MC discusses FLOW and some cutting edge new research on Positive Psychology and Flow

::::::::

Part two of the interview transcript.

Rob: So first, we've talked a bit about flow. Now I call my show bottom-up radio because I believe that we're transitioning from a top-down to a more bottom-up culture and I've come to believe that one of the core parts of bottom-up is a kind of connection consciousness; being aware of your connection to other things. Now -- and I feel that in some ways, your descriptions and other peoples' descriptions of flow feels like that, where -- and I'm using words that you've described in talks that you've given where you say action and awareness merged, self consciousness disappears, and those kinds of things sound a bit like a sense of connectedness to everything. And I just wonder if you could kind of think about flow in those kinds of terms.

MC: Yeah, the state of complete focus on what you're doing and the feeling of kind of effortless engagement with what you're doing obviously has neuropsychological reasons for occurring. And recently, there have been quite a few interesting studies pointing, for instance, to a process which has been called hypofrontality, which means that once you learn to do something well, there comes a point where you don't need the frontal lobe intervention in doing it. And the frontal lobe is the one that criticizes and evaluates what you're doing and tries to connect it to other things. And that's important to have the frontal lobe involved when you're learning something, but after you know how to do something well, it becomes like a backseat driver, telling you, interfering about things that you already know how to do. So, it actually diminishes your performance and, for instance, if you are a skier, at first you have to pay attention to everything you do to do it well and so forth. But after awhile, if you wonder about whether you should put more of your weight on the outside of the ski before a turn, you probably are going to fall or run into a tree or something, because you are dividing your attention from what you should be doing to monitor what you are doing, and unfortunately we have a limited ability to attend to what happens and that's one of the fundamental issues about psychology that I have been very interested in and working on

Rob: Okay, so hypofrontality means that you would stop using your frontal cortex as much as you might otherwise.

MC: Yeah.

Rob: The frontal cortex is considered the top-down part of the brain. It is the part that analyzes and filters.

MC: Yeah, yeah".

Rob: If you stop using that, what are you using then?

MC: Well you are using all of the connections that you have established in doing this activity before, which are usually more in the midbrain and even in the hippocampus and so forth, where you do not need anymore to have this nagging thing about, well I do not know if I did good enough. I think maybe I should do this, maybe I should " If you have that, that is what the forebrain will be doing because that is its business, it is to evaluate and yet there are times when that is actually interfering with the execution of something that you have learned to do. That is why it is important to qualify that this happens -- flow happens when you have developed the skills to meet the challenges. If you tried to shut off your forebrain while you are learning something you would get into trouble and you would probably never learn. But once you do learn, the role of those parts of the brain seem to be interfering rather than helping.

Rob: So what parts of the brain are involved in flow then? Inhibition of the frontal cortex perhaps, and what else is going on?

MC: Well, there are different things, take for instance a group of neurophysiologists in Sweden have been studying people who report and show in their activities that they have more flow than most people and they studied them compared to people who are say "I do not know what you are talking about "when you talk about and, they do not seem to experience this at all. And they found that there is a very significant difference in the dopamine distribution from those who have a lot of flow; the dopamine is mostly released from the dorsal and caudal parts of the striatum; which are connected to parts of the brain that require effortful, concentrated activity. Whereas the comparison group showed that most of the dopamine was secreted from the ventral part of the striatum, which is connected to the kind of passive, hedonic pleasure centers. So, that has been published in a couple of places now and it suggests that for some reason some people either learn or are born in the way that they can get pleasure from doing things that require focused persistent activity rather than from the obvious kind of pleasure producing part of the brain. So that is one kind of thing that we know. We don't know a heck of a lot more because it is really hard to get somebody in a fMRI machine and study the brain while the person is also having flow experience. But it is hard to have flow in fMRI

Rob: Do you have any idea of the percentage of people who experience flow and the percentage who do not experience flow?

MC: Well, it is hard to know, but there are a couple of studies -- not studies but surveys that were done; for instance Gallup, before he passed away, the CEO of Gallup, Don Clifton, who owns the company also. He was a psychologist, Don Clifton, originally and bought up Gallup when Gallup was going down because it was overextended -- anyway, Don Clifton wanted to put something about flow in his big surveys and so we cooked up a couple of simple sentences like: "Do you ever feel so involved in something that you feel that even if something strange happened around you, you would not notice it." Or t"hat you are so involved in what you are doing that you forget what time it is and you do not realize it until much later, that time has passed." Something like that and we had about four or five of these. And, at the same time somebody in Germany who had a similar -- the Ernsback Institute, which was the biggest survey in Germany, also used the same things in Germany. And, it was interesting that both countries found that about twelve to fifteen percent of the people would say they never experienced anything like that. They could noto remember anything like that. And then to find an almost equal number-- ten, twelve percent who say oh yes, I feel that everyday and I feel like that several times a day. And then the big majority follow the kind of almost normal distribution saying you know, a few times a month or a few times a year, a few times a month, a few times a week, and -- so it is not evenly distributed. Some people never seem to lose themselves in that kind of feeling. And it was interesting, for instance, that when I described flow to a public audience, the only people who at the end who say "but isn't that wrong to lose yourself in what you are doing so that you do not notice other things?" They are always women who say that and they say they don't let themselves lose themselves because there is always something that may need that attention a child or it is something that usually they feel that it is not -- I mean not all women of course, but whenever that happens, it seems to be a woman who feels too responsible for what they are doing to lose themselves.

