The Body in Flow
Psychology focuses on the human mind, but the foremost concern of the human mind is the body in which it resides. The body is the mechanism through which we sense the world around us, and that with which we react to those sensations. While a sophisticated min can come to experience intellectual pleasure and pain, the way in which we become familiar with those sensations is entirely physical.
The body is capable of hundreds of separate functions and actions, some of which are passive (seeing, feeling, hearing) others of which are active (touching, running, throwing). The body is an instrument of flow when it has been trained to perform tasks, and perform them well. We are upset when we are clumsy with something and sense no progress toward becoming more adept, but engaged when we have a sense of our physical capabilities: that is, when the body does what the mind wants it to do.
The notion of a mind-body dichotomy is largely a fallacy. To have a body without a mind, or vice-versa, is meaningless as both components are necessary to complete a human being. The body does not do things without the mind: when we are swimming or running, or mind is engaged in the activity.
When we do something exceptionally well, such that the activity can be performed without deliberation or conscious attention, it may seem that the body is acting on its own, but this is speaking figuratively: literally, the mind remains engaged even when not fully attentive to the action.
Higher, Faster, Stronger
The fascination with sporting activities, which spans human culture, reflects the manner in which the management of the human body can produce flow. The activities of sports are frivolous, and the goals on winning a competition or beating a record are unimportant: but involvement in sporting activities is an example of flow.
There is flow in the process of learning a basic activity: how to run, to throw a ball, to climb, or whatnot. We begin in a state of inability until we learn the basic skills, then refine those skills in a direction of our choosing. We may wish to run faster or for further distances, we may wish to throw longer or more accurately. Then, we wish to match our previous performance, exceed our previous performance, and compare our performance to that of others.
Physical activity, practiced to achieve extremes, becomes a combination of unconscious activities and conscious ones: we tune out certain things and do them automatically, and focus on other things and attempt to do them purposefully.
What differentiates a sporting activity from the normal activity of everyday life is goals and skill development. Walking to work is a necessary task that is not particularly fascinating, but hiking through the mountains is a fascinating activity. It is not merely the novelty of the environment, but that hiking on rough terrain presents a series of puzzles to solve: you must develop skill at walking distances, changing your gait to accommodate altitude, overcoming common barriers and obstacles, and the like.
But even the stroll to work can become more interesting by setting goals: to attempt to modify one's pace to reach each street corner exactly when the light turns green, and the simple act of walking presents some level of challenge that can become more mentally engaging.
This leads to the notion of control: people find the greatest pleasure in physical activities in which they feel they have control. A person who is doing something for social reasons (to accompany a friend, to be part of a group, or to be known as a person who participates in an activity) or even for ulterior motives (to improve health by physical activity) enjoy it far less than those who find some intrinsic goal in the activity: to develop skills and achieve goals.
He also mentions a study that found activities with a greater level of emphasis on the body, as opposed to equipment and resources, produced greater levels of happiness. That is, swimming and running are more enjoyable than power-boating or driving a vehicle, and the correlation is the degree to which the body is engaged in the activity, rather than engaged in equipment that is performing the activity.
So as it turns out, the activities that create the greatest pleasure happen to be the cheapest, in terms of equipment and resources necessary.
The Joy of Movement
All physical activities have the potential for flow, even those that are not considered to be sports of fitness. The arts (dancing, painting) and even practical activities (carpentry an gardening) similarly involve physical activities in pursuit of a goal that require skill to perform.
He presents some passages from interviews with ballet dancers, who attest to the engagement in the activity. Those who feel the greatest happiness in their careers are not doing it for the money of the fame, but for the engagement in an activity that enabled them to focus their attention and effort on improving performance.
Here, pause to consider the focus on improving performance - not perfecting it. There are many people who enjoy activities who are not, nor have any goal of becoming, an expert, champion, or professional. Even seniors who engage in ballroom dance find pleasure in the activity - they do not hope to win a contest or earn compensation for their skills.
A person doesn't even have to become particularly adept in doing something to find pleasure in the practice - though with practice, skill generally does accrue. They merely need to be accomplished enough that their limitations do not become insurmountable obstacles to their goals.
Sex as Flow
One of the first things that comes to mind when speaking of physical pleasure is sex. It is certainly one of the most compelling biological urges, and any civilization without some interest in sexual activity would be extinct in short order. But beyond its reproductive purpose, there is a desire to engage in sexual activity for the pleasure of the act itself - and during certain periods of our lives, the majority of focus is on undertaking activities that will lead to sex.
