Creativity and Flow

The experience of optimal functioning called flow enhances creativity, and can be nurtured in our own lives, says the psychologist who developed the concept.

Author of "Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience" and a number of related books, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced me-high chick-sent-me-high) says we can facilitate the conditions for this experience, and that it may be found in a wide range of careers and activities.

For his doctoral thesis on "how visual artists create art" he studied photos taken every three minutes as artists created a painting. He said in a newspaper interview that he was "struck by how deeply they were involved in work, forgetting everything else."

He went on to study chess players, rock climbers, dancers, musicians and others. "I expected to find substantial differences in all their activities," he notes, "but people reported very similar accounts of how they felt. Then, I started looking at professions like surgery and found the same elements there - a challenge which provides clear, high goals and immediate feedback. They forget themselves, the time, their problems."

He cautions that many people misunderstand flow as a kind of passive "spacing out" and seek it in ordinary leisure activities. "Most people look so much forward to being home, relaxing. Then they get home and don't know what to do. They aren't challenged, so they sit in front of the TV, depressed."

Instead of "spacing out," flow is rather the experience resulting from a person's body or mind being "stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile."

Athletes refer to being in the "zone" - an optimal psychological and physiological climate for peak performance.

The legendary Ted Williams has said that sometimes he could see the seams on a pitched baseball. Gymnast Carol Johnson found that on some days she experienced the balance beam as wider, so "any worry of falling off disappeared."

Sports psychologists and trainers use a range of techniques such as progressive muscle relaxation, concentration exercises and meditation to help people access this "zone." One of the consistent themes of these approaches is the need to "get around" the conscious mind.

But Csikszentmihalyi has warned "You can't make flow happen. All you can do is learn to remove obstacles in its way." He says the effort to recapture the high of a perfect run down a ski slope, for example, will rarely succeed because "you're splitting your attention from what's happening now."

Using PET scan technology (Positron Emission Tomography), researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have found that people learning to master a video game show a reduction in the overall metabolism of the brain - less brain activity along with greater skill. This indicates that increasing ability results in better efficiency, and the brain can "relax into" the task. This may be the physiological result, or perhaps a central cause, of decreasing the "static" of non-flow consciousness.

Csikszentmihalyi points out that "Some flow experiences involve low danger, like reading a good book. But certain people are disposed to respond to risk, and their flow will depend on it more than somebody else's. Danger is the hook. But their descriptions are not that different from, say, a Thai woman's description of weaving a rug. The quality of concentration, forgetfulness, involvement, control are similar."

Csikszentmihalyi's suggestions for experiencing flow include picking an enjoyable activity that is at or slightly above your skill level; continually raising the level of challenge as performance improves; screening out distraction as much as possible; focusing attention on all the emotional and sensory qualities of the activity, and looking for regular feedback, or concrete goals to monitor progress, even if it is a large or long-term project with delayed outcome.

Writing a short story, or raising a child, can be contexts for flow experience: you can see them as a series of short-term steps or events, each having value in engaging one's talents.

Other examples of "flow activities" are games, artistic performances and religious rituals, but Csikszentmihalyi notes that "people seem to get more flow from what they do on their jobs than from leisure activities" - perhaps especially those kinds of jobs which demand full attention, like surgery or computer programming.

Writer Susan K. Perry, Ph.D. affirms that flow is not a state of 'no mind' or meditativeness as such. "I don't believe that when you get into a creative place, you're giving up thinking," she said in our interview. "You're super-thinking -- better and with more parts of your mind than you do normally."

But having a 'busy mind' can also mean being fragmented, unfocused, distracted. "You want to get to a place which is both loose, relaxed, and focused," she notes. "What I found in my studies of flow are that two things you need to do to get to this place where time stops and you can be most creative, are to loosen up, and focus in."

"It's a paradox, obviously, to be loose and focused at the same time," she admits. "And they overlap, and one may come before the other." She also thinks we "choose not to get into flow, which means we aren't able to access our deepest creativity. We choose not to because, perhaps, it's more stimulating to be surrounded by overflowing inboxes."

Achieving flow may present a greater challenge for gifted and talented people, who often experience high levels of excitability and intensity, but it is worth the effort to remove the obstacles in the way of feeling flow. That state of awareness is where we are most creatively alive.

Douglas Eby writes about psychological and social aspects of creative expression and achievement. His site has a wide range of articles, interviews, quotes and other material to inform and inspire: Talent Development Resources http://talentdevelop.com/

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