Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi: Discoverer of Flow |
Michelob Chikfilet: Discoverer of Un-Flow |
and the Un Flow Experience |
It is a little known fact that Dr. Csikszentmihalyi had a mentally challenged evil twin who studied an important variant of the flow experience. Dr. C.'s evil twin, the late Michelob Chickfilet (pr. Cheek-fee-lay) is best known for his major work: 'Finding Unflow', which has recently been translated from its original Serbo-Moldovan. This important work focused on the unique experiences reported by those folks who engaged in tasks that challenged them far beyond the limits of their capabilities. Compiling interviews of several thousand failed artists, clumsy rock climbers, quack surgeons, and people who got caught up in rush hour traffic, Dr. Chickfilet (or Dr. C2) discovered that all reported a state of profound agony when engaged in behaviors (creating bad art, falling off mountains, etc.) that challenged them far beyond the limits of their skills. Calling this new experience 'unflow', Dr. C2 discovered that unflow represents the investment of psychic energy, or attention, in situations which are completely hopeless. Often this psychic energy has to be vented (i.e. letting off steam) in behaviors such as beating your head against the wall, fender benders, and taking hostages. According to Dr. C2, unflow is a distinctly lowered state of consciousness, and represents a disoptimal state of maximum disorder in consiousness in which an individual is often transported to a new reality (e.g. prison, divorce court), and is characterized by a sense of hopelessness, frustration, and total paranoia. The above loopy example seems strange because, unlike flow, we know quite well exactly to expect, both mentally and physically, when we encounter ''frustrating' circumstances. We know that there is no special state of consciousness associated with situations that reflect a mismatching of demand and skill. The anxiety or tension that occurs because of this mismatch does not merit some special or unique mechanism or name for the simple reason that we can preconceive what anxious states are. Because we quite often confront frustrating circumstances, we have developed a uniform verbal language to describe the perceptual and emotional circumstances of frustration. On the other hand, the perceptual parameters that are commonly assumed to elicit flow (a demand/skill match) are uncommon, and in lieu of delineating the physical events (i.e., somatic and neural events) that correlate with these perceptual and informative parameters, Dr. C. simply offers clusters of metaphors (e.g., a sense of flowing, psychic energy, orderliness in consciousness, etc.) that describe an event (flow) that we have actually little preconception of. As the cognitive linguist George Lakoff noted: "Cognitive models derive their fundamental meaningfulness directly from their ability to match up with preconceptual structure. Such direct matchings provide a basis for an account of truth and knowledge. The literal however cannot capture the order in all domains. In domains where there is no clearly discernible preconceptual structure to our experience, we import such structure via metaphor. Metaphor provides us with a means of comprehending domains of experience that do not have preconceptual structure of their own." A preconceptual structure represents a commonly shared kinesthetic or sensory experience that occurs before language. For example, we all experience falling, and therefore have all developed a common descriptive language for falling. But for most of us, because a flow experience is something we have difficulty preconceiving, we can therefore feel free to map it to almost any variety of event we do not have some preconception of. Thus, as is amply attested by the works of Dr. C., flow (which is a metaphor itself) has been mapped to religious experience, consiousness raising, peak experience, and 'senses' of freedom, discovery, control, etc. This riot of metaphor will never explain what flow is because it takes us far off field from a one to one mapping of language and empirical observation which is after all what science is. Science describes events that we cannot preconceive. Whether the event is the structure of the atom, the evolution of life, or fhe flow experience, the development of a unitary and consistent metaphor (the metaphor of scientific description) is the only tool we have to discover what flow is. All else, including unfortunately Dr. C.'s work, is merely poetry. |
for more of the good, bad, and ugly of flow, go to 'the guide' on my website linked below. |