Rob: Okay, that might be an evolutional consideration for taking care of children.

MC: Yeah, yeah.-- it is also interesting that you know, we found this study of workers that workers think that -- we studied the whole gamut from professionals to assembly line workers and clerical workers, in between and so -- and we studied them with this method that I kind of invented in the seventies; which we still use and it is very much fun, which means that a person -- originally we had the person wear a pager, just a simple beeper that you could signal, by sending a radio signal to it. And we had people wear pagers and then seven times a day we would send the signal, within a two hour period at random moments and they did not know when it would come or when the signal would come. But whenever the signal came they had to take out a little booklet we gave them and then write down where they were, what they were doing, and then who it was that they were with, and then a number of dimensions -- like how happy to sad they felt; how cheerful, irritable; along that line or how friendly or hostile they felt or so forth; how much they were concentrating, etcetera, etcetera. So when you do that, you do it about seven times a day, at the end of the week you have about fifty responses and then you can compare how they feel for instance at work and how they feel outside of work, at home, or in public whenever they are.

And what we found is then actually people report more flow from work than from any other place except if they had a strong hobby or interest. Then when they were doing that thing, which was quite rare usually, but you know if you like to go bowling it would be maybe once a week, and then you felt kind of in flow. But otherwise work tended to be more flow-like than at home. And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense; in other words, that at work you have challenges which are clear, more or less clear, you get feedback from how you are doing and you can concentrate on what you are doing and at home you are much more vulnerable to distractions and it is not clear what you have to do, often, and -- especially if you are the man of the house whereas the housewife feels in control at home and so the difference is not as big for women. But even women feel usually more in flow at work because there they can forget all of the -- see you are open -- at home you are always open to things that go wrong in ways that indirect; at work it is kind of mediated by all kinds of usually I mean, unless you are actually getting fired or the company is going bust, you don't feel the kind of personal threats that you can feel at home when the kids are not at home on time or when you havn't paid the light bill, or when you get into a fight with your spouse and you don't know what the outcome will be. And it is much more close to the bone, what happens at home, especially for women. Women love to work because they say at work, what I do doesn't matter that much; at home what I do is with the family , it is to dangerous to just relax and do it and forget everything. You have to be always knowing what you are doing, at work it does not matter.

Rob: Is that the case for factory workers and for professional women?

MC: More for -- yeah. It is more case for the lower. For professional women there was ,interesting ,that they differentiated. Some of them were more committed to work than most men were and others were more like the factory working women, that is they took their work as a good kind of interesting interlude, but it is not real life and so forth. And that is what the count of the matter.

Rob: Okay so I want to just do a quick station ID. I am interviewing Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, who is the discoverer and chronicler of flow. The author of the book Flow and he is one of the pioneers and founders of positive psychology. We have been talking about his research, just now talking about how he looked at workers-- people at work and at home on how he did his studies.

I wanted to get one more word that concept out that we have not really used and that is intrinsic reward. Can you -- because you are already referring to the idea, but talk about intrinsic reward and how that fits into what you are talking about please.

MC: Yeah, well the fact is that most of the things we do in life are not done because we like to do them but because either we have to do them or we want something at the end that justifies doing it.

This was actually when I did my dissertation on artists this was the place where I began to question the kind of wisdom of psychology at the time, which was that you did things for some goal outside -- A rat will run down a maze to get to the cheese and that model was applied to human behavior that you do things to get to the cheese at the end, right? Whereas artists, I found would get incredibly involved in doing a painting let us say, and spend weeks and weeks perfecting it and changing it in small ways and not going to the bathroom unless really necessary, and not eating and so forth. Then they finish the painting and they look at it for maybe five minutes and they put it against the wall and often never look at it again.

And many of them -- those who are successful will have a gallery owner who would come every once in a while and try to look at the things against the wall and take them away and if they sold a painting, give the painter some money. But he would not be interested in the thing at all after he finished it. So I said "why is -- this does not fit the model of psychology that is based on rats running after the cheese. This looks like people -- actually these artists are doing the painting because they enjoy the painting itself."

And that was the beginning. And then it turned out that surgeons that we studied surgeons, they say that, "oh-- I never took a vacation the first two decades of my work or the first decade of my work. I stayed busy, but then my wife told me we have to go really to spend the summer or winter a few weeks in Mexico and then we go there and go to the beach and after a week I was so crazy bored, reading books on the beach, that I had to go to the local hospital and volunteer to do surgery there, for nothing because -- and that then was okay. " So, again, here not just the artist, but the surgeon, and then you find the brick-layers, some brick-layers, some assembly line workers also get to love what they are doing because by doing it they get this feeling of complete immersion engagement with what they are doing; which otherwise they don't experience when they are simply watching TV, or they are talking to friends or whatever.