But sex in itself is not always pleasurable. A rape may be physically similar to a loving encounter, but is psychologically quite different. Sex can be revolting, frightening, or neutral. It largely depends on how it is linked to a person's goals.
To take pleasure in sex, one merely has to be healthy and willing, as no special skills are required. There is a biological urge, and biological rewards - but like any other activity it can be boring and monotonous, particularly with time and experience. It turns from a highly positive experience into a meaningless ritual.
To maintain interest in sexuality, it must have the qualities of a flow experience: it must involve skills and goals. Consider the Kama Sutra and the Joy of Sex as manuals written to foster eroticism by making sexual activity more interesting and challenging. They are, in essence, instruction manuals for better sex.
Sexual activity, like any other activity, becomes boring and mundane once a person has mastered it, so additional challenges are added to make it more challenging. Courtship, in many cultures, is simply a method for making sex more difficult and protracted by placing emphasis on interactions leading up to the act of intercourse, which make sexuality a more demanding and challenging process. Fetishism and practices that are considered perverse or bizarre likewise represent methods of changing the goals of sex or the methods used to achieve them.
This is the reason that sex is so often associated with youth: like most activities, it is easy to be fascinated by it when you don't know what you're doing and are thrilled just to be doing it competently. As people gain experience, the activity becomes less interesting unless they can find ways to make it more of a challenge. Like any other activity, sex can remain engaging so long as people are willing to take control of it and cultivate their performance.
Yoga and the Martial Arts
MC observes that Western culture has largely been concerned with controlling the external environment, whereas Eastern culture has been concerned with controlling oneself. He postulates that "the perfect society would be able to strike a healthy balance."
Returning to topic: he considers yoga and the martial arts to be the most advanced forms of self-control: both involve focusing the mind on the body, to control what Westerners believe to be involuntary actions such as respiration and pulse through meditation and focus.
Even setting aside the mystical elements of these practices, it can be observed that the yogi and martial artist are able to accomplish feats of self-control that are astounding.
Yoga is very similar to flow: it attempts to achieve a joyous and self-forgetful state through intense concentration that focuses on controlling and disciplining the body. However, the difference is that the ultimate goal of flow is heightened self-awareness whereas that of yoga is the abolition of the self, as its ultimate state of Nirvana is described as merging the individual self with universal forces, becoming like a drop of water in an ocean. That aside, yoga is analogous to flow.
He then turns to the martial arts, which have a fascination in the west because they offer personal power - but this was not their origin. The origin of martial arts was in the Buddhist temples, where it focused on control of the body and resistance to distractions such as pain.
The ability to forget about the body transitioned into the ability to control the body - to achieve a state in which the body can be moved with precision and speed without requiring deliberation or concentration. This, also, is analogous to flow.
Flow Through the Senses
Because physical activities are easily witnessed, it is also easier to understand how they correspond to flow: we witness a person doing something, and see their increase in skill over time, and can appreciate their progress. Flow is also possible through the senses, which is more difficult to understand because they are entirely internal.
A musician can hear and an artist can see things that others cannot, because their senses have been trained to be attentive in a way that untrained persons are not. In the same way, an athlete develops an awareness of his own body, and can feel the subtle nuances in his own motions.
This ability to perceive is also germane to less frivolous activities. A
weaver will immediately see a missing thread in a cloth at a glance, where others may not notice it until it is pointed out to them - and sometimes, even then, they will not be able to see it. A doctor may know exactly what's wrong with a patient from a cursory physical examination because he knows what to look for and his mind is trained to diagnose based on his enhanced perception.
In sports, the arts, and practical tasks, our ability to achieve a heightened level of performance is achieved by being able to adjust and perfect the motions of the body - but before we can correct them, we must sense them, and be able to discern what is right and what is wrong. In that way, the perfection of our senses precedes the perfection of our actions.
The senses, like actions, are attuned. It is not the physical properties of a person's eyes that enable them to recognize things that others do not (though visual acuity can be an obstacle) - but instead it is the psychological properties of perception and attention: a person with a trained eye sees the same things that others see, but recognize what is important and what should be ignored, and recognizes what it means.
