20 • Flow and intuition

The flow state and our ability for implicit learning are a powerful combination to enhance our cognition — and to hone in on what really matters in the creative process.

Why is here- and now-ness so important for cognition? Because that is where our most direct connection with our environment happens through our sensory-motor loop.

We all have experience with a mental state where this connection to our environment is amplified — the flow state.

Flow (and insight)

The flow state has become something that is discussed both academically and in the popular culture. It was made famous in work by [Mihaly] Csikszentmihalyi. His book Flow. The Psychology of Optimal Experience brought it to the forefront in 1990.

What is the flow experience? The flow experience is an experience people get into they often describe it as like "being in the zone". You are involved in a task that is very demanding. In fact it has a particular structure to it. […] The flow state is one in which the demands of the situation just slightly go beyond your skill ability. And so you get what's called —Csikszentmihalyi represents this by — the "flow channel”: […]

• When I can just enough exapt and extend my skills to meet the demands, so I have to put everything I've got into it, then I get into the flow channel.

• If my skills exceed the demands, I fall into boredom.

• If my demands exceed the skills, I fall into anxiety.

Now of course the thing about you is, you are very good at learning in situation. You need a kind of context in which, as your skills improve, your environment also improves. One of the things we've created in our culture: We have created flow induction machines, because what those machines have are a situation where your skills are constantly improving and the demands of the environment are constantly improving. And these flow induction machines have other properties that are very important in them: There is a very tight feedback between what you do and how the environment responds. You're getting very clear information and failure matters, at least symbolically because you can die. And of course some of you probably realize that I'm talking about video games.

Video games are one of the most reliable ways of inducing the flow state in people. In fact, part of the reasons why video games are addictive […] is precisely because they engender the flow state. Addictions […] run off machinery that is evolutionarily adaptive. That's why it's compelling. […]

What are other things that people do to get into the flow state? They play jazz. They do martial arts. […] One that's particularly interesting, because there's no other explanation for why people do it other than they get into the flow state, is rock climbing. Rock climbing, otherwise, it’s like some sort of torture from Greek mythology. You're presented it like, "Here's a rock face. What I want you to do is, I want you to go up that. It's going to be really physically demanding. It's going to hurt you. You might fall and harm yourself. And once you get to the top you come back down." It would seem like a torturous thing to do.

We know why people rock climb. They rock climb because they get into the flow state. And the flow state is deeply positive for people. It's not the same thing as physical pleasure. In fact the flow state is much more connected to meaning in life. In fact, the more often you get into the flow state, the more likely you will rate your your life as meaningful, the more you will experience well-being. […]

The thing about the flow state: it's a universal. People across cultures, socioeconomic groups, genders, language, environments, age groups, report being able to get into the flow state, and they describe it in detail almost exactly the same way. That's a universal, and universals are important in cognitive science. You pay attention to the universals because they give you profound insight into the machinery.

What's it like to be in the flow state?

When you're in the flow state, you feel like you're deeply at one with things. For example, I'm a martial artist and when I'm sparring it's like my sense of connectedness to my opponent is really enhanced and I'm really at one. And that comes with this kind of spontaneity. So when a strike is coming to my hand, I don’t [think], "Raise your hand now John!" It flows out of me — hence the word — and the block is there. The hockey player, the goalie, just puts out his hand, the gloved hand, and the puck is there. There's this tremendous sense of "at-onement".

And then closely allied to it is this: At one level you know, like the shaman dancing or chanting, that there's tremendous metabolic energy at work. Effort. You're making at one level all this effort but at another level it feels effortless. That's the spontaneity. Again it just seems to flow from you.

Your sense of time is passing differently.

Your sense of self is being dramatically altered. When people are in the flow state, a kind of self-consciousness disappears. We carry around that self-consciousness that's always doing this sort of thing: It's constantly doing our autobiography: How's my day going? How am I doing? Who am I? What am I doing? And it's also checking, image management: How do I look? What are people thinking of me? How am I doing? Am I under threat? All of that nattering, "all my feeling… I knew…" And that, of course, can get out of hand. When you're in depression you ruminate on all that stuff and it overwhelms you. But we all carry that burden around, it's taxing. And in the flow state: It's gone. There's no space for all of that because you're so engrossed in the task.

