow, right,
that's like, oh, that's pretty much like Kitton farts and rainbows. Um,
I'm not in the other state of flow where maybe
I didn't have enough time to prepare for the podcast,
(26:42):
and now it's the eleventh hour and I've got to
get it done da da, and I have to force
myself into flow or else well, you know, you frame
that as a negative flow, but it's still flow, and
it's still you still end up losing yourself in the moment.
Like I mentioned newspapers earlier, and like newspapers, by the
very nature our last minute, I mean, you're just always
dealing with those deadlines. You're we're working up to the
(27:02):
last minute, you're over the deadline, but you're still learning
that flow state to get it done well. And when
I worked at a weekly I definitely would experience that high.
But it is not my preference, however, to come to
the table like that. Um. Now, again, this is very
a narrow framework that these guys are are working from.
This is very new. They even say this sort of
(27:23):
neuro anatomy of flow is yet to be fully informed.
But I should say that it does give us an
even better idea of why there is so much cognitive
flow academia talk involved in game design. Yeah. I mean, indeed,
(27:44):
think back to again to the qualities of flow and
what what kind of what it takes to get to
a flow state. You need a self contained world, you
need rules in place, you need a black and white
idea of what's good and what's bad. I mean, think
about any video game that you have ever engaged with.
You're dealing with that kind of a system. Is a
sell contain little world, maybe a sandbox world, their rules
in place. There's good guys, there's bad guys. There's things
(28:05):
you're trying to achieve. They're tassie, You're you're clicking off
the list. And most importantly of all, the difficulty is
not too great. Um. And if it is too great,
you can probably go into a little menu and scale
it down a bit. Until just the level that you're
comfortable with. Yeah, are game designer at listener, David says,
this is why many big commercial games designers try to
(28:26):
deliberately foster flow in the player, because why, well, the
more flow you're in, the more you're gonna play that game,
and the more you're gonna buy. Right, So it would
make sense that they they've created this world in which
survival is also paramount um and keeps you within the
confines of it. So you're stuck in the flow, but
(28:46):
in a good way. Yeah, I mean for the most part.
I mean, certainly, you know, we talked about early about
the possibility of addiction to the flow state, and certainly
there are people who deal with with with gaming addiction
where that game just becomes the flow state you during
that game is just so nice and so addictive you
just keep coming back to it again and again, to
the detriment of other things in your life. For that matter,
(29:08):
you can easily imagine want somebody who has become addicted
to the flow state at work to the point where
they're neglecting other aspects of their lives. Now you have
to point out that children are constantly engaged in a
state of flow. Of course they are. And Dr Seuss
actually described adults once as obsolete children, so in a way,
(29:29):
it's it's us getting back to that sense of play.
And I wanted to read a quick thing from Charlie Hone.
He's an author who's um entered the Ted Gladiator Arena
himself to talk about this, and he wrote a blog
entry for the School of Life and says, I have
to approach work as play. Otherwise my work sucks when
I tackle a problem with a sense of play voluntarily
(29:52):
because I'm inherently attracted to it. My creativity and optimism
and happiness, or I become fascinated with the world, I
fall in love with people, and whoever I'm working with
helps me make the game more fun or positive energy
becomes contagious. That's where my best works has come from.
And I thought, well, that's a nice way to perhaps
cap offs and flow. Yeah. Hey, so there you go
(30:13):
the flow state. As always, be sure to check out
Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you'll
find all the podcast episodes, all the blog posts, all
the videos, as well as links out to our various
social media accounts. And hey, we would love to know
about your flow experiences are There are certain times of
the day that you get into the flow, or certain
sort of things that you do that are sure to
put you into that state. Please share it with us,
(30:35):
and you can do so by writing an email to
blow the mind at how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com.
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