Flow is achieved through the senses in much the same way: we begin with normal perception and slowly begin to notice things, and our ability to be discerning increases with experience and practice. The notion that people are born with superior perception is largely a fallacy: they have developed it, through practice.
The Joy of Seeing
Vision is the most dominant sense for most human beings, as it is also the most remote: we can see things before we can feel them, smell them, or taste them (hearing is a different matter, covered next).
Consider our appreciation of the visual arts. The untrained eye sees a painting, and has a vague sense of what it depicts as a subject. A technical eye can begin to appreciate the technique used to execute it. A philosophical eye can appreciate the ideas that the artist meant to express through visual representations.
Clearly, it takes training to be able to experience sensory delight just from seeing things. It is not merely being able to notice a painting and identify a subject, but interpret visual evidence that others do not give any specific attention.
The Flow of Music
Sound is the second major sense, which enables us to perceive things that are inaccessible through other senses. We can hear things we cannot see.
He mentions primitive tribesmen who are in touch with their environment by its sound. They know their jungle, and the sounds that it makes. They know when there is danger, or when it is going to rain, and even the time of day by the noises that they hear - or more aptly, by the way they recognize the meaning of what they hear.
Pause to grouse a bit about the use of music in western cultures. Many public places use recorded music to hide sounds in the environment, believing them to be unpleasant. People walk around with headphones on, dulling their sensation of the environment around them. It seems in a way like walking around blindfolded and ignorant of the world.
That is not to say that music is universally bad or destructive of flow - like art, it has the ability to become a flow experience when a listener trains his ear and is able to fully appreciate it: to hear music not as mere rhythmic notice, but understand the composition and the emotions that a composer is attempting to convey.
But there is a difference between listing to music in a way that one appreciates it and hearing music in a way that merely deadens other noises - just as there is the difference between experiencing a painting as a piece of art and experiencing paint that covers seams and stains in the walls.
He goes on for a while about the connection between music and ritual: how people who attend a live concert are like a religious congregation who find a sense of unity in experiencing the same stimuli. (EN: This seems neither here nor there.)
He then speaks of the stages of music appreciation: to recognize it as a patterned sound, to recognize the rhythm, to recognize patterns of notes and chords, and so on.
He also speaks of the analytical mode of music appreciation, in hearing different renditions of the same tune, or in hearing different groups perform the very same rendition. To the untrained ear, a given piece of music sounds the same - but to the trained ear, the differences in its execution become evident. One orchestra plays a piece of music in a significantly, but subtly, different way than another.
He also returns briefly to the notion of doing something for the sake of gaining something else. Consider the teenaged garage band who is attracted to music as a way to get attention, particularly from girls, and the way that they fail to achieve much skill. Children whose parents force them to study music are much the same. But those who are attracted to music and whose focus is on developing the ability to play it, then to improve their skills, are often quite fanatical in their level of engagement because for them, it is a flow experience that is intrinsically rewarding.
The Joy of Tasting
Most cultures have a cuisine, but that is developed over time. Food is necessary to sustenance, and when it is scarce there is little appreciation of subtleties. We eat whatever we can get our hands on, prepare it simply and quickly, and do not consider the taste or texture. It is not dining, but feeding.
Where food is available, people develop tastes. They are biologically driven to "like" the tastes of food that has the greatest value as fuel - things that are sweet and things that are fatty "taste" good to us. But this is merely instinctual preference.
The appreciation of food is something different to having personal likes or dislikes, which depends largely on developing the sense of taste. Much as an artist has a trained eye and a musician has a trained ear, the gourmand has a trained palate, and can understand and appreciate the subtle tastes of food.
The preparation of food is a separate matter, though somewhat related. Many people can appreciate music without being able to play it, and in the same way the gourmand may appreciate food without becoming a chef. But it doesn't work the other way around: one cannot become adept at preparing food or playing music without having the ability to appreciate it.
And so, the development of the ability to sense and the ability to execute are related, but are two separate flow activities.
MC takes a moment to scoff at "foodies" for whom food is a status symbol. To eat things that are rare and expensive is not an expression of taste, but of wealth. They seek to gain status by eating as an accomplishment, to be seen by others as exotic and distinguished. Many do not have a developed palate, or much appreciation of cuisine.
As such, our present culture remains more of a consumption rather than a production culture. People enjoy food, or pretend to do so, but show little evidence in creating it - hence the lack of a distinctive American cuisine.