Jonny Koenig
5/17/16
Period 1
The Flow of Psychology
Flow is not a tangible reward for doing well in an activity, it is not a state of being you can achieve from a drug, or a type of mindset that certain people have. Flow is a state of consciousness. But before Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi can define flow, the definition of consciousness must be presented. Consciousness is the awareness of ourselves and our environment. This is so important to know because what breaks the threshold to achieve flow is when one is not conscious of himself or the environment. According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, flow is a completely involved, focused state of consciousness, with diminished awareness of self and time,
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The book is a collection of stories, references to the bible, references to ancient times, and examples all to help the reader understand what optimal experience is, and how to achieve this state of consciousness.
After completing the book, I discovered that in most civilizations, jobs are designed to produce as much flow like feeling as possible. This surprised me because work and school have always had a negative connotation to them. People on sundays are always depressed over the fact that they must return to work or school the next day. With flow being a state of optimal experience, you would think that work and school are not part of this. But when thought really is put into it, most time that I work, I am in the state of flow. Whether I am doing an assignment, taking a test, or just listening in class, I decide to become fully engaged in the experience, therefore, I do not even realize that I am working. Going along with Csikszentmihalyi, I agree with the statement that when one is in the state of flow, they are also participating in optimal experience. Reading about this leads me to a number of questions. I wonder, when a teacher creates a curriculum, do they shape it to have the students
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I went to go play basketball and I had so much on my mind, I found it hard to put all of my energy towards basketball. I was shooting while a friend was rebounding and I remember telling myself to stop wasting my energy over other things like writing a paper or reading a book. I convinced myself to to think in the present and in that moment I lost self-consciousness. My shot, my footwork, the way I jumped, everything was perfectly fluid. I went on to knock down maybe five shots in a row and moved onto the next drill. That was when I did not even realize that I made six three-pointers in a row! This was a moment of optimal experience. Even though I was not aware of how much I was enjoying my self, later that night I realized that my whole mind and body were in sync, I was flowing. I then realized what the author was talking about when he kept on repeating himself about the graceful experiences of flow. I believe that everyone has experienced flow. In my head, I see teachers achieving the state while they are grading tests and once they start to speed up, their efficiency is maximal. The teacher probably does not even realize what they have so naturally done until they have completed their work or are interrupted by an outside stimulus. The teenager that said this quote is probably explaining the same exact feeling that I felt, a loss of self-consciousness, and a feeling of one hundred
goal is to achieve a pleasant state of consciousness instead of bringing out any good for
As humans we are constantly in search of understanding the balance between what feels good and what is right. Humans try to take full advantage of experiencing pleasure to its fullest potential. Hedonism claims that pleasure is the highest and only source of essential significance. If the notion of hedonism is truthful, happiness is directly correlated with pleasure. Robert Nozick presented the philosophical world with his though experiment, “The Experience Machine” in order to dispute the existence and validity of hedonism. Nozick’s thought experiment poses the question of whether or not humans would plug into a machine which produces any desired experience. Nozick weakens the notion of hedonism through his thought experiment, claiming humans need more than just pleasure in their lives. Nozick discovers that humans would not hook up to this machine because they would not fully develop as a person and consider it a form of suicide.
In the early 20th century, a psychologist called William James conducted the first empirical study of religious experience. In his study, he identified four features that categorise a religious experience: Noet...
We are more than just a receptacle that holds a collection of good emotions and pleasures. We are more than just a “happy” internal life. If happiness is the only thing that matters, what are we to be happy? Nozick asks, “How could the most important thing about our life be what it contains, though? What makes the felt experiences of pleasure or happiness more important than what we ourselves are like?” (Mulnix). It is by thinking about the Experience Machine, and wondering what it would be like to live an eternal, positive internal life, that we realize we would not want to spend our lives connected to the Experience Machine. We realize that there is more to life that we value than just our experiences. Perhaps we want to make a change in our lives, or in the lives of others. Perhaps we want to impact the world in some way. I agree with Nozick and find that it is quite reasonable to believe we, as human beings, want more out of life than just
Flow is a state a person enters which is akin to completely encompassing motivation and attention to what they are doing. Each person can experience flow under different circumstances and tasks and in fact the tasks that I personally experience flow under may be very different from the tasks that would make another person experience the same level of flow. Csikszentmihalyi (2008) wrote “the common characteristics of optimal experience: a sense that one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal-directed, rule-bound, action system that provides clear clues as to how well one is performing.”
Earthly pleasure is seen by many religions as no more than a vice; a wall in between oneself and God. Therefore, the only reasonable path to an Answer would be to ...
Robert Nozick offers the “experience machine” as a thought-experiment designed to tell us something about what makes a life worth living. Describe the thought-experiment.
This idea is comparable similar to Percy’s idea that one true cure for depression is the contemplation of suicide as both draw upon the necessity of reflecting back upon your lives. While contemplating suicide, an individual will seriously reflect on their experiences up to that moment in their life. Using that information, they must then decide whether to stop or continue to exist in the world. Both options return the power back into the individual, because ultimately they are the only ones who can make that decision. If they cease to exist, they will no longer feel anything. Though if they decide to continue living, then they set the terms of their life and free themselves. Upon this point of reflection, I believe that they attempt to find a pattern within their experiences in order to have direction
Do really we want to “pursue frantic and often joyless” activities just to be looked at by others a certain way? Finding who we are and, overall achieving who we personally look to be often involves people “Exploring inside of their own heads” with their time of boredom. “And now I’m one step closer to being two steps far from you.” might be a lyrical form of comparison between finding who we are by taking a moment of time to evaluate ourselves, to being who everyone else expects us to be, like a busy individual. These are steps away from each other, hard to accomplish both tasks because we don’t make time to experience both time absorbing activities and free time. Do we want to observe “Where squirrels hide their nuts in the grass”, care freely, or do we want to go to baseball practice? The choice ultimately ours to make, but in the end, the pressure to look at doing nothing as an unproductive thing might influence our opinions.
This refers to the subjective experiences that people report as a consequence of engaging in the particular activity and can be seen as a coping strategy (i.e. they experience an arousing “buzz” or a “high” or paradoxically tranquilizing feel of “escape” or “numbing”).
To feel free of the struggle of pain and pleasure is to feel the currents of the
Can’t think. My body shakes and screams from the tension. Heart pounding, nerves tingling, every muscle contracted. Stop. Focus. Deep breath and close everything out. I shut my eyes and the turbulent world in which I am submerged goes black and silent. Coach says visualize the race. Visualize your ideal race. I visualize….
Technological developments assume an integral part of human history. In the recent years, studies indicate that the advances in technology have penetrated into the human way of life thus changing the daily life of people. One area of human life that has been affected by technology is the human consciousness (Halal, 2008). The emergence of new technologies has led to greater impact on the human form of consciousness. It is noted that information, communication and technologies have affected the human consciousness in more profound ways. Studies also indicate that the predominant application and use of technology has led to a change in the human consciousness especially concerning the cognition, sense of self, perception and memory of individuals. This paper seeks to critically analyze the impact of communication, information and technology on these elements of the human consciousness.
Diasporic consciousness, as a dominant phenomenon in the world literature exposes the mental flight of people who constantly trying to reconstruct their present based on their past. Their past hunts them to a frozen and fractured consciousness that force them to search for locating their identity and this search for locating the identity became the starting point of diasporic literature. Their quest for the past and the assimilation into the alien culture of the adopted country gave way the concept of ‘ambivalence’ which means the conflicting feelings of people and things. The term also identifies with in-betweenness, half-ness and dilemmas of colonial natives and expatriates. This condition is true to V. S. Naipaul who sown the seeds of diasporic ambivalence from his birth.
Most everyone has experienced the performance state known as being in the "zone" from time to time, but did you know that it is possible to live your entire life in this optimal state? Yes, it is possible, and just think of all the amazing things you could accomplish by mastering the art of getting in the "zone" permanently. Imagine waking up every morning with this optimal attitude(rest assured the most successful people in the world do). Defined as the most optimal mental, spiritual and emotional state of being one can attain, the zone is manifested in your life whenever you live with complete detachment from the possibility of failure. Furthermore, the maintenance of a perpetual zone-like state can