Source: Flow Zone
Entry into the flow zone can occur when people find a task they are skilled at, and engage in it at a level that slightly taxes their ability. “People seem to concentrate best when the demands on them are a bit greater than usual, and they are able to give more than usual. If there is too little demand on them, people are bored. If there is too much for them to handle, they get anxious. Flow occurs in that delicate zone between boredom and anxiety.” …
Watching someone in flow gives the impression that the difficult is easy; peak performance appears natural and ordinary. This impression parallels what is going on within the brain, where a similar paradox is repeated: the most challenging tasks are done with a minimum expenditure of mental energy.
In flow the brain is in a “cool” state, its arousal and inhibition of neural circuitry attuned to the demand of the moment. When people are engaged in activities that effortlessly capture and hold their attention, their brain “quiets down” in the sense that there is a lessening of cortical arousal. That discovery is remarkable, given that flow allows people to tackle the most challenging tasks in a given domain, whether playing against a chess master or solving a complex mathematical problem. The expectation would be that such challenging tasks would require more cortical activity, not less. But a key to flow is that it occurs only within reach of the summit of ability, where skills are well rehearsed and neural circuits are most efficient.
A strained concentration-a focus fueled by worry-produces increased cortical activation. But the zone of flow and optimal performance seems to be an oasis of cortical efficiency, with a bare minimum of mental energy expended. That makes sense, perhaps, in terms of the skilled practice that allows people to get into flow: having mastered the moves of a task, whether a physical one such as rock climbing or a mental one such as computer programming, means that the brain can be more efficient in performing them. Well-practiced moves require much less brain effort than do ones just being learned, or those that are still too hard. Likewise, when the brain is working less efficiently because of fatigue or nervousness, as happens at the end of a long, stressful day, there is a blurring of the precision of cortical effort, with too many superfluous areas being activated-a neural state experienced as being highly distracted. The same happens in boredom.
But when the brain is operating at peak efficiency, as in flow, there is a precise relation between the active areas and the demands of the task. In this state even hard work can seem refreshing or replenishing rather than draining. Because flow emerges in the zone in which an activity challenges people to the fullest of their capacities, as their skills increase it takes a heightened challenge to get into flow. If a task is too simple, it is boring; if too challenging, the result is anxiety rather than flow.
It can be argued that mastery in a craft or skill is spurred on by the experience of flow-that the motivation to get better and better at something, be it playing the violin, dancing, or gene-splicing, is at least in part to stay in flow while doing it. Indeed, in a study of two hundred artists eighteen years after they left art school, Csikszentmihalyi found that it was those who in their student days had savored the sheer joy of painting itself who had become serious painters. Those who had been motivated in art school by dreams of fame and wealth for the most part drifted away from art after graduating.
Csikszentmihalyi concludes: “Painters must want to paint above all else. If the artist in front of the canvas begins to wonder how much he will sell it for, or what the critics will think of it, he won’t be able to pursue original avenues. Creative achievements depend on single-minded immersion.”
I like comparing the left brain with our digestive system…we accept food chewing it till it is ready to be sent to the stomach where the digestive food is prepared to be ingested into our blood circulation…at that point it is similar to the right brain in that it becomes subconscious but automatically nourishes the total body.
Jennifer,
The best evidence shows that many years of mechanical, left-brain activity is needed before the flow experience (right-brain experience) can take place. For the musician or artist, the mechanics of fingering and playing of scales, etc must take place before one can transcend the mechanics and let the expression flow from one’s fingers. When the flow happens, the muscle memory takes over and the body works without conscious direction. I know that it happens that way with my guitar playing. On some days, the fingers work without conscious intervention; in fact, there is no one there orchestrating the music, it just flows out with emotions driving the whole thing. Without a certain amount of expertise, this would never happen. As a beginner, I would always have to focus on the mechanics; but after 45 years, the skills are there for flow to happen.
Sid, You have the mechanics of “flow” down to a science, but being in the “Zone” is more surreal than mechanics. Yes, the “mechanics” should be there but even with the mechanics there is no guarantee of perfect harmonious flow. Only a few achieve this; Prodigies are a good example. Some one may play the piano beautifully and perfectly but something is missing. When you are 100% in the flow or in the zone, you are using your mechanics by rote but you are tapping into an altered state. You feel light and invincible. You are connecting with an energy or better yet, an intelligence, that is in the “air” not in yourself. You click into a portal. Those who know what I am talking about know that it is a euphoric state of mind. You are not in real time and you feel it. You are not even a separate body. You actually feel as if you are blended with what you are doing. There are levels of this, and one is always aware, in a surreal, almost slow motion kinda way, that you are there in the zone to perform your feat. You are right Sid, there is no stress in that moment because there is no thinking. The only pathway there is to stop all thinking with words. Your minds only feels thoughts and images. When this happens Sid, time doesn’t exist. There are no steps in thought, every feeling happens simultaneously, yet in slow motion…you actually enter another dimension. Even though a bystander or witness can see the pianist hands and fingers moving quickly, the pianist who is really in the zone, as is with prodigies don’t feel like they are moving fast with time. They feel peaceful and almost observing from out side their bodies, but not completely separate. It’s as if there are no solid borders holding your energy (your sixth sense of awareness) inside the confines of the physical mass of your body. You feel yourself more of energy than of mass. If you ask anyone who can and has entered this state to read the above and ask if it is accurate, I know, without a single doubt, those who truly have reached this zone will say; YES…YES..YES…this is it. For those who have not experienced it..they can read description after description and yet never truly grasp it because if they never entered another dimension, they can never imagine it just using their 5 senses because the 5 senses are just the background of the Zone. Your 5 senses are just keeping you connected with your body but your mind is not processing with them. The mind is consciously processing in 6 sense universal awareness mode. And, I guess, the 5 senses then flip and work in the subconscious. All of you is calibrated in perfect harmony and you feel it in every fiber of your being. And it is an overall state of total euphoria and oneness and harmony. And then all of a sudden, when your “feat” is done, you just automatic snap back into real time. and you feel the the speed of real time and the disconnect from the Zone (at it’s peak state) but you are still on that high. You don’t plan the Zone. You do what you do and at some moment you hit this peak and enter it automatically. I guess it must be like hitting the sound barrier. You have to gain a certain momentum…and then you just tap into it…like a secret code to a portal. Maybe your energy alters, and when that happens you hit the same frequency of the universe or some different dimension.