Too Fast to Think by Chris Lewis

Author:Chris Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kogan Page
Published: 2016-09-29T18:00:00+00:00

Flow and pulse: the way to sustainable creativity

In positive psychology, Flow, also known as the zone, is the mental state when a person is immersed in a complete energized focus. It was named by Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. According to him, in Flow, the emotions are not just contained and channelled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. The hallmark of Flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task, although Flow is also described (below) as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even oneself or one’s emotions.

Csíkszentmihályi says: ‘Regardless of the culture, regardless of education, there are seven conditions that seem to be there when a person is in Flow. There’s this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback. You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake.’

This perhaps explains the story behind two online encyclopaedias. The first was developed at a cost of millions of dollars by a major corporation. The second was created by volunteers who were unpaid. Which do you think succeeded? Yes, the former was Microsoft’s Encarta which was closed in 2009 and the latter was Wikipedia which continues to thrive today. The concept of Flow partially explains this. Csíkszentmihályi also points out that increases in material well-being does not correlate in a linear sense with happiness. He points out that above a basic level of income, the number of people who call themselves happy is fixed at around 30 per cent. What he illustrates is that happiness is indeed a choice. You can’t make someone happy. They have to choose to be happy.

This sense of ecstasy, he says, is a step into ‘an alternative reality’. Although his research was based on 8,000 interviews of people from all types and backgrounds, the truth would appear to be deceptively simple – when people are in Flow, their left-brain processes are suspended. They are in habit mode and their ‘existence is temporarily suspended’. They have reached unconscious competence in the learning cycle.

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