Gaming the Flow

it's a kind of altered state. We should mention that. For me, I think about a river flowing and I 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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, 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

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 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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

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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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

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, and you can do so by writing an email to

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