But when you are actually doing something that requires your energy and your attention and your complete immersion in what you are doing, that feels very good. And probably evolutionarily that makes a lot of sense. That why -- if getting things done well and getting your challenges is important for survival, it makes sense that you end up developing a feeling of positive experience doing it, just as if sex is important for the reproduction of the species, it is kind of important to enjoy sex. Otherwise people wouldn't do it and would not have children and we wouldn't be around as a species. Same thing with food. I mean, if you consistently forgot to eat because it does not -- you do not really care for eating and you end up weakened, or sickly and then not regularly eating and so forth.

So, essentially I think flow is an adaptive mechanism that helps a species survive and it is something that when we experience we want to repeat and, of course, after repeating the same thing over and over, unless you make it more complex, you lose that sense of focus because you have automated yourself to doing it, and that is why people on the assembly line have a hard time. But even there people can begin to develop things, their motions in new ways. For instance, most assembly line workers who enjoy doing that do it more like a sportsman who is trying to -- an athlete who is trying to perfect his high jump or the broad jump or whatever and do over and over, but every time hoping to get a few tenths of an inch farther and as he does that he gets feedback he says "oh okay, so if I jump this way I will get even further and so forth." And you do it over and over and still trying to beat your own records and -- or other people's records and that is how most assembly line workers who really love what they are doing.-- they kind of decide that they want to do it faster, better, with less effort, or some other way that doesn't show to the outside eye you know, but they feel that they are doing something which is challenging and they have to try to do their best at doing it. And so it is a very -- I think this is not a romantic notion of somehow transcending -- it is transcending, but it is transcending in a way that is pretty rational, because it means that you transcend by developing skills which may be very material or mechanical skills, or it could be skills that are intellectual or esthetic, or spiritual, I mean spirituality is certainly another form of feeling closer by ignoring the everyday or the kind of notion , the routines or obligations of everyday life and trying to connect to it something greater and not present to the senses, but -- and so that is also a kind of a struggle to achieve a goal where you"

Rob: But let us talk about that for a minute; that feeling of connecting to something greater. Talk about that.

MC: Yeah, well that is a form of -- in a sense, all of flow is about connecting to getting better, to reach the limits of your capacity and that can be by jumping higher or by doing your job faster or something, but that also is a transcending of your previous limits. But then there are people who say "well is that all there is or is there something beyond what I can experience, beyond what I can see," and then they develop skills to achieve the sensitivity that will make them get in touch with things that are not obvious, or evident, or even you know, observable or meaningful to other people. And whether this is all kind of a construction -- or actually -- by construction I mean something that you imagine and you feel, but it doesn't have a reality outside of your own brain, so to speak. Or whether it's actually connecting with something that is outside of your brain and that you have been able to connect with because of the attention that you have invested in trying to establish this connection.

I mean I am not one to deny that it is possible that there is an external force or being to which we connect; I can't deny that, but I could suggest that there are -- that it could be that you get the same kind of experience by simply saying "oh, I think I sense something outside or there must be something out that is enveloping all of us and that makes it possible for life to exist and so forth."

Rob: That sounds religious. Or spiritual.

MC: Yeah, yeah I mean, what I'm saying is that spiritual can be an inner construction of our own experience and imagination and sensitivity. It could be that or it could be an actual connection with some force that is outside of us and I can't tell which of these it is, but it is definitely the kind of inner spirituality is definitely an important part of what one can cultivate, what one can achieve and when you achieve it, it gives you a sense of flow.

Rob: A sense of love did you say?

MC: Sorry?

Rob: You said sense of flow. I thought you said love. Does love fit into -- I heard you wrong and I thought I heard you say love, but maybe that is a good question. Does love fit into this? Does love fit in with flow?

MC: Yeah, I said flow, but it is true that love is a way of achieving -- I mean, first of all, for instance, if you look at people who have been going around the world studying flow report that, at least for women, the most common flow experience occurs when they take care of their children, and take care both physically but even more by making them feel happy when they are sad, when they are telling them stories that could be useful to them, when they are experiencing things together, and this, most of this you would call love, you know, and it is -- we could call it love or the addition of these different ways of being with a child and experiencing true and with another human being, I mean that is very flow producing.

Rob: How about oxytocin or endorphins? Is there a connection between oxytocin or endorphins and flow?

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?

Rob: Okay, fabulous. Thank you so much. You have been so generous. I really appreciate it.

MC: Yeah.

Rob: You have a great day.

MC: Okay, okay, sure. Okay, bye-bye.

Rob: Bye.

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.

His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.

Join the conversation:

On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution

and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation