MC: Yeah, probably those are the mediators of the experience just as dopamine is a mediator of flow. I am sure oxytocin and the other chemical changes are involved either as effects of it or as, even as causes, in a sense. That is you learn to associate certain chemical change with a feeling and experience, so then you can use the chemical ,in a sense, as a stimulus for the experience, but flow is certainly not -- as far as I know, it does not happen as a result of any chemical by itself; you have to have a goal, you have to use a skill and only then you have a flow experience, you can't just the chemical change itself unless it is interpreted as a challenge or as an ability to overcome] something. I do not think that would be flow.
Rob: Now when you describe flow as being associated with focus and concentration, I think of attention deficit disorder; which is a hugely growing problem. Have you had any thoughts or has anyone looked at flow and ADD?
MC: A lot of people are interested in that, but I do not know of any study, I cannot tell you about it, there may be but I cannot because , I mean in ADD, usually children achieve a state of that seems to be similar to flow when they are doing something like repetitive body movements or singing or something which seems to absorb their attention, but otherwise they seem to be kind of distracted and not able to achieve the kind of full involvement in what they are doing. But, as I say, there is no good study for it. It is eleven thirty and I think I need to go because the rest of the family is getting restless.
Rob: Okay, you have been great and really -- one last question, okay?
MC: Okay.
Rob: I have done a lot of interviews and articles about people with narcissism and psychopathy. Is there any connection at all between people who are good at flow or bad at flow, or any relationship between flow and focused attention and narcissism, or the characteristics of a psychopath?
MC: Well, I think -- see, flow is a very flexible kind of state. You could get flow from becoming a boxer and loving to beat people up and you get into flow that way, you know? Or you could be a fisherman who spends all of you know, his free time watching the ripples on the sea to see whether his bait has been bitten or not. So I think there are people who can get flow also from narcissistic display or you know trying to impress other people and trying to put people down and trying to outsmart people and so forth.
Flow, if I were to give an analogy, flow is like a form of inner energy that is self-rewarding, that is intrinsically rewarding. But like all energy, you could put this flow to good uses or bad uses. I mean you can get flow just -- let us say fire is a great source of energy for civilization but you can use fire to make bricks or to burn down buildings and you could use it to -- so energy can be obtained and from different forms and it could be used for different goals and this I think is true of flow also, that I think the important thing is to make sure that kids grow up being able to find flow in activities that are purposeful and growth producing, rather than let us say just in shoot them video games and just passive listening to music or harassing the neighbor kid or whatever. Because all of those things could produce flow fortunately, if you have nothing else, no other challenge in the environment that allows you to get involved and of course one problem with our civilized way of life is that children are kind of essentially so protected and scheduled that they have less chances of achieving flow than they may have had fifty or sixty years ago, or a hundred years ago when they played in the streets and they had to amuse themselves. Now you do not have to amuse yourself; you can get amused by turning the switch and of course that amusement is very rarely flow-producing but it is -- it gives you the impression of being, it's got the virtual flow, or junk flow as some people call it, but the -- because you are not using skills and there is very little challenge.
Rob: Alright, I have to ask you this one last question. You gave a talk at this years positive psychology international conference that was about the big picture for positive psychology in terms of the evolution and how did you put it? Changing the evolution. Positive evolution and things like that.
MC: Well yeah, what I was telling the audience is that I was hoping that positive psychology did not act simply as kind of a patch on the bored peoples' lives as a kind of a cheap way of getting therapy and producing therapy, because what we need to find out is a way of living which would represent at positive step in evolution of humankind and we can't get that unless we kind of line up the social institutions, the economy, the political system, the way we live more generally with our consciousness, with our ability to do things through our brain and through our body.
And so the point was to think about becoming kind of stewards of evolution, trying to lead evolution away from these kinds of short-term improvements in the lives of some of the people while the rest of Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia are going to be swallowed up in chaos and the kind of dissolution of the Russian Soviet system is going to ruin most of eastern Europe and central Europe also.
And so I think if we are serious about trying to improve the quality of life we have to move out from the individual psychology of trying to get people happy one at a time in a therapeutic type of relationship and think about living as a species, as a kind of a humanity as a whole. I mean we talk about globalized economy but we have to think about globalized social and psychological well-being also. It's a huge and kind of a fearsome kind of challenge, but either we take it or we are going to end up destroying both the social systems that can't take it and then eventually ourselves as well as the global environment in which we live. And so I think psychologists ought to become aware that we are -- we can contribute and we have a responsibility for the well-being of the species in a larger setting than just a therapeutic couch. Okay?
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