Aug 19, 2010 "Flow"

     On this date, Tim presented an article from Psychology Today, (http://www.psychologytoday.com/). We read this article which is a summary from Finding Flow by Mihalyi Csikczentmihalyi. 1997. We read through this article in parts. As is usual for the group we read about 1/3 to 1/2 of the article. You may access the complete article at http://www.psychologytoday.com/node/25074
     Other books by Mihalyi Csikczentmihalyi:
      Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
     In this book, Csikczentmihalyi describes his definition of an optimal experience. "Sometimes a person reports having an experience of extreme joy, a feeling of ecstasy for no apparent good reason: a bar of haunting music may trigger it, or a wonderful view, or even less -- just a spontaneous sense of well-being. But by far the overwhelming proportion of optimal experiences are reported to occur within sequences of activities that are goal-directed and bounded by rules -- activities that require the investment of psychic energy, and that could not be done without the appropriate skills."
     "It is important to clarify at the outset that an "activity" need not be active in the physical sense, and the "skill" necessary to engage in it need not be a physical skill. For instance, one of the most frequently mentioned enjoyable activities the world over is reading. Reading is an activity because it requires the concentration of attention and has a goal, and to do it one must know the rules of written language. The skils involved in reading include not only literacy but also the ability to translate words into images, to empathize with fictional characters, to recognize historical and cultural contexts, to anticipate turns fo the plot, to criticize and evaluate the author's style, and so on. In this broader sense, any capacity to manipulate symbolic information is a "skill", such as th eskill of the mathematician to shape quantitative relationships in his head, or the skill fo the musician in combining musical note.
     "Another universally enjoyable activity is being with other people. Socializing might at first sight appear to be an exception to the statement that one needs to use skills to enjoy an activity, for it does not seem that gossiping or joking around with another person requires particular abilities. But of course, it dose; as so many shy people know, if a person feels self-conscious, he or she will dread establishing informal contacts, and avoid company whenever possible."
     Csikczentmihalyi further explains that his definition of a common peak experience that can be under your control to create, is an activity that requires skills to complete in an attempt to reach a goal that is reachable as determined by the level of skill that the person with this goal has. In other words, the obstacles to reach the goal can just be overcome by the skills of the person attempting to reach this goal. One other item is necessary for this peak experience is some form of feedback to the person practicing his skills so that he/she can determine how he needs to alter his performance to attain his goal.
     The author names these experiences "autotelic" experiences. He says that "the key element of an optimal experience is that it is an end in itself. Even if initially undertaken for other reasons, the activity that consumes us becomes intrinsically rewarding. .... The term 'autotelic' deroves from two Greek words, auto meaning self, and telos meaning goal. It referes to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward. Playing the stock market in order to make money is not an autotelic experience; but playing it in order to prove one's skill at foretelling future trends is -- even though the outcome in terms of dollars and cents is exactly the same. Teaching children in order to turn them into good citizens is no autotelic, whereas teaching them because one enjoys interacting with children is. What transpires in the two situations is ostensibly identical; what differs is taht when the experience is autotelic, the person is paying attention to the activity for its own sake; when it is not, the attention is focused on its consequences."
     Milhalyi Czikczentmihalyi is professor and former chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and the National Academy of Leisure Sciences. He has written three books on his idea of Flow: 1) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experiences  2) Optimal Experience: Studies of Flow in Consciousness, and 3) Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life.
     He is a very prolific writer and has also written: Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, coauthor of The Creative Vison, The Meaning of Things, Being Adolescent, Television and the Quality of Life. He has carried his idea of "flow" into proposed ways of evolving our consciousness using the activity of "flow" in another book entitled The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millenium.