The other thing about the flow state is: it's super salient. It's like the kind of brightness and vividness you get in a videogame. The world seems more intense.

And people really like this experience. And not only do they like it, it seems to be where they do their best work.

Flow is optimal experience

The flow experience is an optimal experience in two ways: Many people regard it as the best experiences they can have. But it's also where they're doing their very best at what they want to excel in. That's why it's so motivating to get into the flow state.

Why is the flow state so good? This year (2018) I published some work with Adrian Bennett and Leo Ferraro, in which we try to argue for what the cognitive mechanisms are in the flow state.

Csikszentmihalyi tells you the environmental conditions — what you need in order to get into the flow state:

• You need skills and demand to be matched.

• You need there to be a very tight coupling between you and the environment like in the video game.

• You need very clear information, it can't be ambiguous or vague.

• And failure has to matter. It has to be costly to you in some fashion.

He specified all of that. He also specified the kind of training that helps enhance you, to get you into the flow state. And, think about this: […] Training in mindfulness — the more people have training in mindfulness, increases their capacity to get into the flow state.

Flow as a cascade of insights

Can we come up with a unified explanation for all of this? I think we can, both for the phenomenology — why we're experiencing what we're experiencing when we're in the flow state — and why is it improving your cognition. […]

Think about the rock climber. The rock climber is climbing. Remember we talked about how you frame and find patterns […]. Remember the 9-dot problem. These patterns aren't just patterns in your mind, they're patterns in knowing how to make sense of things. So you're rock climbing, and if that breaks down, you impasse, you're stuck. And I don't mean just cognitively, you're physically stuck.

If you want to be a good rock climber, what you have to do is you have to break that framing. You have to train yourself to break the frame, restructure, change what you're finding relevant and salient, and then change yourself to fit that, and then you refit yourself to the rock face. Then you have to do it again, and then you have to do it again, and then you have to do it again.

Or the jazz musician. The jazz musician is playing. They pick up on a pattern, they play with it, but they can't stay with it too long. What do they have to do? They have to shift, they have to restructure. They have to shift into a new pattern and then play with that, but they can't stay with it too long. They have to pick up on it, they have to refresh again and again and again and again and again.

What's going on with the rock climber, the jazz musician, the martial artist, is this idea of a cascade of insights. You're having an insight, that's leading to another insight, that's leading to another insight. It's priming.

You know when you have an insight, you have an "Aha!", and you get that burst of energy, and it's like a flash. That's why we put a light bulb over somebody's head when we want to show them having an insight. It’s like that flash. Now imagine if I took that "Aha!" and I extended it: "Ahaaaaaaa!" — that's the flow state. It's an insight cascade. The more you flow, the more you're training your ability for insight and direct interacting with your environment.

Flow is effortless, timeless, selfless connectedness with the world. It is what we consider optimal experience, and we seem to be hardwired to love it. As if evolution has primed us to seek insight…

Intuition (and bias)

A lot of what looks like “psychic abilities” are your ability to pick up implicitly on complex patterns in the environment without being aware of it. Hogarth, in his book on Educating Intuition, […] makes a very good argument […] for this: He says that what we call intuition is a real thing, but there isn't anything magical about it, in [the way] the psychics say. Your intuition is the result of your implicit learning.

You pick up on all kinds of complex patterns, not knowing how you have done that, but you get an ability to detect patterns and you don't know how. That's why your intuition feels the way it does: You just sort of know.

You know things. You're doing it all the time. To use a famous example from Dreyfus: You know how far to stand from somebody — where you should stand, how close you should stand, what angle you should stand. How, as the conversation or the context changes, you're allowed to move closer or farther away, what angles you're allowed to be at. But if I were to ask you to tell me how you do that, you wouldn't know. You would just say, "I know how to do it." And yet, when people don't know how to do it, it creeps you out.

Correlational vs. causal patterns

[…] Hogarth points out that we have two different terms, and we don't realize we're talking about the same thing:

• We have intuition, when we think it's going well, that implicit learning.

• But we also have bias and prejudice, for when we think that implicit learning goes bad.

The bigot has got intuitions about races that are wrong. How is it that implicit learning goes wrong? Well, here's the thing: You have some complex pattern in the environment and your implicit learning picks up on it. The problem is, there's two kinds of patterns in your environment: There's correlation patterns and causal patterns.

Correlation is when any two things are related to each other. Let me give you an example of a couple of correlations that you shouldn't confuse with causation:

There is a correlation between how large your wedding is and how long your marriage will last. You have a bigger wedding, your marriage will last longer. Now you would be a fool to therefore think you should have the biggest possible wedding, because the reason why bigger weddings predict longer marriages is not because bigger weddings cause longer marriages, they're only correlated. It's because bigger weddings reflect a bigger social network, more financial resources. And having a bigger social network for the couple, having more financial resources, actually does cause a marriage to last longer.

Here's another one: I'm old enough and I was brought up in a religious household when prayer was taken out of the schools and of course people were very upset about that. “Look at crime is going up as we've taken prayer out of the schools," and things like that. By the way crime hasn't been going up (read some of Stephen Pinker's work). But let's say it was. That's only a correlation because here's another correlation: We know that greenhouse gases have been going up steadily, and that's part of the environmental crisis we're going to talk about. You know what has been also consistently going down for the exact same time period? Caribbean piracy. Having pirates in the Caribbean and wooden ships with cannons and stuff. As that went down, greenhouse gases went up. Now I hope none of you think that we could solve global warming by bringing back piracy.

There are many patterns in the world that are illusory, because they're only correlational, they're not causal. The bigot has picked up on correlational patterns, not causal patterns. What you want to do is: You want to train your implicit learning to pick up on the causal patterns that are real rather than the correlational patterns that are illusory.

Optimizing for detection of causal patterns

Now here's what you can't do: You can't tell people to look for patterns explicitly. […] We can't replace implicit learning with explicit learning, because it is precisely by being implicit that it works so well.

What can we do explicitly then? What we can do is set up the right context, the right environmental factors, so that my implicit learning machine will tend more likely to get onto causal patterns rather than correlational patterns. So I'll get good intuition rather than bad intuition.

How do you do that? Hogarth says the way you would do this is the way you do science: You want to control the context. Because what science is, science is a way of distinguishing causal patterns from correlational patterns. You set up an environmental situation so that you can distinguish the causal patterns from the correlational patterns.

What do you do? In an experiment first of all I make sure that everything is very clearly measured. I get very clear information. I make sure I'm looking to see that the change in one variable is closely followed by a change in another variable. I change your drug dosage — do your symptoms get better? I look for clear information. I look for clear feedback. And in science failure matters. You test a hypothesis. And this confirmation has to be possible. Failure matters.

Now notice this: What Hogarth says is, what I want to do is, I want to put you into an implicit learning situation where you get clear feedback like you do in science, where there is a tight coupling between what you do and how the environment responds, and where error really matters, like in science. And he says what we should do is we should try and do implicit learning in those kinds of contexts.

Here's what myself and my colleagues argued: Those three criteria that will turn your intuition into good implicit learning are exactly the conditions for flow:

• Clear information

• Tightly coupled feedback

• Error matters

The rock climber needs clear information, tightly coupled feedback, and error really matters. That context really means that there's a much greater chance that their implicit learning machinery is going to pick up on causal patterns rather than correlational ones. […]

Now here's what's interesting too: [Insight cascade and implicit learning] are reinforcing each other. Because the insight gets your cognition to explore for new patterns, and then the implicit learning picks up those new patterns, and then those new patterns enhance your ability to restructure. And then you keep exploring for new patterns, acquiring the new patterns through implicit learning, and you keep ratcheting your skills up. Getting into the flow state is deeply enhancing of your cognition.

Somebody who's an expert at getting into the flow state is going to be an individual you want to have around. Now that individual is going to have some really serious challenges facing them: They don't know how they're getting a lot of the information they're getting. They don't know why they're so insightful. They're experiencing this radical "at-onement" (oneness) with the world, this loss of sense of self […]. You have to understand these insights aren't verbal insights.

Implicit learning is lower-level pattern recognition. It happens subconsciously and is not available to our conscious, analytical self.

We know, but we don’t know why or how we know. And we can’t explicitly look for patterns in the environment. Our subconscious is just so much better at it than if we try to come up with patterns consciously and analytically. Implicit learning is non-propositional knowing.

However, we can set up our environment in such a way that we enhance implicit learning by leveraging the flow state. If we manage to get into flow, if we get clear information, if we have tightly coupled feedback, and if errors matter, we can enhance our implicit learning.

Alexander’s feeling

Christopher Alexander clearly was an exceptionally skilled observer. He must have honed his skills — whether intentionally or accidentally — to get into a flow state and enhance his implicit learning to pick up on patterns in the built environment. Through this process he began to pick up on the patterns of what he eventually called wholeness or life.

But he didn’t stop there. He realized that he was picking up on something that he couldn’t explain, and then decided to spend a lifetime on trying to understand and then explain what those patterns really are that he was able to recognize so clearly.

Do flow and intuition play a role in Alexander’s fundamental process?

In The Nature of Order, book 2, The Process of Creating Life, chapter 14, Deep feeling, he proposes (highlights mine):

Wholeness and “deep structure” are enormously difficult to see. Especially in a complex, real-world case, the task of finding the most structure-enhancing step available is therefore, in practice, extremely hard. Our current modes of perception are not always tuned to seeing wholeness in the world around us; and the exact definition of the structure of wholeness — the system of centers at all scales, with their attendant degrees of life and coherence — is cumbersome and hard to grasp when we try to grasp it by analytical means.

The living process can therefore be steered, kept on course towards the authentic whole, when the builder consistently uses the emerging feeling of the whole as the origin of his insight, as the guiding light at the end of the tunnel by which he steers. I am suggesting that if the builder, at each step of a living process, takes that step which contributes most to the feeling coming from the work, always chooses that which has the more profound feeling, then this is tantamount — equivalent — to a natural process in which the step-wise forward-moving action is always governed by the whole.

Roughly this, I am almost certain, is what traditional builders did. They paid attention to the feeling of the emerging structure: and thus were able to stay within the guidelines of the existing and transforming whole. Guided by feeling, they were able to function almost like nature: They were able to make each small step count in the emergence of a new unfolding whole.

For us, in our era, it is not so easy. The word “feeling” has been contaminated. It is confused with emotions — with feelings (in the plural) such as wonder, sadness, anger — which confuse rather than help because they make us ask ourselves, which kind of feeling should I follow? The feeling I am talking about is unitary. It is feeling in the singular, which comes from the whole. It arises in us, but it originates in the wholeness which is actually there. The process of respecting and extending and creating the whole, and the process of using feeling, are one and the same. Real feeling, true feeling, is the experience of the whole.

Being guided by the whole, and being guided by feeling, are therefore nearly synonymous. What I call feeling is the mode of perception and awareness which arises when a person pays attention to the whole. When people pay attention to the whole, they are experiencing feeling.

It may seem far-fetched to suggest that all questions of city planning, engineering, transportation — not to speak of building — should be decided by feeling, by the feeling of the whole. But that is, indeed, what I am proposing. It is an intelligent and practical way forward.

Could he be talking about flow and intuition?

A creation process guided by intuition — that kind of feeling we can hardly describe, because we can hardly understand it ourselves. We don’t know how we’re coming to conclusions. We don’t know why we know. We just know.

When we are at one with the world, when we manage to let go of our self, when we listen to our intuition, we can tap into our implicit knowledge of what needs to be done next in the creation process so that we can enhance the wholeness of and add more meaning to our creation.

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Mirror of the Self is a weekly newsletter series trying to explain the connection between creators and their creations, and analyze the process of crafting beautiful objects, products, and art. Using recent works of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and design theorist Christopher Alexander, we embark on a journey to find out what enables us to create meaningful things that inspire awe and wonder in the people that know, use, and love them.

If you are new to this series, start here: A secular definition of sacredness.

For an overview and synopsis of the first 13 articles, see: Previously… — A Recap.