You've probably experienced it. And you've certainly heard of it: that state of being in the zone, in the groove, on a roll. It's what

Flow: Making the impossible... possible

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2021-06-26 09:30:04

You've probably experienced it. And you've certainly heard of it: that state of being in the zone, in the groove, on a roll. It's what researchers call 'flow': a state intimately familiar to athletes and artists — and to anyone who's been fully absorbed in a given task to the point where time seems to stand still, and even the sense of self disappears.

The term "flow," and the experience it describes, was first noted by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his investigations of optimal experience in 1975. After conducting thousands of interviews with people following their passions, from artists to athletes to surgeons and chefs, he noted a similar refrain: they all described a feeling "of being carried by a river, carried by currents" as the sequence of events flowed from one to the other effortlessly.

Csikszentmihalyi discovered six core characteristics of the flow experience: complete concentration, a merger of action and awareness, a vanishing of self-consciousness, a supreme sense of control over one's actions, an altered sense of time, and an experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding.