In this example the physicist David Deutsch (1999) demonstrated that explanations and predictions are entirely different things. Explanations provide us with the linguistic tools from the English vernacular to the calculus that enable us predict outcomes in our physical world. But when and where we will utilize these tools depends on the problems we have to solve. We do not use Newtonian mechanics, Einsteinian field equations, or the mathematics of superstrings to help us get to the store in the morning or in any of our daily behaviors for that matter. However, we can and do use the metaphors of Newton, Einstein, and even superstring theory to explain our worlds.

The metaphorical understanding that comprises Newtonian, Darwinian, Einsteinian, etc. explanations are useful because they constrain or correct for the spurious inferences we could otherwise make from our vicarious experience with the regularities of the world. Thus knowing about the world from the perspective of modern physics constrains us from inferring the existence of angels moving the planets, of astrological influences on behavior, and hypothetical entities such as ether and phlogiston. It also constrains us from accepting shared metaphorical assumptions that may be equally incorrect. For example, common sense and Newtonian mechanics postulate causes and effects in a billiard ball array of interacting three dimensional objects set in an invariant time that higher order Einsteinian and quantum descriptions render illusory. Nonetheless, an understanding and acceptance of modern physics does not invalidate the subjective metaphors that describe our daily existence or the common sense physics of everyday life. Thus we still feel that the earth is immobile, that time passes, and that heat feels hot. The ‘qualia’ of our daily existence, the conscious feel of time, taste, touch, and color remains undisturbed.

In a similar vein, we know what a headache is by the fact that it hurts, but we understand what a headache is by our ability to move from one metaphorical scheme (hurt, pain, discomfort) to another (inflamed blood vessels, high blood pressure, etc.) Understanding what headaches are precludes us from hypothesizing new and strange causal entities such as demonic possession or errant microwaves. Similarly, understanding that headaches hurt assign an emotional valence or value to our understanding, and it is this empathic understanding that impels behavior to ends that serves individual and societal needs. Thus, we may say that a doctor understands what headaches are, but a good doctor also understands that patients suffer.

The ability to use the metaphorical language of different methods of inquiry precludes the postulation of odd metaphorical constructs that have no basis in reality, and is indeed essential to science. However, science does not dismiss subjective reality, but permits us to more reliably anchor it to physical or empirical events, and thus allows us to better communicate how we feel and what we truly value. This multi-metaphorical position assumes that no one metaphorical level of understanding is more privileged than another, and is championed by the cognitive linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Turner (1999), who argue that a true understanding of any phenomenon is dependent upon our ability to frame it using differing methodological assumptions. Thus, "In applying a method, we need to be as sure as we can that the method itself does not either determine the outcome in advance of the empirical inquiry or artificially skew it. A common method for achieving this… is to seek converging evidence using the broadest available range of differing methodologies. Ideally, the skewing effects of any one method will be canceled out by other methods. The more sources of evidence we have, the more likely this is to happen."

Unfortunately however, the tendency in science is be restrictive in the use of one’s metaphors, and to address particular issues in science with the singular methodology of the specialist. As the founder of cybernetics, Nobert Weiner noted (1961) "…..science has been increasingly the task of specialists. Today there are few scholars who can call themselves mathematicians or physicists or biologists without restriction. A man may be a topologist or an acoustician or a coleopterist. He will be full of the jargon of his field, and will know all its literature and all its ramifications, but, more frequently than not, he will regard the next subject as something belonging to his colleague three doors down the corridor, and will consider any interest in it on his own part as an unwarrantable breach of privacy."

This argument is particularly true for the science of psychology. Psychologists in the fields of humanistic, social, experimental, cognitive, and behavioristic psychology have churned out an extensive corpus of journalistic literature, but nearly all of it is does not include even the most cursory consideration of how other methodologies and their accompanying metaphors would clarify understanding. In particular, the question that comes to mind to any layman who confronts the imposing and intimidating edifice of endless rows of stacks of books and journals that comprise the knowledge of psychology is how much of all this stuff is comprised of just different ways of saying the same thing, and how much of it consists of merely metaphors that allude to events, but are grounded in none of them.

Consider this simple yet very nontrivial observation. A person who has to rapidly shift his attention between a host of very salient perceptions or precepts will experience a state of high neurological arousal marked by consistent reports of pleasure, ecstasy, and well being. This fact has been independently confirmed by the separate methodologies of humanistic, social, physiological, and bio-behavioral science, but never through the combined perspective of those methodologies. Simple polling procedures (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997) have found that individuals consistently report ecstatic or pleasurable states when engaging in very involving pursuits ranging from mountain climbing to gambling. This phenomenological interpretation is often merged with a social psychological perspective that imports indistinct metaphorical motivating processes such as intrinsic motivation, ‘autotelic’ personality, and self-actualization. In addition to these metaphors, the neurophysiological correlates to these experiences are well established. PET scans and other neurophysiological measures have demonstrated that heightened levels of the neuro-modulator dopamine are present during video game playing (Koepp et al., 1998), extreme sports, and gambling, and represent the distinguishing morphological change during such ‘flow’ producing behaviors. It has been proposed (Ashby, Isen, & Turken 1999) that dopamine facilitates switching between different cognitive perspectives, which improves cognitive flexibility and creative problem solving, and mediates the cognitive effects of positive affect. This position has been corroborated by recent neuro-physiological findings that have established dopamine as a neurochemical that imparts pleasure (Montague et al. 1994), makes thinking more efficient (Durstewitz et al. 1999), and keeps us rooted on our behavior (Schultz, 1998). Dopamine is released when attention ‘shifts’ due to behavioral discrepancies or challenges (Donahoe, Palmer, and Burgos, 1997), or in other words, is released when one is "attending" to salient events (Horvitz, Stewart, and Jacobs, 1997).

Finally, the bio-behavioral events that constitute the neural activity corresponding with peak experiences can be modeled using neural models of reinforcement that implicate dopaminergic midbrain systems (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993), and mapped to patterns of information (e.g. variable ratio or gambling schedules of reinforcement) that as a matter of course engage the contingency based metaphors of behaviorism. Each of these empirical methodologies if used in concert would immensely simplify an understanding of such ‘peak’ or ‘flow’ experiences by discounting extra behavioral metaphorical entities that have no meaning outside of the methodologies that created them. In particular, a grounding of ecstatic experiences to neural events and the schedules of information (or reinforcement) that elicit those events would dispel the implied reality of metaphorical constructs (e.g. ‘undreamed of level of consciousness, ‘heightened sense of self’.) On the other hand, an understanding of the subjective metaphors (e.g. ecstasy, pleasure) of peak experiences implicates those aspects of neuro-biological research that are important to people.

Because the evidence for what has been popularly called ‘peak’ or ‘flow’ experiences has never converged, the phenomenon has been needlessly confounded and trivialized by the persistence of extraneous metaphors that have no meaning outside of the methodology that created them. Contrariwise, if looked as a mere physiological or behavioral phenomenon, the subjective importance of such experience is unrealized, and is reduced to some colorless and abstract component of ‘reinforcement’. Only through the combined use of metaphors from phenomenology, social psychology, physiology, and behavior analysis (i.e. behaviorism) may such experiences be understood, and be ultimately reduced to the comfortable intuitive explanations that we apply to many aspects of the human condition, from headaches and disease to the mechanics of throwing a ball.

Ultimately, what is ‘real’ to us is what we understand, and understanding is not the province of one favored metaphorical description of the world, but of many. In his landmark book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), Thomas Kuhn noted that the work of a scientist was a community affair, and that scientists tend to work with a narrow vocabulary that they may not share with other communities, thus causing each faction to ultimately talk past each other rather than to each other. Recent advances in cognitive science, and particularly in the nascent field of cognitive linguistics recognize that the long overdue simplification of the overly complex field of psychology requires an understanding and appreciation of the metaphorical underpinnings of the language we use. This appreciation is only the beginning, and is long past due.

In psychology, decision making, whether it is initiated or motivated by a conscious or non conscious estimation of the contingencies of reinforcement (as behaviorists would see it), biological sensitivities (as sociobiologists would see it), or mentalistic agencies such as will, need, or desire (as pop or social psychologists would see it) is generally accounted for apart from the patterns of neural activation that are responsible for translating motivating events into behavior. The actual neural and somatic processes that activate behavior are generally not considered as having a significant influence on how behavior is decided. Decision making is thus ‘disembodied’, since a consideration of bodily influences would not increase the predictive power bestowed by the behavioral road map provided by environmental contingencies, biological sensitivities, or just good old common sense.

In contrast to the fixation on of behavioral, social, genetic and otherwise disembodied motivating entities that comprise most of what we call the psychology of motivation, cognitive psychology is primarily concerned with the physiological, biochemical, and morphological content of mental states, and how those states are integrated to produce vision, perception, attention, awareness, etc. In other words, cognitive science emphasizes how mental processes are activated, not why they are activated. This bifurcation of psychological perspective into a separate emphasis on motivation and activation variables has historically separated cognitive science from those disciplines in psychology such as analytic, social and behavioristic psychology that are concerned primarily with how behavior is instigated or motivated.

Within the last twenty years however, a new generation of cognitive scientists has begun to regard this divide as artificial, and has recognized that motivation and activation are tightly bound, and that each informs and explains the other. This position, also called bio-behavioral or second generation cognitive science, has found elegant and forceful advocacy in the works of the psychologists John Donahoe and David Palmer, the philosopher Mark Johnson, the linguist George Lakoff, the neuro-psychologist Antonio Damasio, and the immunologist Gerald Edelman. Their general position is that language, behavior, and value itself it strongly rooted in sensori-motor or bodily processes, and that activation in itself does influence motivation. Thus sensori-motor and neural activation patterns underlie basic processes of reinforcement (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993), create the basis of language through metaphor (Johnson and Lakoff, 1999), continually influence behavior as emotion (Damasio, 1994), and provide the basis of value and consciousness (Edelman, 1992).

However, the complex activation patterns that underlie language, emotion, and value do not in themselves implicate how decision making at its most rudimentary is performed. And here is the critical point. If decision making, if reduced to its molecular correlate of activating attentional processes in itself adds value to behavior, then no behavior can be reliably predicted without a consideration of the activation processes that make behavior possible. Moreover, if this is true, then many of the long held concepts in social psychology, behaviorism, and sociobiology must be reconsidered, reinterpreted, or abandoned.

On a molecular (neural) level, the shifting of attention that occurs as initiated by a sudden change in an environment-behavior (perceptual) relationship is isomorphic with the liberation of the neurotransmitter dopamine in synaptic clefts between coactive pre- and post synaptic neurons (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993). The functional role of dopamine is to stabilize active neural representations in the frontal cortex (Durstewitz et al. 1999), to label stimuli with appetitive value (i.e. it feels good), and to provide advance reward information before behavior occurs (Schultz, 1999). Finally, dopamine is released in response to perceived deviations from learned predictions in future reward (Montague, et al. 1994), or is sensitive to the perceived salience of responses and their consequences (i.e. response contingencies). In other words, dopamine acts to make thinking processes more efficient and is essential to the process of reinforcement.

If these hypotheses are true, then specific response contingencies (particularly variable ratio or ‘gambling’ schedules of reinforcement) may be hypothesized to signal frequent and consistent deviations in reward prediction, and these deviations will correlate with the consistent and elevated release of dopamine and the felt experience of elation or pleasure. This prediction has been recently borne out by a recent experiment (Koepp et al. 1998) that demonstrated that the increased release of dopamine occurs during the performance of a goal directed motor task: a video game. This result is underscored by an extensive record of self reports that relate ecstatic states to environmental contingencies that require a rapid attentional shifting between salient cognitive precepts (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993).

A specific response contingency (gambling or video game playing) demands a rapid shifting of attention, but multiple concurrent contingencies involving similar behavior that lead to different rewards may do the same thing. Consider this mind experiment. Will, a third grader, is given a homework assignment to write a school play for a not too exacting teacher. Most likely, Will will not find the task interesting, and turn in some banal creation calculated to achieve a good grade and no more. But what if Will was aware of a cute classmate who swooned over romantic phrases, a principal who liked slapstick, the call of posterity if the play was entered in a nationwide contest, an audience that liked good plot suspense, not to mention writing a better piece than a rival student in class? For better illustration, let’s flesh out this scenario out with a more cinematic example. Will can become William Shakespeare, the principal the Queen, the cute classmate a beautiful countess, his student rival Christopher Marlowe, and posterity the enrapture of audiences for all time. As the movie ‘Shakespeare in Love’ fancifully notes, Shakespeare’s banal play idea of ‘Romeo and Ethel: The Pirates Daughter’ evolved into the resulting Romeo and Juliet due to the influence of a confluence of events or otherwise ‘extrinsic’ motivators. Each of these motivators would in itself have an unremarkable effect on Will, but representing a calculus of ever changing constraints, would cause him to continually shift his attention to succeed in this psychological juggling act. Stressful, perhaps, but exhilarating, definitely.

If activation patterns (attention) are specific to prediction error, then the continuous prediction errors that sustains attention and the corresponding release of dopamine are inherent in the stimulus context that creates that prediction error, and not in the stimulus itself. Thus extrinsic motivators (money, power, sex, etc.) always include an intrinsically motivating component (pleasurable alertness) that is critically dependent upon how those extrinsic events are arranged to follow behavior. Thus extrinsic and intrinsic motivation are not separate entities, but are individual aspects of the same motivating or learning process. This explains the favor we give to behaviors that have a great deal of unpredictability, such as sports, gambling, and perhaps play writing. The leads to a critical hypothesis: Objects do not reinforce, but rather the perceptual relationships denoted by those objects. These relationships occur virtually, and always represent as-if relationships and their corresponding prediction errors. That is, an object does not have to be possessed, but be potentially possessed.

Reinforcement theory, as defined through modern cognitive science, contrasts with theories informed by behaviorism, sociobiology, economics, and even social psychology that correlate happiness with physical objects. Humans do exist to maximize value, but if value is determined by potential rather than actual events, then value can only be maximized by engineering social environments that provide multiple concurrent rewards for differing aspects of behavior, and inculcating through education our ability to perceive those rewards. In other words, perfectly engineered societies are merely the societies we admire anyway, such as the idealized models represented by ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, and Shakespearean England. These societies provide the multi-modal reinforcement for any variety of endeavor, from art to music to sports, but as importantly, they provide the means whereby we may easily perceive the potential approval of the an audience, a girlfriend, posterity, or a Queen. And the Shakespeares of the world, as well as its musicians, artists and saints come about because they are well reinforced by what they do, and this because they can empathize about the world.

Ashby, F. Gregory, Isen, Alice M. and U. Turken (1999) A Neuropsychological Theory of Positive Affect and Its Influence on Cognition, Psychological Review, 106(3), 529-550

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1997) Finding Flow, Basic Books

Damasio, Antonio R. (1994) Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Avon

Deutsch, David (1997) The Fabric of Reality, Allen Lane

Donahoe, J. W. and D. C. Palmer (1993) Learning and Complex Behavior, Allyn and Bacon

Donahoe, J. W., D. C. Palmer, and Jose E. Burgos (1997) The Unit of Selection: What do reinforcers reinforce?, Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 67, 259-273

Edelman, Gerald (1992) Bright Air Brilliant Fire, Basic Books

Durstewitz, Daniel, Marian Kelc, and Onur Gunturkun (1999) A neurocomputational theory of the dopaminergic modulation of working memory functions, Journal of Neuroscience, 19(7): 2807-2822

Horvitz, J. C., Stewart, T., and Jacobs, B. L. (1997) Burst activity of ventral segmental dopamine neurons as elicited by sensory stimuli. Brain Research, 759, 251-258

Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago

Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, Basic Books

M. J. Koepp et al. (1998) Evidence for striatal dopamine release during a video game, Nature, 393, 266-268

Montague, P.R., Dayan P. Sejnowski, T.J. (1994) Foraging in an uncertain environment using predictive Hebbian learning. In: J.D. Dowan, G. Tesauro and J. Alspector (eds.) Neural Information Processing Systems, 6, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, pp. 598-605

Schultz, Wofram (1998) Predictive reward signal of dopamine neurons, Journal of Neurophysiology, 80, 1, 1-27

Weiner, Norbert, Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961

The flow experience, as commonly defined, represents a state of pleasure, good feelings or euphoria that occurs when one is attending to some important task that represents a perfect match between demand and skill. Of course, during the course of any performance, a perfect matching is impossible, since slight mismatches between demand and skill occur near constantly. Thus a rock climber or creative artist, when tasked to the limit of his or her capability is not absolutely sure that the next move will not result in a fall or a loss of inspiration. Thus a matching of demand and skill encompasses behavior that is to a small degree uncertain in its results. If this simple assumption is granted, then the demand/skill match perfectly coheres with a cardinal principal in contemporary neuroscience that holds that the human brain is keenly sensitized to prediction error, and that its chemistry will be altered in specific ways when prediction error is highly positive and sustained. To wit, the neuromodulator dopamine, a neurochemical that modulates global areas of the brain (neocortex) is released when an individual (and this includes our mammalian cousins) perceives a positive discrepancy in its environment that was heretofore imperfectly predicted. This has recently been empirically demonstrated through simple brain scans (fMRI) that have detected heightened levels of dopamine in a variety of flow producing tasks, from game playing to creative behavior. Further, elevated dopamine levels not only result in subjective reports of euphoria or pleasure, but also in increased levels of 'synaptic efficiency' that leads to heightened mental capacity. As scientific explanations usually do however, the literary breathlessness that accompanies common descriptions of flow (e.g., undreamed of state of consciousness, psychic energy) is replaced with a more down to earth and slightly sinister explanation. Namely, the vaunted flow experience is little different from a cocaine high, which depends also on elevated dopamine levels.

Although the neuro-psychology of flow is plainly transparent, in nearly all its literature in print and on the web, this critical element of the phenomenon has been totally ignored. The primary reasons commonly ventured for this has been that the neuro-psychology of flow is mere reductionism, whereas flow is about subjective experience. This of course is rubbish. To reduce any phenomenon to its constituent parts must not be confused with using such a reduction as part and parcel of an explanation of that phenomenon. Thus, we may know that the subjective experience of a pain in the neck may be reduced to strained muscles or infected blood vessels, however we explain such pains through a recourse to our subjective agonies and its proximal physiological causes. That is of course what science does, provide explanations, and it is explanations that generate the procedures from wonder drugs to wonder cars that enable us to cope with our world. In the 14^th century, the 'science' of astronomy was interested in predictions, and by noting systematically the motions of the stars, the events that populated the universe, from eclipses to the seasons could be foretold. Explanation was an afterthought, and was provided by the bible or through ad hoc constructions like crystal spheres. But as Galileo demonstrated, science is more than prediction, it is explanation, and to be scientific means to always quest for the heart of the matter, not the heart of the prediction. Similarly, flow research is anchored in 14^th century notions of science, with explanations of flow being a mere ad hoc concoction of brain waves, psychic energy, or consciousness raising. By not even noting the importance of a complete explanation of flow that integrates the phenomenological and physiological aspects of flow, explanations for flow become mere literary devices, and that is what they have been to this point. Thus flow is NOT science because it does not embrace the explanatory comprehensiveness of science (or in other words, it implicitly rejects the epistemology of science). Until the literature on flow does this it will remain what it has always been, merely literature.

For a more detailed and reference laden take on the same phenomenon and its practical and philosophical implications, the following article, published recently in the behavioristic journal 'Behavior and Social Issues', demonstrates how even behaviorism is not science but literature, but unfortunately without Csikszentmihalyi's poetry.

This new flow theory is built on a new theory of incentive motivation based on actual observations of the brain 'in action' that has emerged within the last five years. The following link explains it briefly through the use of the simple example of a nickel slot machine.

These factors cannot be investigated with a metaphorical language that is incapable of mapping the fine grain empirical correlates to flow. That requires recourse to more strongly empirical methodologies that are utilized by the subject matters of learning theory and neuro-psychology. I believe that the four questions that follow about flow can only be answered by these methodologies. In the subsequent argumentative outline that follows, I present a candidate theory for flow that is derived from these disciplines.

The flow state represents an experiential state that is characterized by a high degree of alertness and pleasure, nonetheless the neuro-psychology of flow has never been seriously addressed.

Response Scalability

Although flow reflects a state of attentive absorption, many absorbing tasks do not elicit pleasurable feelings. The simple matching of task and demand may have little emotional resonance if an individual is solving a crossword puzzle, but will elicit a state of ecstasy is an individual is embarking on a dangerous mountain climb. In other words, the intensity of the flow experience seems to be dependent upon the importance of the task that is engaged.

Individuals who are about to engage in absorbing activities (e.g. mountain climbers) commonly report pleasurable flow like states, even though they are not presently engaging in tasks that require attentive absorption. Similarly, individuals who have engaged in such tasks report similar pleasurable states.

Flow has been commonly associated with creative behavior, and has been hypothesized as increasing one’s ability to think creatively.

One of the most interesting findings in contemporary neuro-psychology is that the simple act of shifting attention can be quite a pleasurable thing. It is now known that perceptual set shifting occurs concurrently with the release of the neuromodulator dopamine which makes thinking more efficient, focused, and pleasurable, and also signifies or marks the importance of perceptual objects. In this later regard, dopamine is integral to contemporary conceptions of reinforcement or reward. Dopamine release also scales with the importance of the perceptual events that are attended to, and in situations where continuous perceptual shifting is required between highly salient informative events (e.g. performing surgery, climbing mountains, thinking creatively), neuromodulator release is high and sustained, and is reported as pleasure or even ecstasy. This is called peak experience, deep play, or flow.

It is my position that a bio-behavioral explanation of the ‘flow’ state not only provides a description of the neurological substrate of flow, but also maps to informative or experiential events (i.e. response contingencies) to provide explanations for the response latency, duration, and intensity of flow experiences. A bio-behavioral explanation also maps to phenomenological (subjective) experiences that comprise flow and many other emotional states. Finally, a bio-behavioral explanation suggests testable procedures that can not only validate such an explanation, but also has significant applicability to problems regarding education, psychotherapy, and moral philosophy.

1. Perceptual set shifting is modulated by dopamine release.

Decision making implies problem solving, since an individual must choose between different alternatives in order to decide on an optimal course of action. In modern reinforcement theory, all decision making is modulated or guided by the release of the neuromodulator dopamine. The effects of dopamine are several:

2. Dopamine increases cognitive efficiency, acts as ‘somatic’ marker, and subjectively feels pleasurable.

Dopamine increases the firing rate between individual neurons, facilitates greater interconnectivity between neurons, and thus makes thinking more efficient. Subjectively, dopamine marks the importance or salience of perceptual events, and non consciously directs or fixes attention to those events. This activity is often reported as pleasurable.

3. A perceptual demand for rapid perceptual set shifting increases dopamine release.

A demand for high efficiency in thinking due to external temporal demands (e.g. if one must rapidly make the right choice while performing surgery or climbing a mountain) or internal temporal demands (e.g. creative thought) will demand a rapid shifting of perceptual set, and thus accentuate dopamine release. In other words, to be able to shift between and integrate different perceptual perspectives may be demanded for simple behaviors that are constrained by time, or complex behaviors that can only be successfully performed by recourse to a rapid shifting in perceptual set. Thus the relatively simple task of climbing a mountain requires a rapid shifting in cognitive perspective when decisions must be made in split seconds. Secondly, relatively complex tasks such as composing a poem or a sonata can only occur when many precepts must be ‘held’ in attention and considered in rapid succession.

4. Dopamine release is scalable to the importance of the precept that we are shifting attention to.

In other words, the more important the precepts that attention is shifted between, the more dopamine will be released. For example, we would be far more alert and aroused seeing a police car in our rear view mirror than a minivan. Similarly, increased dopamine release would be hypothesized to occur when the implications of perceptual set shifting remain high across a performance. Thus a mountain climber would be presumably more aroused if the implications of a fall were fatal rather than if it involved only a slight possibility of injury.

5. Dopamine release occurs after cessation of eliciting stimuli. (behavioral momentum), or before those stimuli actually occur (priming).

Dopamine release is signaled by abstract properties (e.g. perceptual salience), but it is also associated with other ‘discriminative’ stimuli that represent the otherwise neutral environmental setting in which that response occurred. For example, a mountain climber may have a ‘peak’ experience while climbing a sheer cliff, but the pleasurable aspects of that experience may also be elicited as he prepares for another climb, recalls the experience, or if he just happens to remain in the vicinity of mountains. Like an accident victim who relives the emotional trauma of an accident by recalling it or returning to the scene where it occurred, highly pleasant or peak experiences may also recur and be sustained through the conscious or non conscious rehearsal of the neutral perceptual events that framed it. Similarly, dopamine release may occur prior to the actual onset of the stimuli that will elicit it, and thus occurs as a preparatory or priming response. For example, mountain climbers often report euphoric feelings as they prepare for a climb.

6. Dopamine release is not incompatible with other activating somatic responses.

Because dopaminergic activity derives from mid brain structures, it is not incompatible with other somatic responses that are also activated by perceptual events. For example, if rapid perceptual set shifting is not perceived to be sufficient in itself in achieving an important goal, other somatic responses (e.g. muscle tension) may be signaled that serve as somatic markers that signal other behavioral strategies that may alter how a problem is appraised, but not how rapidly it is appraised. Thus, an individual taking a difficult test would rapidly shift between different perspectives that allow him to resolve test problems, yet may experience mild anxiety that further sharpens or attenuates his focus. Similarly, an individual may experience intermittent feelings of high alertness or high alertness combined with high anxiety, as when one is absorbed in watching an ‘exciting’ football game.

Because dopamine release is not locked in tandem with other somatic responses, and because subjective appraisals map to input from a collection of neural, somatic, and cognitive systems, dopamine alone is highly correlated with but nonetheless cannot be solely responsible for feelings of ecstasy or bliss.

 

7. Because dopamine release is multiply determined by informative events, it may be modified by an understanding and control of the informational events (response contingencies) that map or correspond to its release.

The validity of the flow concept owes to the work of the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. His social psychological fieldwork among thousands of respondents demonstrated conclusively that self-reports of pleasure, satisfaction, creativity, and even ecstasy are reliably correlated with circumstances that occur in situations that represent a matching of skill to demand. Rock climbers, surgeons, creative writers etc. commonly report this ‘flow’ state when engaged in behaviors that command their total attention or absorption. Unfortunately, Czikszentmihalyi mapped these self-reports to metaphorical rather than neurological entities, and flow became defined as a holistic mental state rather than an experience that could be dissembled into constituent processes that implicate actual neural activity. Thus, flow experiences are due to the concentration of ‘psychic energy’ or obscure psychological mechanisms such as intrinsic motivation, autotelic personality, etc. Because flow events are not mapped to specific empirical events, his theory has severe problems with its semantics, and succeeds only as a literary description of the phenomenon. A scientific theory of flow must address and explain the behavioral characteristics of flow, and in this regard Csikszentmihalyi’s account falls far short. Thus his ‘theory’ of flow cannot account for behavioral momentum, response scalability, cognitive efficiency, and the pleasurable subjective feeling associated with flow. Moreover, it does not suggest any testable procedures other than the invocation to find something you’re interested in and do it.

Ashby, Isen, and Turkel

Although negative emotional experience (depression, anxiety) has been readily mapped to specific informational, neurological, and somatic events, only in the last several years has positive emotional experience been mapped to similar events. In a pivotal 1999 article in the Psychological Review, Ashby et al. became among the first researchers to recognize that the subjective language of positive experience or ‘qualia’ can indeed map to specific neurological events. In an exhaustive review of recent neurological literature, they demonstrated that perceptual set shifting does correlate with the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, and that dopamine is responsible for cognitive efficiency, and does indeed mark the salience of events.

However it is significant that they do not discuss how dopamine release may or may not be a learnable response. More precisely, the authors neglect to provide or refer to a working theory of reinforcement, and do not provide a data language that can map perceptual shifting to informative contingencies that change with time and behavior. In other words, the authors do not consider how ongoing experience as denoted by information can map to dopamine release or to self-reports of positive affect, or how high neural arousal as marked by dopamine release may occur if it leads to consciously or nonconsciously perceived outcomes. For example, the authors are content to say that a reward such as a gift is responsible for an increase in dopamine, but do not discuss how receiving a gift can signal the modulation of an individuals subsequent perception of the many and varied consequences of that gift which in turn elicit rapid perceptual shifting. Secondly, they are silent about how specific response contingencies can also modulate perceptual shifting. For example, variable ratio or gambling schedules of reinforcement map to informative events (e.g. the roll of a die, fishing, or games) that have variable and rapidly changing outcomes that must be rapidly considered. Finally, although the authors suggest that their work may be extended to social psychological phenomena that employ self reports of affect (pleasure, ecstasy) as a primary data, they do not refer to any behavioristic or contingency based data languages that could map these experiences in time.

In all fairness, the authors point out that the derivability of affect from learning processes and the applicability of their conclusions to social psychological phenomena (e.g. flow) were beyond the scope of the article. However it is astonishing that the authors overlook a wealth of empirical research that demonstrate that learning processes themselves can be mapped to neuro-psychological processes that strongly implicate dopaminergic activity. This research, which is derived from contemporary research in behaviorism, unifies all learning processes (e.g. respondent or Pavlovian conditioning and operant or Skinnerian conditioning) under simple principles of reinforcement that enfold the activity of the neuromodulator dopamine.

In their 1993 book ‘Learning and Complex Behavior’, the behavioristic psychologists John Donahoe and David Palmer systematically mapped informational and behavioral events to actual neurological processes. As leading proponents of the emerging discipline of theoretical or bio-behaviorism, D&P differ from many cognitive psychologists in their insistence that complex large scale or molar psychological processes (voluntary choice, involuntary behavior) can and should be mapped to simpler data languages that denote rudimentary neural processes. Their ‘unified theory of reinforcement’ provides for the first time an explanatory bedrock from which all psychological processes may be derived. D&P defined reinforcement as representing a behavioral discrepancy that on the neural level causes dopamine to be released between synaptic clefts. In other words, conscious and nonconscious behavior is shaped by patterns of reinforcement that derive in turn from the activity of dopaminergic mid brain systems.

Although D&P’s work represents an advance in psychological thinking of the first order, and has been gained much academic acceptance, they did not demonstrate any parallels of their highly abstract language to the subjective or phenomenological data languages which are frequently employed by social and humanistic psychologists to describe the facts of experience. In a manner akin to a chemist who painstakingly describes the chemistry behind water, but ignores the fact that people describe water as something that’s wet, D&P fail to tie their precise data language to the imprecise subjective ‘qualia’ of existence. The most obvious example of this is their emphasis on dopaminergic neural processes to explain reinforcement, and their failure to recognize that dopamine release is a major component in human emotion, and that dopamine is strongly correlated with reported feelings of pleasure that in turn alters overt behavior. Correspondingly, and perhaps due to a strong aversion or perhaps confusion regarding the interpretation the subjective qualia using an objective language, D&P completely ignore human emotion, even though the topic would be completely amenable to their perspective.

Because Donahoe and Palmer have not attempted to extend or translate their very precise and empirically grounded data language to other more imprecise languages used by social, humanistic, and cognitive psychologists, their seminal and quite revolutionary contribution has been widely ignored by psychologists outside of the behavioristic persuasion. Similarly, because Csikszentmihalyi has ignored or has been dismissive of the ‘hard’ psychological sciences that insist on an empirical grounding of psychological phenomena, the very real importance of his flow concept has been marginalized, and has likewise been ignored by psychologists outside of the disciplines of social and humanistic psychology.

Finally, although it is salutary that Ashby et al. noted the importance of a theory of affect that maps subjective experience to real neurological events, their suggestion of a further integration of their theory with learning theory and social psychology is weak. The authors display no knowledge of similar research in learning theory that incorporates much the same research they quote, and they only vaguely hint as to how their work may be applied to topics in social psychology such as intrinsic motivation, peak experience, and creativity.

To fully understand any phenomenon, it is above all necessary to understand that no data language is so privileged that it must a priori exclude other data languages that describe the same phenomena. Thus an individual may know that water is wet, but also understand water from the perspective of chemistry, fluid dynamics, or quantum physics. To understand water, he must be capable of moving from one perspective to another depending upon the problem he wants to solve. Likewise, the flow experience can be understood as a pleasurable experience, as the result of certain neuro-psychological processes, or as the result of the imposition of particular response contingencies. Finally, the ability to move between different data languages corrects for results that may be predetermined by a single data language alone. Thus, Csikszentmihalyi’s postulation of intrinsic motivation processes and separate states of consciousness collapses when corrected by a concurrent understanding of the neural processes that parallel the flow response. Likewise, Donahoe and Palmer’s bio-behavioristic account of behavior denotes experience as a colorless mechanism, and cannot predict or account for the subjective language of human experience that reflects human consciousness, feeling, and emotion. Hence, it has little or no relevance to the highly metaphorical language that constitutes the common vernacular and much of academic thought.

The refusal among cognitive, social, and behavioristic psychologists to recognize the interdependency of their subject matters has been disastrous for psychology, because it has encouraged redundant, incomplete, or obscurantist solutions for psychological phenomena that would be far more economically explained through an integration of their data languages. The flow response is an excellent example of this, although there are countless others.

References:

Ashby, F. G., Isen, Alice M., and Turken U. (1999) A Neuropsychological Theory of Positive Affect and Its Influence on Cognition, Psychological Review, 106, (3), 529-550

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1990) Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Collins

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1997) Finding Flow, Basic Books

Donahoe, J.W. and D. C. Palmer (1993) Learning and Complex Behavior, Allyn and Bacon

(well, sort of)

Well, here’s my experience with the exercise. The following article was submitted to the journal Biological Psychology, which promptly gave it to three unnamed reviewers. The article came back to me for rewrite, and with some very interesting commentary. Those comments, which are quoted entire in the following pages, are also followed by my own commentary. My second article, which is about double the size of the first, addresses the problems the reviewers found, and will be submitted to yet another journal shortly. I’ll keep you the reader posted regarding whatever happens.

(By the way, the first article, warts and all, did finally find a home on the e-journal athletic insight (athleticinsight.com).

A. J. Marr

In the last thirty years, an extensive literature has accumulated that has established the existence of a state of pleasure, well being, and increased cognitive efficiency that occurs when one is performing an absorbing task. This flow state occurs in a perceptual channel or ‘zone’ that reflects a matching of demand to skill, and frequently occurs in creative, sporting, or other circumstances that demand total attention. Explanations for flow primarily consist of a host of inferred mental states that are ungrounded to actual bio-behavioral processes. In particular, the somatic and neural concomitants of the flow response have been scarcely investigated, and have never been systematically addressed. The purpose of this article is to integrate current research in learning theory and neuro-psychology with these observations, and to provide a synthetic theory of the flow experience that will account for all manifestations of the experience, and provide clear and testable predictions related to its elicitation and control.

In the early seventies, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered from the basis of thousands of interviews a common subjective experience of pleasure, interest, and even ecstasy that was derived from activities that perfectly matched one’s skills with the demands for performance. Rock climbers, musicians, chess players, surgeons all reported this "flow" state when their activities possessed this perceptual structure (Csikszentmihalyi, 1977), and subsequently reported a greater interest in these tasks as a result of this experience. Csikszentmihalyi defined the flow response as a "holistic response" or an "optimal state of experience is one in which there is order in consciousness." "This happens when psychic energy, or attention, is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunity for action." (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) Flow "provides a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting a person into a new reality. It pushes a person to higher levels of performance, and leads to previously undreamed of states of consciousness. In this growth of self lies the key flow activities." "Potentially negative experiences can be transformed into flow by 1) setting clear goals to strive toward, 2) becoming immersed in the activity chosen, 3) paying attention to what is happening, and 4) learning to enjoy immediate experiences." The flow state has been defined as "an intrinsic reward for participation in an activity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1977), as an optimal state that occurs when there is a balance between the perceived challenges of a situation and a person’s skills or capabilities for action (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), and as a centering of attention on a limited stimulus field (Webster, Trevino, and Ryan, 1993). Flow is also characterized by a heightened sense of playfulness (Webster and Martocchio, 1992), self control (Ghani and Deshpande. 1994), increased learning (Canter, Rivers and Storrs, 1985), and increased positive subjective experiences (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). In keeping with the implied reality of multiple motivational processes, these definitions scarcely refer to information but rather to mind states such as levels of consciousness, attention, or playfulness or states of intentionality such as intrinsic reward, self control, goal setting, etc.

What is immediately distinguishing about almost all commentary on the flow experience is its thoroughgoing metaphorical content. Flow occurs because psychic energy is invested, consciousness is ordered, undreamed states of consciousness are reached, and when we are immersed into activity. Flow doesn’t refer to behavioral, neural, or somatic variables, but to other domains of perceptual experience that reflect disembodied levels of experience. Flow is composed of distinctive rational, perceptual, and emotional domains that follow with each other like the chain of boxes in a flow chart. Thus a demand/skill match is followed by attention that is followed or attended to by ‘senses’ of playfulness, self control, enjoyment, etc. All of these different domains act as different segmented psychological faculties. These domains represent different psychological phenomena, and are seen as separate but interacting agencies. Flow is distinctive among motivating processes because it is not only signaled by a perception of a matching of skill and demand, but also incorporates other inferred motivating processes such as hypnosis, play, self actualization, and psychic energy (attention). Indeed, the critical element of purely informative or perceptual events such as the matching of skill to demand seem almost incidental when lost in this profuse list of motivational processes which are incorporated into the flow construct.

In contrast to the profusion of interpretive or metaphorical characteristics of flow, the physiological correlates to flow have been scarcely investigated and have been only generally or partially described, or in the case of somatic and neural responses, not described at all. Indeed, the neural correlates to flow have been reduced to metaphorical representations of the mind that engage hydraulic or electromechanical models that render the mind with cartoonish simplicity. Thus, flow is depicted as the result of the vaguely defined containment, channeling and alignment of emotions, feedback loops, attentional energies and forces, mental "cool" states, or as the tuning of the arousal and inhibition of neural circuitry (Goleman, 1995). More remarkably, there has been no experimental investigation into the nature of the somatic states that parallel flow. Specifically, the visceral and musculoskeletal concomitants to flow have never been examined.

Any scientific theory must be ultimately judged by how well it describes the subject matter it purports to explain. Because it does not account for the physiological correlates of reported feelings of pleasure and absorption, a satisfactory flow theory does not exist. A flow theory must explain and integrate the behavioral, cognitive, and neuro-psychological events that comprise flow experiences. By synthesizing different ‘levels’ of observations that descend from molar (subjective experience, absorption) to molecular detail (neural processes), fine grain predictions can be made regarding the latency, duration, and scalability of flow, and the underlying physiology of enhanced creativity and reported pleasure.

Flow occurs when the demands of a task match but to not surpass the skill available to complete that task. This perceptual set, or ‘flow channel’ represents a class of information that that both elicits and is the object of attentional focus. This information may in turn have normative implications that vary from high to low. From self-reports of individuals, flow seems to scale or increase as the implications of behavior increase. Thus, intense and ecstatic flow experiences are commonly reported among individuals who are absorbed in demanding tasks that have critical implications, such as performing surgery, mountain climbing, and creative behavior. In contrast, less intense or no flow experiences are reported among individuals who are engaged in absorbing but less critical tasks such as reading, video game playing etc. Besides scaling with the importance of the task, the emotional concomitants to flow occur when an individual anticipates a task that commands total absorption, and subsequently to flow eliciting behavior. For example, Csikszentmihalyi noted that individuals reported flow like states as they prepared for flow producing activities like skiing (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Finally, higher behavioral efficiency and creativity have been commonly attributed to the influence of the flow state (Canter, Rivers and Storrs, 1985).

In addition to these behavioral indices of flow, cognitive measures of flow have focused on one primary variable, namely cognitive absorption or focused attention. The implicit assumption of a corollary and perhaps causal relationship between focused attention and flow follows the pattern of a stimulus-response mechanism. That is, the occurrence of the stimulus event (attention) is followed by an almost reflexive response (emotion). Nonetheless, whether or not this paradigm may be of any practical validity depends upon the status of attention as a definable stimulus event, and the degree to which specific correlations can be drawn between various levels of attention and emotional states.

The important question is whether attention as commonly defined displays the expected attributes of a stimulus event. Certainly, the many definitions that may be given to attention do not provide for a simple answer to this question. For example, Candland (1969) maintains that attention can represent a variety of phenomena, such as general alertness, selective focusing, flexibility in shifting focus, and capacity to sustain focused alertness. In addition, the concept of attention does not reflect on localized process, but is best viewed as a taxonomy for a multitude of processes that modulate the afferent signal from a sensory receptor along its sensory pathway (Hilgard, 1975). Supporting this perspective, the neurophysiological correlates of attention as revealed by a variety of researchers (Hernandez-Peon, Spong, Haider, and Lindsley, 1965; Deutsch and Deutsch, 1963) discredit the implicit judgment that attention represents a stimulus like event. Rather, attentional processes assume the aspect of a homeostatic mechanism that allows certain streams of sensory information to be processed to the exclusion of other incoming information. That is, rather than representing a stream of information that is transmitted through certain afferent and efferent neural passageways, attention represents the process that permits such information streams to be enhanced or diminished.

However, the physiological correlates to focused attention may be inferred from a related experience to flow called meditation. Conditions that elicit focused attention as well as its unique experiential characteristics are generally shared by and may be subsumed under the class of ‘meditative’ experiences that have been studied far more exhaustively. Pleasant emotional experiences that are characteristic of meditation have long been associated with strict attentiveness to specific stimuli or stimulus classes and seen as a byproduct of that attentiveness (Goleman, 1976). Like flow, meditation has been associated with unique physiological and experiential states (Goleman, 1976, Brown, 1977; Deikman, 1963), but unlike flow, the neurophysiological and somatic correlates to meditation have been exhaustively studied Fenwick (1977),Michaels (1976), Wagstaff (1975), Pagano and Warrenburg (1983), Holmes (1984, 1988), and have been found to represent no unique neurophysiological or somatic state, but are merely relaxation. The fact that meditative experiences represent no unique physiological state invalidates the claim that focused attention can account for the euphoric aspect of flow. But as has been noted, there are many different varieties of attention.

Albeit the matching of demand to skill demands an absorption in the task at hand, the flow response universally requires the rapid consideration and choice between many cognitive precepts or events. Thus a mountain climber, surgeon, or poet would have to rapidly choose between many variants of each successive behavior or cognitive precept, each of which if chosen wrong could result in a bad fall, a dead patient, or the loss of inspiration. Can rapid attentional set shifting between a cascade of salient cognitive precepts account for flow? Recently, new neuro-psychological evidence has been assembled that suggests that it can.

Like all behavioral responses, flow is instantiated by neural processes. But what candidate processes exist that can explain flow? A common suggestion is that flow reflects a reduction in brain metabolism, as represented by indices of cortical activity, such as the EEG (Goleman, 1995). In actuality, the cerebral cortex is enervated, and no manner of direct stimulation, electrical, physical or otherwise results in sensations that would otherwise be reported as pleasurable or painful. On the other hand, direct stimulation of mid brain organelles such as the thalamus, amygdala, etc. commonly evokes sensations of pleasure or pain. The essence of emotion, if referred to the sensations that are at the core of feeling, must engage the activity of mid brain structures as mediated by neuro-chemical processes. Indeed, the cerebral cortex is largely the recipient of emotional influences rather than the generator of various emotional states (Panksepp, 1998). The facts of experience, as represented by the information we constantly perceive both consciously and non-consciously continually integrate higher (neo-cortical) and lower (midbrain) neural processes. In a review of recent findings in neuro-psychology Ashby, Isen, and Turkel (1999) concluded that rapid attentional set shifting between salient cognitive precepts does indeed correlate with feelings of elation and satisfaction, and that the neurochemical processes that enable this shifting also increase cognitive efficiency and creativity. In a similar vein, the behavioristic psychologists John Donahoe and David Palmer (1993) identified cognitive set shifting with dopamine release, and in turn with the concept of reinforcement. The cognitive set shifting inherent in broad perspectives on problem solving has also been independently noted to correspond with more effective problem solving and a higher likelihood of persisting at the behavior that is characterized by those perspectives (Dewitte and Verguts, 1999).

On the neuro-psychological level of description, the selection of a particular environmental behavior relation or cognitive precept can be defined as reinforcement, which on the neural level causes the neurotransmitter dopamine to be liberated in synaptic clefts between coactive pre- and post synaptic neurons (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993). The functional role of dopamine stabilizes active neural representations in the prefrontal cortex (i.e., attention), and thereby protects goal related delay activity against interfering stimuli, (Durstewitz et al. 1999). Dopamine labels stimuli with appetitive value, and may provide advance reward information before behavior occurs (Schultz, 1999). Dopamine also mediates the cognitive effects of pleasant feelings that may be denoted by self reports of pleasure, happiness, or satisfaction (Ashby, Isen, & Turken, 1999).

In particular, mesolimbic dopamine (DA) activity has been conceptualized as a reward signal that marks and is scaled to the importance or salience of perceptual events (Horvitz, Stewart, and Jacobs 1997), and promotes the effective processing of afferent signals simultaneously arriving at the midbrain. A cascade of multiple salient perceptual events would presumably accentuate and sustain DA activity and facilitate the switching among alternative cognitive perspectives, and thus enhance decision making and creative thinking (Ashby, Isen, and Turken, 1999). This neuro-chemical activity would not only facilitate the rapid and efficient focusing of the mind on a wide range of images, but would also be frequently interpreted as highly pleasurable. Preliminary confirmation of this has been provided by neuro-imaging studies that demonstrated the increased release of dopamine during activities (a video game) that required sustained shifting of a cognitive set (Koepp, 1998).

Finally, the greater number of stimuli that are associated with a response, the more likely that any given environment will contain some of those stimuli, and hence the response will reoccur and/or persist. This ‘over-expectation’ effect, or behavioral momentum (Nevin, 1992) would assign a discriminative function to otherwise neutral stimuli that have been associated with the response. Thus, the continuation of an emotional response long after its proximal causes have ceased may be attributed to remaining in the original environmental setting (office, laboratory) of that response. Hence, as an emotional response, flow would also be predicted to have a behavioral momentum, which subjective reports indicates is the case.

However, this analysis becomes a bit more complicated when situations that elicit the sustained release of dopamine are considered. The positive affect caused by unexpected rewards has been attributed to the release of the neuromodulator dopamine, yet dopamine release continues long after dopamine cells have stopped firing (Ashby, Isen, and Turken, 1999). Although dopamine release has been noted to occur up to thirty minutes after the stimulation of dopaminergic systems, it remains unclear how behavioral momentum may facilitate or inhibit the degree and persistence of the release of dopamine over time.

Flow has been linked to reported states of euphoria or pleasure that occur during and after states of prolonged exertion (Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi, 1999). This euphoric state, or ‘runners high’, is generally attributed to the release of endogenous opiod-peptides, or endorphins, that are the body’s natural way of toning down specific pain responses at different levels. As a result of physical stress, endorphin release produces euphoria, respiratory depression, reduced gastrointestinal motility, and analgesia (Rang, 1995). However, the mapping of euphoric states to physical stressors rather than perceptual events (demand/skill match) cannot account for any of the well established behavioral and cognitive correlates to the flow response. Like dopamine, endorphins are opiods, and presumably would elicit similar subjective feelings. However, since they are elicited by entirely different classes of environmental factors the relationship between flow and a runner’s high, is linked only by their relationship to the similar neurochemical changes they share.

A bio-behavioral theory of flow explains the latency, duration, and intensity of flow, as well as flow’s effect on cognitive efficiency and creativity. In addition, the theory is parsimonious, testable, and integrates the seemingly independent subject matters of phenomenology, learning theory, and cognitive neuro-psychology. Most importantly, a bio-behavioral theory demonstrates that the flow experience cannot be understood through an appeal to phenomenological, cognitive, neurological, or behavioral variables alone, but only through an integration of the respective metaphors that are engaged by these explanatory schemes. Ironically, the systematic integration of these different explanations present a far simpler representation of the flow experience, since different metaphorical and methodological perspectives provide a multivariate perspective on the phenomenon, and correct for conclusions that are skewed by the language itself (Lakoff, 1999).

Finally, separate idiosyncratic mind states such as flow, intrinsic motivation, autotelic personality etc. are ultimately empty concepts, since they cannot account for the abstract environmental contingencies and somatic and neuro-chemical processes that activate behavior. In other words, they have poor semantics, since they are only partially or obscurely rooted in the empirical facts of behavior.

The flow experience does not represent a separate or distinct neuro-psychological event. Rather, flow represents a neurological event that differs in degree rather than type from other similar events, and is no more distinctive than high anxiety is from low anxiety, or running from walking. Moreover, flow is subject to the same principles of learning that govern other involuntary and voluntary behaviors. That is, the processes that underlie flow display the same lawfulness that governs responses as disparate as salivation, emotion, walking, or talking.

The practical implications of a bio-behavioral explanation for flow greatly refine Csikszentmihalyi’s own prescriptions for the replication of flow in everyday life, and make those prescriptions much clearer by discarding spurious mental processes such as intrinsic motivation, autotelic personality, and the like. For example, short bursts of absorbing activity (e.g. writing sonnets, creating art) that are paced at separate intervals during the day will elicit a high level of neural arousal will have enough ‘momentum’ to span those intervals, and create a state of pleasurable alertness that can be extended all day.

Secondly, because flow is a scalable response, lower levels of activation are still desirable, even if they may not produce self-reports of elation or satisfaction. School curricula that are designed to cultivate a child’s shifting focus on diverse aspects of a subject matter that may be inherent in or denoted by that subject matter will arouse his attention, and thus seem to be ‘intrinsically reinforcing’. Third, by stressing the importance of activating neural processes in environments that require exacting levels of performance (e.g. education, work), learning technologies can be readapted to more accurately fit the facts of behavior, and with subsequent increases in their effectiveness as well as comprehensibility.

Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, Basic Books

A second objection of the review is that I did not include any data that the theory could be tested against. Actually, the testability of a theory depends upon whether novel predicted events will occur given an experimental setting. One thus tests not against ‘data’ but against a hypothetical prediction of data. In this regard, my biobehavioral theory for flow is full of lots of quite testable predictions for those artistic and professional types who get into the flow. Predictions regarding the response latency, response content, scalability etc. of flow are I believe quite evident in my article.

More critically, these predictions are wholly dependent upon the use of the right instrumentality’s to investigate the phenomenon, which have not been available until recently. Often a hypothesis cannot be tested until instrumentation is developed that can falsify it, and thus qualify that hypothesis as a scientific fact. For example, the Copernican heliocentric theory of the solar system would have forever remained a theory if the telescope had not been invented that permitted the possible falsification of the theory. A flow theory is no different, since until recent times it was not possible to corroborate any inferred mental process as to its neural mechanics. A biobehavioral theory of flow predicts that individuals who report a sense of euphoria, interest and creativity while focusing on involving tasks will also demonstrate a significant increase in dopamine production. This type of experiment, which can easily be performed using PET scans and other instrumentation, has never been performed on individuals in and out of flow, but when it does, then Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory will finally be demonstrated to be mostly vacuous nonsense surrounding an important kernel of truth.

Reviewer B generally has difficulties with the logical rigor of my arguments, however he has confused my arguments for a biobehavioral flow theory with my seeming acceptance of flow as equivalent to meditative states. He notes a theoretical incoherence in my argument, and I have made significant additions to my article to address this. However it is curious that he believes that ‘attention’ can be used as an independent variable that predicts emotional or flow states, when attention itself is, as I discuss in my article, quite theoretically incoherent itself!

The author is under the impression that the flow experience encompasses a heterogeneous group of phenomena, and he is correct. But all flow researchers stress that it is the abstract qualities of those phenomena (the demand/skill) match that are the common elements that make flow states among artists, rock climbers, and the like equivalent. The common motivational components of flow have always been simple, and there is no need to hypothesize new motivational components unless they are testable and are necessary to increase the predictive power of a flow theory. At present, this does not seem to be the case.

To disagree with the reviewer, the question as to whether dopamine is a reward signal or a reward predicting signal has not yet been resolved. Schultz et. al. never claimed that dopamine is a reward signal, and I did not quote them as claiming such. The association of dopamine with reward is actually attribute in my article to Horvitz. Moreover, much recent research (which I quote) demonstrates that high and sustained elevations of dopamine are indeed associated with euphoria or other self reports of pleasure.

The author claims it is not true that the cerebral cortex is largely the recipient of emotional influences. Perhaps the exact meaning of this statement was not clear. Actually the statement is an exact quote from Jaak Panksepp, who is an eminent neuroscientist and acknowledge expert on emotions. In his quote, Panksepp was referring to the affective or sensory aspect of emotions, and not to the function of the cerebral cortex as the provider of the interpretation of the positive or negative valence of emotion.

His comment on neuro-biological terms were generally correct, and the article will be changed accordingly.

His comment on the my discussion of attention have been updated with recent work on the topic, including Desimone.

Where I agree: Nowhere

Where do I disagree: Let me count the ways!

General comment: This reviewer (Csikszentmihalyi?) seems to agree with the opening statement, but then immediately pronounces the entire effort a pipe dream, and is of no interest to what flow scholars are really interested in, namely the ‘experience’. Problem is, if flow doesn’t refer to anything, and it can mean literally anything. Thus flow has been equated with meditative experiences, runners high, ecstatic states, intrinsic motivation, creative activity etc. Ironically, by meaning many things, it ends up meaning next to nothing.

Reviewer C. starts off by agreeing with the thesis that a satisfactory flow theory must integrate behavioral, cognitive, and neurophysiological events, and then in a later paragraph claims that neural, somatic, etc. events are not what scholars in flow want to understand. In other words, although a flow theory must have an adequate semantics (that is, it must be grounded to something), the semantics of flow is really not what flow scholars care for. This of course is self contradictory and absurd. Scientific theories are impossible without an adequate semantics, and to call flow theory a ‘theory’ while holding an a-priori disregard for semantics is to create an Alice in Wonderland world where theory is mere syntax or word play.

But syntax seems to be just fine for this reviewer, since flow is not about behavior, neural events, and the like, but about ‘experience’. It is an interesting fact that when we suffer for some reason (headaches, depression, that nagging back pain), we are quick to search out the physiological root of the problem and the assorted therapies that remedy that problem. On the other hand, pleasurable experiences such as flow leave us curiously self satisfied with purely subjective accounts for the experience, as if any explanation other than the ‘phenomenological’ one somehow diminishes the experience. In actuality, the insistence on relying on subjective accounts as related by self reports condemns flow a mere trivial exercise that is at bottom unscientific because it simply ignores science. In other words, knowing what flow is ‘like’ can and will never do. Instead, one must scientifically investigate what it is.

The reviewer claims that I do not seem to ‘get’ that a systematic phenomenology is about disembodied experience, and that the ultimate level of explanation for flow lies on this level, and not with a reductionistic perspective that represents a different dogma. But is cognitive science so restrictive that it must privilege one level of thinking over another, and that one must accept one method or perspective over others? What this reviewer does not seem to ‘get’ is that this narrow view has been challenged in the last decade by modern cognitive science (the works of Lakoff, Edelman, Damasio, Searle are examples) and that understanding depends upon the integration and the non-privileged status of different levels of thinking that range from phenomenology to neurology. This is a position that I stress in my article, which most clearly does not privilege a reductionist perspective as representing ‘the’ explanation for flow.

Thus to the reviewer’s question "What is more real, the neurological datum or the subjective experience?" Actually neither is, it just depends upon the question you ask. The question is not metaphysical, as the review would say, but linguistic. And furthermore, for the reviewer to classify himself as an empiricist seems something of a stretch, since except for self reports, the empirical correlates of flow do not interest him.

The reviewer does not believe I am ‘up’ on flow literature. Actually, I have reviewed two of the articles he quotes, and decided not to include them as references in my article. My cited articles are current, if you count the decade of the 90’s as current. Because flow literature has relied to date and without exception on between group designs, its findings have varied little over the decades. Since self reports remain the only data that are considered in these studies, new findings on flow are limited by what self reports tell you, and I figure that the only question not asked in ESM (i.e. leave it to beeper) studies is whether the participant has had an out of body experience while in flow.

Finally, the reviewer’s lack of confidence in psychological theories that integrate behavioral, cognitive, and neuropsychological events is based on the astonishing and wrong perception that no major psychological theory has managed this feat. Integrative psychological theories from emotions to reinforcement to other cognitive processes from vision to sex are easily found in the literature of psychology. The reviewer’s line of reasoning seems to be that psychological phenomena are somehow exempt from the integrative theoretical structures that serve the physical sciences so well. Ironically, if they do exist, they immediately demonstrate the utter vacuousness of the reviewer’s position. After all, if integrative theories don’t exist in psychology, odds are they never will. But if they do exist (and they do!) then their pursuit is entirely worthwhile, and I dare say, important.

The review thinks that I am naively sure of my own epistemological grounds. I of course did not address those grounds, which is hardly cause to perceive me naïve. And as for my "dogmatic’ critique, I confess that I haven’t a clue what he means, except perhaps that I am pretty sure that he is wrong.

(revised article)

In the last thirty years, an extensive literature has accumulated that has established the existence of a state of pleasure, well being, and increased cognitive efficiency that occurs when one is performing an absorbing task. This flow state occurs in a perceptual channel or ‘zone’ that reflects a matching of demand to skill, and frequently occurs in creative, sporting, or other circumstances that demand total attention. Explanations for flow primarily consist of a host of inferred mental states that are ungrounded to actual bio-behavioral processes. In particular, the somatic and neural concomitants of the flow response have been scarcely investigated, and have never been systematically addressed. The purpose of this article is to integrate current research in learning theory, cognitive science, and neuro-psychology with these observations, and to provide a synthetic theory of the flow experience that will account for all manifestations of the experience, and provide clear and testable predictions related to its elicitation and control.

In the early seventies, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered from the basis of thousands of interviews a common subjective experience of pleasure, interest, and even ecstasy that was derived from activities that perfectly matched one’s skills with the demands for performance. Rock climbers, musicians, chess players, surgeons all reported this "flow" state when their activities possessed this perceptual structure (Csikszentmihalyi, 1977), and subsequently reported a greater interest in these tasks as a result of this experience. Csikszentmihalyi defined the flow response as a "holistic response" or an "optimal state of experience is one in which there is order in consciousness." "This happens when psychic energy, or attention, is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunity for action." (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) Flow "provides a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting a person into a new reality. It pushes a person to higher levels of performance, and leads to previously undreamed of states of consciousness. In this growth of self lies the key flow activities." "Potentially negative experiences can be transformed into flow by 1) setting clear goals to strive toward, 2) becoming immersed in the activity chosen, 3) paying attention to what is happening, and 4) learning to enjoy immediate experiences." The flow state has been defined as "an intrinsic reward for participation in an activity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1977), as an optimal state that occurs when there is a balance between the perceived challenges of a situation and a person’s skills or capabilities for action (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), and as a centering of attention on a limited stimulus field (Webster, Trevino, and Ryan, 1993). Flow is also characterized by a heightened sense of playfulness (Webster and Martocchio, 1992), self control (Ghani and Deshpande. 1994), increased learning (Canter, Rivers and Storrs, 1985), and increased positive subjective experiences (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997). In keeping with the implied reality of multiple motivational processes, these definitions scarcely refer to information but rather to mind states such as levels of consciousness, attention, or playfulness or states of intentionality such as intrinsic reward, self-control, goal setting, autotelic personality, etc.

What is immediately distinguishing about almost all commentary on the flow experience is its thoroughgoing metaphorical content. Flow occurs because psychic energy is invested, consciousness is ordered, undreamed states of consciousness are reached, and when we are immersed into activity. Flow doesn’t refer to behavioral, neural, or somatic variables, but to other domains of perceptual experience that reflect disembodied levels of experience. Flow is composed of distinctive rational, perceptual, and emotional domains that follow with each other like the chain of boxes in a flow chart. Thus a demand/skill match is followed by attention that is followed or attended to by ‘senses’ of playfulness, self-control, enjoyment, etc. All of these different domains act as different segmented psychological faculties. These domains represent different psychological phenomena, and are seen as separate but interacting agencies. Flow is distinctive among motivating processes because it is not only signaled by a perception of a matching of skill and demand, but also incorporates other inferred motivating processes such as hypnosis, play, self actualization, and psychic energy (attention). Indeed, the critical element of purely informative or perceptual events such as the matching of skill to demand seem almost incidental when lost in this profuse list of motivational processes which are incorporated into the flow construct.

The flow experience is generally defined with little or no reference to any concomitant bio-behavioral processes. It is an experience that can be accessed through conscious introspection, and can be defined through pure syntax alone, with no importance attached to its physiological dependencies, or its semantics. Thus, in contrast to the profusion of inferred or metaphorical characteristics of flow, the physiological correlates to flow have been scarcely investigated and have been only generally or partially described, or in the case of somatic and neural responses, not described at all. Indeed, the neural correlates to flow have been reduced to metaphorical representations of the mind that engage hydraulic or electromechanical models that render the mind with cartoonish simplicity. Thus, flow is depicted as the result of the vaguely defined containment, channeling and alignment of emotions, feedback loops, attentional energies and forces, mental "cool" states, or as the tuning of the arousal and inhibition of neural circuitry (Goleman, 1995). More remarkably, there has been no experimental investigation into the nature of the somatic states that parallel flow. Specifically, the visceral and musculoskeletal concomitants to flow have never been examined.

Studies on flow predominantly employ between group designs that statistically cross correlate or factor analyze the self-reports of individuals in various life settings. These reports are generally collected at set time intervals using beepers to remind subjects to periodically note their feelings. However, by relating self reports for groups of individuals, the generalized conclusions that invariably follow cannot account for molecular variances in behavior such as latency, scalability, response strength, response content, etc. that characterize distinctive psychological processes (Sidman, 1960). By virtue of an exclusive reliance on between group designs, flow is depicted as a steady state behavior that varies only in its linguistic representations. Thus flow is invariant as a state, but nonetheless engages various metaphorical descriptions such as flowing sensation, self-actualization, intrinsic motivation, psychic energy, etc.

In contrast to the presumption that between group designs are the methods of choice to explore the nature of flow states, in actuality between group designs are best used to suggest further procedures rather than determine processes. For example, it may be determined through a polling of thousands of individuals that those who consume several portions of broccoli a day have a statistically lower incidence of cancer than those who do not. This finding would therefore inform the direction of future research that employs procedures that attempt to derive the actual biochemical processes that are responsible for the therapeutic properties of broccoli. Similarly, the use of between group designs in flow research has established the fact that individuals report a remarkable feeling of euphoria, interest, and heightened cognitive abilities when absorbed in demanding tasks. However, these designs can only inform different procedures that are capable of examining the processes that underlie the flow state.

A second problem is that the data language that is employed to interpret the results of a single methodology pre-ordains specific interpretations due to linguistic restraints of the language itself. Mono methodological treatments of psychological phenomena are of course representative of journalistic treatments that seek to derive predictions from the use of single data languages and single methods. However, they impede understanding by their inability to demonstrate the metaphorical content of the terms they may employ. The exclusive use of between group designs in flow research thus cannot demonstrate whether such terms as intrinsic motivation, autotelic personality, etc. have any meaning outside of their linguistic context.

For example, an individual who has a headache may report a throbbing, painful sensation, or that it feels like demons are dancing in his head. However, the distinction between the realism of the subjective qualities of pain (or any experience for that matter) depends upon knowledge of differing empirical representations of pain. Thus, knowledge of the physiological correlates of headaches maps to and validates the subjective ‘qualia’ of pain, but demonstrates in turn the purely metaphorical content of ‘dancing demons’.

Understanding requires the integration of different methodologies and the data sets they generate (Lakoff, 1999). This integration simplifies resulting theories because it only accepts as real terms that have empirical meaning across methods. Thus, distinguishing between the purely metaphorical and the real, as in demonic possession or painful sensation can only be accomplished by the mutually corrective influence of different ‘levels’ of knowledge.

The singular reliance on between group designs in the study of flow is flawed because it obscures actual processes rather than informs procedures that actually reveal processes, and because it makes it difficult to separate metaphorical constructs from literal ones. The use of any solitary procedure or method to understand a phenomenon, whether it reflects a single apparatus (e.g. telescope, PET scan, Skinner box) or method (within or between group designs) necessarily imputes capabilities beyond its means. Thus a telescope alone cannot gain an understanding of the stars, which is dependent instead on its integrated use with other tools (X-ray telescopes, spectroscopes, etc.) and other methods (statistical analysis, mathematical modeling). Similarly, the flow experience can only be understood if researchers on the topic accept the pluralistic methodologies and data languages that are essential for scientific understanding.

Any scientific theory must be ultimately judged by how well it describes the subject matter it purports to explain. It must define its terms clearly, relate them logically, and make testable predictions that are subject to falsification (Popper, 1959). In its present form, flow ‘theory’ does not provide an adequate theoretical syntax, relying instead of diffuse chains of metaphors that are not related logically. Secondly, flow theory has poor semantics. That is, it does not account for the physiological correlates of reported feelings of pleasure and absorption, the learning histories of the subjects, or the non-conscious cognitive processes that underlie conscious reports of interest, pleasure, and satisfactions. For these reasons, a satisfactory flow theory does not exist. A flow theory must explain and integrate the behavioral, cognitive, and neuro-psychological events that comprise flow experiences. By synthesizing different ‘levels’ of observations that descend from molar (subjective experience, absorption) to molecular detail (neural processes), fine grain predictions can be made regarding the latency, duration, and scalability of flow, and the underlying physiology of enhanced creativity and reported pleasure.

Flow occurs when the demands of a task match but to not surpass the skill available to complete that task. This perceptual set, or ‘flow channel’ represents a class of information that that both elicits and is the object of attentional focus. Flow is a function of the cognitive processing of a specific perceptual set (demand/skill match) that remains constant across performance. It is independent of response topography, and can occur concurrently such disparate behaviors as chess playing, rock climbing, or writing poetry. The information that elicits flow may in turn have normative implications that vary from high to low. From self-reports of individuals, flow scales or increases as the implications of behavior increase. Thus, intense and ecstatic flow experiences are commonly reported among individuals who are absorbed in demanding tasks that have critical implications, such as performing surgery, mountain climbing, and creative behavior. In contrast, less intense or no flow experiences are reported among individuals who are engaged in absorbing but less critical tasks such as reading, video game playing etc. Besides scaling with the importance of the task, the emotional concomitants to flow occur when an individual anticipates or models future tasks that command total absorption, and subsequently to flow eliciting behavior. For example, Csikszentmihalyi noted that individuals reported flow like states as they prepared for flow producing activities like skiing (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Finally, higher behavioral efficiency and creativity have been commonly attributed to the influence of the flow state (Canter, Rivers and Storrs, 1985).

Although Csikszentmihalyi maps flow experience to the independent variable of a perceptual demand/skill match, the independent behavioral measure of an absorbing or demanding activity represent a molar variable that remains invariant across long time scales (i.e. ‘a flow channel’), and has never been decomposed into underlying molecular constituents. It thus lacks theoretical coherence. That is, because the molar conception of a demand/skill match has never been decomposed to the molecular perceptual processes that represent the moment-to-moment aspects of an individual’s behavior, these aspects, since they are not explored, are not theoretically subsumed under molar entities such as attention, absorption, and demand. This has resulted in the unproven inference that the demand/skill match is near constant across performance in flow producing activities, and remains matched within short time frames during performance.

Practically however, a uniform demand/skill match is impossible on the micro-behavioral level, since there will always be unexpected variances in demand and skill that will result in a correction of behavior to match the unexpected errors between behavior and outcome. For example, typical flow producing behaviors such as creative behavior, performing surgery, and rock climbing on the micro-behavioral level represent behaviors that will require constant adjustments or corrections due to unforeseen variances in ongoing behavior or the demands or response contingencies that frame that behavior. Thus, at any moment in time, a rock climber may have to adjust his climbing stance, a surgeon may have to alter or change a surgical procedure, or a composer or artist may have to deal with a new motif or idea.

If a demand/skill match actually denotes micro-behavioral perceptual variances in demand and skill, then such variances can be theoretically mapped to not only micro-behavioral aspects of overt behavior, but also covert neural responses. If the operational construct of a demand/skill match can be demonstrated to map to micro-behavioral events for overt and covert responses, then a coherent and empirically based theory of flow can be derived. As will be shortly demonstrated, this is indeed the case.

In addition to these behavioral indices of flow, cognitive measures of flow have focused on one primary independent variable, namely cognitive absorption or focused attention. The implicit assumption of a corollary and perhaps causal relationship between focused attention and flow follows the pattern of a stimulus-response mechanism. That is, the occurrence of the stimulus event (attention) is followed by an almost reflexive response (emotion). Nonetheless, whether or not this paradigm may be of any practical validity depends upon the status of attention as a definable stimulus event, and the degree to which specific correlations can be drawn between various levels of attention and emotional states.

The important question is whether attention as commonly defined displays the expected attributes of a stimulus event. Certainly, the many definitions that may be given to attention do not provide for a simple answer to this question. For example, Candland (1969) demonstrated that attention can represent a variety of phenomena, such as general alertness, selective focusing, flexibility in shifting focus, and capacity to sustain focused alertness. In addition, the concept of attention does not reflect a localized process, but is best viewed as a taxonomy for a multitude of processes that modulate the afferent signal from a sensory receptor along its sensory pathway (Hilgard, 1975). Supporting this perspective, the neurophysiological correlates of attention as revealed by a variety of researchers (Hernandez-Peon (1956), Spong, Haider, and Lindsley, 1965; Deutsch and Deutsch, 1963) discredit the implicit judgment that attention represents a stimulus like event. Rather, attentional processes assume the aspect of a homeostatic mechanism that allows certain streams of sensory information to be processed to the exclusion of other incoming information. That is, rather than representing a stream of information that is transmitted through certain afferent and efferent neural passageways, attention represents the process that permits such information streams to be enhanced or diminished.

Attention also denotes cognitive processes that involve the motivation that directs the selective processing of information. Paying attention as a dynamic process is dependent upon processes of selection that involve disparate nonconscious cognitive processes that occur in time (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993). These processes implicate mechanisms of learning and memory that in turn bias attention towards novel and salient information (Kastner et. al, 1999) Ultimately, whether Johnny attends to a homework project is dependent upon discrimination histories, genetic tendencies (e.g. extraversion), concurrently perceived information (e.g. distractions), and emotional influences (e.g. anxiety).

Because attention at turns represents a taxonomy for a collection of processes, separately denotes individual processes, or represents obscure or inferred processes, attention as a theoretical entity is incoherent. In other words, like the concepts of emotion, motivation, and consciousness, attention represents a field of study rather than an entity that can be uniquely and precisely defined (Posner, 1984).

Because the concept of attention is ill defined or incoherent, and can be operationalized in many different ways, it cannot be employed as a predictor of the specific qualitative aspects of the dependent variable of flow, namely self reports of interest, alertness, euphoria, and increased cognitive efficiency. In other words, the general definition of attention can only predict the general effects of attention, which include a much wider scope of dependent measures, from mild alertness to relaxation. Moreover, general definitions of attention cannot be used to predict the fine grain molecular or physiological aspects of the flow experience. Thus, questions about response latency, physiological changes, response scalability etc. cannot be answered.

In spite of this, "the noun ‘attention’ lends a unitary and thing like quality to the diverse expressions of a number of different biobehavioral processes. Treating attention as a thing tempts us to use it as an explanation of behavior rather than -at best- a heading under which a set of superficially similar phenomena may be grouped." (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993) When attention is used to separate the differing experiences of individuals in and out of ‘flow’, its easy to adopt statements such as "The first individual experienced flow because she was attentive or absorbed, but the second one did not because she wasn’t as attentive." To use attention in this way is to fall prey to the nominal fallacy; i. e. to treat the name of the phenomenon as if it were an explanation. Moreover, the nominal fallacy encourages circular reasoning. To wit- Question: Why did the first individual experience flow? Answer, because she was attending. Question: How do you know that the student was attending? Answer: because she was experiencing flow. When misused in this way, "attention" deludes us into believing we have explained behavior when we have merely classified it (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993).

The equivalence of attention with its general characteristics does not determine what aspect of attention is most highly correlated with the effects of flow as a unique subjective experience and as a distinctive physiological event. This is best illustrated from a consideration of the subjective and physiological correlates to focused attention or absorption that defines a related experience to flow called meditation. Conditions that elicit focused attention as well as its unique experiential characteristics are generally shared by and may be subsumed under the class of ‘meditative’ experiences that have been studied far more exhaustively. Pleasant emotional experiences that are characteristic of meditation have long been associated with strict attentiveness to specific stimuli or stimulus classes and seen as a byproduct of that attentiveness (Goleman, 1976). Like flow, meditation has been associated with unique physiological and experiential states (Goleman, 1976, Brown, 1977; Deikman, 1963), but unlike flow, the neurophysiological and somatic correlates to meditation have been exhaustively studied (Fenwick 1977;Michaels, 1976; Wagstaff 1981; Pagano and Warrenburg 1983; Holmes 1984, 1988); and have been found to represent no unique neurophysiological or somatic state, but are merely relaxation. The fact that meditative experiences represent no unique physiological state but are merely relaxation invalidates the claim that focused attention can account for the euphoric aspect of flow or account for claims of increased cognitive efficiency. But as has been noted, there are many different varieties of attention.

A different aspect of attention is reflected by the observation that flow follows the ongoing perception of a near perfect match between the demands of the situation and the skills of the individual. Artists, surgeons, musicians, rock climbers etc. commonly report states of pleasure, satisfaction, heightened interest, and often euphoria when the demands of the task require the rapid consideration and choice between many cognitive precepts or events. Thus a mountain climber, surgeon, or poet would have to rapidly choose between many variants of each successive behavior or cognitive precept, each of which if chosen wrong could result in a bad fall, a dead patient, or the loss of inspiration. If the demands of the task exceed the skills available, anxiety occurs and flow disappears. On the other hand, if one’s skill exceed the demands of the task, flow also disappears and replaced with either no emotion or boredom.

The questions that these observations pose are several. Can rapid attentional set shifting between a cascade of salient cognitive precept account for flow? As importantly, why would flow disappear in overly demanding situations and be replaced by anxiety, and why would flow disappear as well in situations where an individual is not required to rapidly assess all aspects of a situation? To answer these questions, neuro-psychological evidence can be assembled that suggests an answer.

On the neuro-psychological level of description, the selection of a particular environmental behavior relation or cognitive precept can be defined as reinforcement, which on the neural level causes the neurotransmitter dopamine to be liberated in synaptic clefts between coactive pre- and post synaptic neurons (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993). The functional role of dopamine stabilizes active neural representations in the prefrontal cortex (i.e., attention), and thereby protects goal related delay activity against interfering stimuli, (Durstewitz et al. 1999). Dopamine labels stimuli with appetitive value, and may provide advance reward information before behavior occurs (Schultz, 1999). Dopamine also mediates the cognitive effects of pleasant feelings that may be denoted by self reports of pleasure, happiness, or satisfaction (Ashby, Isen, & Turken, 1999). In particular, mesolimbic dopamine (DA) activity has been conceptualized as a reward signal that marks and is scaled to the importance or salience of perceptual events (Horvitz, Stewart, and Jacobs 1997), and promotes the effective processing of afferent signals simultaneously arriving at the midbrain.

Generally, the role of dopamine is to signify salient events, and has a non-conscious role in determining the value or valence of responses that are not otherwise characterized consciously as pleasurable. However, if dopamine release is high and has a rapid onset, then a conscious state of pleasure or ‘high’ is generally reported. For example, the rate at which dopamine receptors are blocked in cocaine users as well as the extent of the blockage determines whether an individual experiences a cocaine high (Volkow, Fowler, and Wang 1999). Thus, the high and rapid build up of dopamine due to cocaine use results in a distinctively pleasurable experience. Similarly, a cascade of multiple salient perceptual events would accentuate and sustain DA activity by facilitating the switching among alternative cognitive perspectives, and thus enhance decision making and creative thinking (Ashby, Isen, and Turken, 1999). This neuro-chemical activity would not only facilitate the rapid and efficient focusing of the mind on a wide range of images, but would also be more likely interpreted as highly pleasurable if dopamine release increases due to a higher perceived importance of those events. Preliminary confirmation of this has been provided by separate neuro-imaging studies that demonstrated the increased release of dopamine during activities (a video game) that required sustained shifting of a cognitive set (Koepp, 1998), and also for individuals who rapidly shift focus to high anticipated behavioral outcomes such as in gambling (Breiter, Aharon, et al. 2001). In the latter study, dopamine release scaled in tandem with the perceived increase in the payoff of gambling behaviors and with self-reports of euphoria or satisfaction. Finally, in addition to motivational factors, the type or level of cognitive processing has also been correlated with the elevated and sustained increase in dopamine. Higher and more sustained levels of dopamine have been observed during working memory tasks in comparison to simple rote tasks such as reading (Fried et al. 2001). This finding coheres with the common association of flow experiences with types of cognitive processing (artistic or creative thinking) as well as cognitive processing (mountain climbing) that is characterized by a high motivational component.

Dopamine occurs as a ‘teaching signal’ that directs behavior to salient precepts that have a positive outcome (Schultz, 1998). Dopamine neurons are activated by rewarding events that are better than predicted (i.e. represent positive prediction error); remain uninfluenced by events that are as good as predicted, are depressed by events that are worse than predicted (Schultz, 1998; Berns, 2001), and become more activated as the importance of those stimuli increase (Breiter, Aharon, et al. 2001). Thus, if response salience stays high, but results in negative outcomes, then the intracellular interactions that involve dopamine are disrupted, and result in anxiety, anger or other bad feelings (Blum et al. 1996). This explains why individuals who are overtasked (a mismatch of demand over skill) do not report euphoric flow states, but rather negative emotions such as anxiety. Similarly, if response salience is low due to undertasked behavior (a mismatch of skill over demand), then the same intracellular interactions are less accentuated, and are do not result in conscious feelings of euphoria or pleasure.

Finally, the fact that dopamine release is signaled by the salience of conditioned as well as unconditioned stimuli implicates the learning histories of individuals, or in other words, the manner whereby prior experience may influence behavior. For example, the greater number of stimuli that are associated with a response, the more likely that any given environment will contain some of those stimuli, and hence the response will reoccur and/or persist. This ‘over-expectation’ effect, or behavioral momentum (Nevin, 1992) would assign a discriminative function to otherwise neutral stimuli that have been associated with the response. Thus, the persistence of dopamine release long after its proximal causes have ceased may be attributed to remaining in the original environmental setting (office, laboratory) of that response. Similarly, the same discriminative function may occur due to the perception of perceptual events that historically foreshadow or act as precursors of imminent future events that have been historically associated with heightened dopamine release. This ‘priming’ response (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993) would explain why individuals who in preparing to or are anticipating to engage in flow producing tasks (e.g. mountain climbers readying equipment) report the same subjective experience of flow prior to actually engaging in tasks that actually produce the flow experience. It must be remarked that priming is functionally equivalent to principles of classical conditioning that demonstrate how unconditioned responses (e.g. the salivary reflex) can be elicited by events (e.g. the ringing of a dinner bell) that act as precursors to the primary elicitors of behavior (e.g. food). Similarly, behavioral momentum has a counterpart in the concept of response extinction, wherein a response decreases faster or more slowly depending upon the historical significance of contextual events. The fact that dopamine release has response aspects that are quite in keeping with a Pavlovian unconditioned reflex and the procedures of classical conditioning illustrates how the processes that underlie flow may be mapped to differing (although not contradictory) data languages in learning theory.

However, this analysis becomes a bit more complicated when situations that elicit the sustained release of dopamine are considered. The positive affect caused by unexpected rewards has been attributed to the release of the neuromodulator dopamine, yet dopamine release continues long after dopamine cells have stopped firing (Ashby, Isen, and Turken, 1999). Although dopamine release has been noted to occur up to thirty minutes after the stimulation of dopaminergic systems, it remains unclear how behavioral momentum may facilitate or inhibit the degree and persistence of the release of dopamine over time.

Flow has been linked to reported states of euphoria or pleasure that occur during and after states of prolonged exertion (Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi, 1999). This euphoric state, or ‘runners high’, is generally attributed to the release of endogenous opiod-peptides, or endorphins, that are the body’s natural way of toning down specific pain responses at different levels. As a result of physical stress, endorphin release produces euphoria, respiratory depression, reduced gastrointestinal motility, and analgesia (Rang, 1995). However, the mapping of euphoric states to physical stressors rather than perceptual events (demand/skill match) cannot account for any of the well established behavioral and cognitive correlates to the flow response. Also, endorphins are biochemically dissimilar to dopamine, which is a monoamine and not a polypeptide (opiod). Thus there is no reason to assume that the same phenomenological response (flow) would correspond with such differing physiological correlates. Moreover, since endorphin and dopamine release is elicited by entirely different classes of environmental factors, the relationship between flow and a runner’s high is linked only by arbitrarily equated self reports of pleasure.

In spite of the widespread representation of Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow as ‘theory’, his description of flow does not represent an adequate theory because the elements of flow simply do not fit the definition of a scientific theory. Flow theory is rife with major difficulties in its syntax and semantics. Not only are the independent measures of flow poorly defined and integrated, but the dependent measures of flow rely on self reports that imply a direct connection between a uniform private event (a flow state) and a verbal response (I feel happy, satisfied, flowing) that is unreliable. The uncritical acceptance of this one to one correspondence between a report of flow and an inner flow state results in the awkward multi-specification of a unitary flow state to behaviors that embody disparate and even incompatible physiological states. Thus, the equation of the flow state with experiences that clearly entail differing states of relaxation, high alertness, cognitive interest, or neural activation broadens flow to include just about any emotional state that is in some way pleasurable, and thus expands the concept of flow into near meaninglessness. The concept of flow also entails a threat to the nature and objectivity of an empirical analysis of behavior because flow is associated with ‘existence propositions’ that assign surplus meaning over and above observed correlations (Zuriff, 1985). Like similar meaningless concepts as phlogiston and ether that marked the respective agents of combustion and the transmission of light, flow simply adds a surplus meaning that comprehensive empirical observations do not require.

A true theory of flow must have theoretical coherence and integrate micro and molar aspects of behavior, and thus must relate real empirical events to the common experiential reports of interest, euphoria, and increased cognitive efficiency that combined represent the ‘holistic’ or molar conceptualization of flow. Unfortunately, current conceptions of flow are independent of physiology, and thus can be equated with any physiology. Thus we come to the absurd conclusion that a unitary flow state can be instantiated by very differing processes. The characteristic aspects of flow can in total be mapped only to specific neural processes that involve the dopaminergic systems that are critical to learning, reward, and emotion. To wit, flow does not represent a separate or distinctive mental or physiological state, but is rather the subjective or felt aspect of a consistent and high level of neural activation or arousal elicited by the perception of a high, positive, and sustained prediction error during a task performance. In addition, self-reports of flow like states in circumstances that precede and follow the perceptual events that elicit flow demonstrate how prior learning, and by implication processes of memory can modulate the neurological processes that underlie self-reports of arousal.

A bio-behavioristic theory of flow explains the latency, duration, and intensity of flow, as well as flow’s effect on cognitive efficiency and creativity. In addition, the theory is parsimonious, testable, and integrates the seemingly independent subject matters of phenomenology, learning theory, and cognitive neuro-psychology. Most importantly, a bio-behavioral theory of flow demonstrates that the key and perhaps defining element of the flow experience cannot be understood through an appeal to phenomenological, cognitive, neurological, or behavioral variables alone, but only through an integration of the respective metaphors that are engaged by these explanatory schemes. Ironically, the systematic integration of these different explanations present a far simpler representation of the flow experience, since plural metaphorical and methodological perspectives provide a multivariate perspective on the phenomenon, and correct for conclusions that are skewed by the language itself (Lakoff, 1999).

It must be stressed that a commitment to pluralistic methods is not reductionism, since it does not privilege any one method as the way to understand flow. Indeed, subjective reports and neurological measures both inform and correct each other, much as subjective reports inform us that individuals take pleasure and suffer, but nonetheless reflect at root a real biological substrate. Thus flow is more than simply self-reports, neurological indices, or other behavioral measures, it is all of these things, and can not be understood otherwise.

A bio-behavioristic explanation of flow underscores much broader issues that radically alter the basic ways we think of motivation. Primarily, the decision making process behind such behaviors as disparate as creative thinking, problem solving, or walking to the store are all dependent upon and influenced by somatic or neural activation variables that are mediated by abstract environmental contingencies. In other words, behavior is inherently embodied, and how we feel while performing an action is modulated by the contingency between action and outcome, and that feeling not only alters how we perform and judge that action, but is altered by the results of that action itself. In practical terms, we cannot gauge the effectiveness of a teaching style, a leisure or work activity, or even the desirability of moral acts unless we can conceive of the concurrent presence and influence of the abstract environment contingencies that modulate cognitive shifting and its neurological and somatic concomitants. Thus, motivation is not just a function of a rational economic calculus of static motivating events that have separate and unchanging value, but is crucially dependent upon a non-conscious mapping of psychological space. This mapping can only be accomplished using a simple contingency-based data language that is the lingua franca of contemporary behaviorism.

Finally, separate idiosyncratic mind states such as flow, intrinsic motivation, autotelic personality etc. are ultimately empty concepts, since they cannot account for the abstract environmental contingencies and somatic and neuro-chemical processes that activate behavior. In other words, they have poor semantics, since they are only partially or obscurely rooted in the empirical facts of behavior.

The flow experience does not represent a separate or distinct neuro-psychological event. Rather, flow represents a neurological event that differs in degree rather than type from other similar events, and is no more distinctive than high anxiety is from low anxiety, or running from walking. Moreover, flow is subject to the same principles of learning that govern involuntary and voluntary behaviors. That is, the processes that underlie flow display the same lawfulness that governs responses as disparate as salivation, emotion, walking, or talking.

The practical implications of a bio-behavioristic explanation for flow greatly refine Csikszentmihalyi’s own prescriptions for the replication of flow in everyday life, and make those prescriptions much clearer by discarding spurious mental processes such as intrinsic motivation, autotelic personality, and the like. For example, short bursts of absorbing activity (e.g. writing sonnets, creating art) that are paced at separate intervals during the day will elicit a high level of neural arousal will have enough ‘momentum’ to span those intervals, and create a state of pleasurable alertness that can be extended all day.

Secondly, because flow is a scalable response, lower levels of activation are still desirable, even if they may not produce self-reports of elation or satisfaction. School curricula that are designed to cultivate a child’s shifting focus on diverse aspects of a subject matter that may be inherent in or denoted by that subject matter will arouse his attention, and thus seem to be ‘intrinsically reinforcing’. Third, by stressing the importance of activating neural processes in environments that require exacting levels of performance (e.g. education, work), learning technologies can be readapted to more accurately fit the facts of behavior, and with subsequent increases in their effectiveness as well as comprehensibility.

Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic Books

A common criticism of contemporary behaviorism is that it cannot account for intrinsically motivated states, or in other words, reinforcement that derives from the behavior itself. Creative, sporting, and other behaviors that engage rapid shifts in attention have long been held up as activities that are reinforcing in themselves, without any need of a corresponding ‘extrinsic’ reinforcer.

Recently, in a comprehensive survey of recent literature in neuro-psychology in the Psychological Review. Ashby, Isen, and Turkel (1999) demonstrated that cognitive set shifting is accompanied by the heightened release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, that increases alertness, thinking efficiency, and keeps attention more rooted. Dopamine also is highly correlated with a strong hedonic component, or in other words, it feels good.

However, the authors do not note the fact that cognitive set shifting, or the demand to shift attention between different informative precepts may easily be mapped to schedules of reinforcement. Thus an individual who has newly won a trophy may rapidly shift attention between concurrent schedules of reinforcement (e.g. do I go to Disneyworld or Hawaii?). Likewise, variable ratio schedules may direct an individual to attend between multiple response variants (as in sports, games, and gambling behavior) that have uncertain behavioral outcomes.

The implication of this research is that pleasurable aspects of behavior are highly dependent on how reinforcers are scheduled, and not just on a reinforcer itself. It is a bedrock principle in behavior analysis that performance is intricately tied to schedules of reinforcement. It is well established that contingencies of reinforcement can be demonstrated to map to not just overt behaviors, but to covert responses ranging from the salivary reflex to a child’s achy stomach on a school day. The fact that similar contingencies can be mapped to specific and traceable neuro-chemical processes simply demonstrates the greater resolving power of our observational tools to establish the fine grain behavioral correlates of response contingencies. The fact that these processes enable more effective thinking and feel good to boot demonstrates for the first time how the subjective component of intrinsic motivation and peak experience becomes readily subject to the language and methodology of behavior analysis.

Ashby, F. G., Isen, Alice M., and Turken U. (1999) A Neuropsychological Theory of Positive Affect and Its Influence on Cognition, Psychological Review, 106, (3), 529-550

The concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are cardinal concepts in social and humanistic psychology, and represent distinctive mental processes that interact in specific ways that can in turn be observed through observation of individuals in work, school, and other institutionalized settings. Various academic viewpoints posit how intrinsic and extrinsic motivation add to one another or disrupt one another, yet there is still no consensus as to how these motivational events interact, or for that matter what they are. In particular, well-researched ‘meta-analyses’ (Deci et al., 1999; Cameron et al. 2001) that summarize the copious literature on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation have come to starkly different conclusions as to how intrinsic and extrinsic motivating factors influence behavior. Indeed, the literature on this topic, like passages in the Bible, can be quoted to serve one’s purposes. Thus, the literature on intrinsic/extrinsic motivation can be interpreted as supporting the idea that external rewards disrupt intrinsic motivation, boost intrinsic motivation, or have no effect whatsoever.

The resolution to this seemingly eternal conundrum is not served by yet another study, but by recognition of the fact that intrinsic and extrinsic motivational processes represent nothing more than metaphorical artifacts that bear not the slightest similarity to the neural processes that actually govern motivation. In other words, the intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation controversy is a sham because distinctive intrinsic and extrinsic motivational processes simply do not exist. The metaphorical identification of the facts of human motivation (and presumably, human happiness) with the attainment of mental or physical objects as represented by intrinsic and extrinsic motivators is an overarching premise that has encompassed nearly the whole of western philosophy since the days of the Greeks. It is simple, seemingly effective, and generally matches the facts of behavior as represented by common sense. It is also entirely wrong. Within the last ten years, the neuroscientific analysis of the reward mechanisms in the brain has revealed that an entirely different mechanism underlies reward or reinforcement. In this radical new interpretation of reinforcement, mental or physical objects do not reinforce, but rather the prediction error of the perceptual connotations of physical or mental objects. These connotations may reflect the unpredicted sensory attributes of those objects (e.g. the novelty of listening to a Chopin Etude for the first time), or the unpredicted contingent aspects of those objects (e.g. a last minute field goal that wins a football game). This positive and unexpected prediction error in the timing and quality of an event is scaled to the release of the neuromodulator dopamine, a neurochemical that activates or modulates global states of the brain. Dopamine is responsible for fixing attention, increasing the effectiveness of attention (i.e. increases synaptic interconnections and speed of neural activity), and also bestows an appetitive value on behavior that is often perceived as pleasurable. The fact that the unexpected time and content variability of contingent events is critical to the estimate of the quality of reinforcement means that objects per se do not reinforce, but rather the prediction error and the accompanying neural changes that are denoted by objects.

The concept of reinforcement as reflected in the activity of dopamine neurons represents a particular challenge to the canonical metaphorical representation of a reinforcer or reward as a discrete event that controls or motivates behavior as the consequence of a fixed response pattern or contingency. Rather, discrepancy theories of reinforcement assign reinforcement to the prediction error that derives from an individual’s moment-to-moment perception of prevailing response contingencies. That is, reinforcement is a continuous and not intermittent event, and is relative to the quality of prediction error perceived at any moment in time. This view, which is presently the dominant interpretation of learning in neuroscience proposes (Hollerman and Schultz, 1998) that: "Learning depends on the extent to which behavioral outcomes are different than predicted, being governed by the discrepancy of ‘error’ between outcome and prediction. Outcomes that affect learning in this way are termed ‘reinforcers.’…"Learning proceeds when outcomes occur that are not fully predicted, then slows down as outcomes become increasingly predicted and ends when outcomes are fully predicted." Furthermore, "the magnitude of dopamine responses to reward reflect the degree of reward predictability during individual learning episodes…". A dopaminergic based discrepancy theory was first ventured by Donahoe’s Unified Reinforcement Principle (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993), and the fact that dopamine production co-varies with the quality of prediction error, as well as marks prediction error, impacts not just the quality of reinforcement, but also the attendant quality of subjective experience. In other words, the phenomenology of intrinsically rewarding states, or their subjective feeling, can now be rooted to actual physiological processes that can be simply conceived.

Take a simple piecework task, such as pulling a lever many times a minute to stamp out buttons on an assembly line. The reward for performing this task, namely a salary, is wholly predictable in its timing and its amount. However, if the timing of the reward as well as its size radically varied over time, then although the average weekly salary would remain the same, the worker could be rewarded substantially, marginally, or not at all after each lever pull. The latter example, which makes the button machine into a slot machine, will result in the otherwise tired and bored worker becoming suddenly animated, interested, excited, and ironically, indifferent to the reasonable expectation that he or she may likely have a net loss at the end of the week. The manipulation of prediction error alone therefore transforms an onerous ‘extrinsically’ motivated task into a highly desirable ‘intrinsically’ motivated task.

As another example, consider a non-rote task that requires an individual to figure out a puzzle or other problem. The solution for a novel problem-solving task also involves unpredictable prediction errors, when progress towards solving the problem occurs intermittently and surprisingly as different options are considered. If the prediction errors are positive, rapid, and high, then we have a lot of dopamine produced and a corresponding enjoyable, flowing, peak, or otherwise pleasurable experience. Similar activities that involve high, rapid, and positive prediction error are creative, sporting, gaming, or other tasks. (In corroboration of these findings, dopamine has been demonstrated to scale up or down with changes in the probability and importance of expected events (Breiter et al, 2001) and with the frequency of cognitive set shifting between unexpected events, such as in creative behavior (Fried et al. 2001) and video game playing (Koepp et al. 1998).

As a final example, let us consider the exemplar of all intrinsically motivated individuals: Shakespeare. If the fanciful movie ‘Shakespeare in Love’ is to be believed, Shakespeare’s genius was spurred by a confluence of motivators, including girlfriends, competitors, fellow actors and investors, not to mention the approval of the crowd, the Queen, and posterity. It was indeed a volatile matrix of uncertainty that excited the imagination and the pen, giving us a play, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, a sublime mixture of pratfalls and poetry that appealed to crowd and Queen alike. But what indeed motivated Shakespeare, uncertainty or contingency? Simple, remove the uncertainty (but not the contingency) and the edifice collapses, and Shakespeare then knows all the right moves, and would likely become bored to tears. He would be no more inspired than a baseball player who knows the final score beforehand, or a gambler who knows the impending face of each card. Shakespeare in Love would become Shakespeare in Hell, a presumption that has at least literary precedent. (See note below for some of the circumstances of the real Shakespeare)

In an episode of the classic TV series ‘The Twilight Zone’, a burglar gets shot and killed, and is met by a jovial fellow who introduces him to a world where he can have anything he wants, from women to power to fame. Unfortunately, everything is totally predictable, from the role of a die to a woman’s sigh. He protests that everything has become boring and dull, and requests to be shipped off to hell, where at least he could play chess with the devil. The man laughs, and says to the shocked burglar, "What made you ever think that you were in heaven?"

As was previously stated, in contrast to the implicit view that an extrinsic reward is an indivisible event, a discrepancy theory of reward holds that the prediction error signified by 'extrinsic' or objectified reinforcing events is not integral to or fixed by objects, but is dependent upon individual discriminative contexts and histories. For example, although a monetary reward signifies all the things you can imagine you can now buy, which is of course a positive prediction error, that same reward may also signify negative prediction errors as well that are dependent upon contextual cues deriving from present and historical (learning history) events. The well cited example of children losing interest in activities because of a reward is a case in point. If I were to receive a $500 reward for drinking Pepsi, the informative context of the Pepsi and not the Pepsi itself would produce a negative prediction error (is this Pepsi ok to drink?). However, the same $500 reward given for an athletic or creative (e.g. winning the Super Bowl, or a piano competition) accomplishment would likely not result in a negative prediction error, since tradition dictates monetary reward as a validation for and not denigration of accomplishment. Indeed, in such cases, the absence of a monetary reward would likely signal negative prediction error, as it would signify that such accomplishment is taken lightly by society.

Prediction error is dependent upon information that is mediated by the reward, the performance, the environmental context of the behavior, and how it is interpreted due to the personal history of the individual. Unfortunately, because of the near exclusive use by social psychologists of ‘between group’ experimental designs that statistically compare groups of individuals, idiosyncratically perceived informative events are averaged across individuals, and this important data is lost. Hence, the very methodology used by social psychology engenders a self-fulfilling prophecy. By blurring the individual and salient aspects of an individual's experience, homogenized individual variations in behavior are instead relegated to ad hoc motivational causes such as self-actualization, psychic energy, needs for achievement, and of course, intrinsic motivation that have reality only in the imagination.

Social and humanistic psychologists have a penchant for deriving ever-new motivational constructs, from flow states to extrinsic/intrinsic motivation that presumably reflect unique mental processes. In contrast to this top down approach that starts with hypothetical or inferred molar motivational events, a bottoms up approach that begins with real or observed molecular motivational events can remarkably constrain the promiscuous theorizing of unique motivational states that has served to obfuscate much of the science of psychology. The unified principle of reinforcement that is emerging from neuroscience casts doubt on many widely accepted categories of motivation due to the simple fact that they have no distinctive neural correlates, and can be more parsimoniously explained as the emergent properties of very simple neural processes that underlie all behavior. Thus there is no such thing as distinctive intrinsic and extrinsic, operant or respondent, spiritual or materialistic motivating systems. Likewise, there are no distinctive flow states, peak experiences, needs for achievement, or other compartmentalized motivational processes.

Neuroscience has the capability to remove much of the conceptual clutter of psychology, but careers and egos hinge on such theoretical flotsam. Whether of not psychologists have the courage to prune their copious and confusing subject matter will determine if they can actually address the pressing issues that confront society, or if they are merely condemned to debate into infinity and beyond such simple matters as the efficacy of giving gold stars to children. (And of course all this gives wonderful grist for satire, to which I am personally thankful).

Note: (Oh yes. And the real Shakespeare? Consider an environment full of external motivators for a pastime as addictive to its age as our time is for television. To quote Daniel Boorstin’s book ‘The Creators’ (pp.307-310): "The theater had risen in London during Shakespeare’s youth. "The suddenness with which the new pastime had appeared raised the alarm of the learned and the pious. Like television in our time, theater acquired its frightening popularity within a half century." "…..In two weeks during the 1596 season a Londoner could have seen eleven performances of ten different plays at one playhouse, and on no day would he have had to see a repeat performance of the day before."…."Of the twelve hundred plays offered in London theaters in the half century before 1590, some nine hundred were the work of about fifty professional playwrights." (It should be noted that the London of 1590 had about the population of present day Jackson, Mississippi!!) This author wonders what a Vesuvius of inspiration would follow if present day authors had such willing ears, and what any of us would trade for such extrinsic motivation!)

Bibliography:

There are three major sources of information on unified reinforcement or discrepancy theory, and one that is a bit odd.

The first represents the work of the bio-behaviorists John Donahoe and David Palmer. Their Unified Principle of Reinforcement is the first systematic presentation of a discrepancy theory of reinforcement, and scholarly articles on their work can be found on the web site of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB).

The most lucid and up to date accounts of discrepancy theory are also found on the web. The Google web directory contains quite a few PDF files on articles by the neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz that are lucid yet rigorously argued. Schultz is presently the major figure in neuroscience who has comprehensively examined the neuro-psychology of reward.

The third major source of information on unified reinforcement theory is found in the 1998 book, ‘Affective Neuroscience’, by the distinguished neuro-psychologist Jaak Panksepp. Panksepp is also well represented in the web. His comment (from chapter 8 of his book) is instructive as to the untenability of the concept ‘extrinsic reward’. "From the behaviorist perspective, the incentive properties of a reward were traditionally defined in terms of attributes such as the quality, quantity, and delay of reward rather than in terms of any conception of what the nervous system experiences and undergoes when it is confronted by highly desirable objects. In fact, the high incentive state, from the nervous system perspective, may be the arousal of an emotive process that invigorates search and foraging behaviors. In other words, the unconditional incentive state within the brain may largely consist of the arousal of a psycho-behavioral integrative system (e.g., seeking) of the brain. An increased number of studies measuring DA (dopaminergic) cellular activity, as well as dopamine release in the pathways emanating from the VTA (e.g. a midbrain structure-my note), now indicate that this system is highly tuned to stimuli that predict rewards, rather than to rewards themselves."

References:

Breiter, H. C., Aharon, I. Kahneman, D., Anders, Dale, and Shizgal, Peter (2001) functional imaging of neural responses to expectancy and experience of monetary gains and Losses, Neuron, 30, 619-639

Cameron, Judy, Banko, Katherine M, and Pierce, W. D. (2001) Pervasive negative effects of rewards on intrinsic motivation: the myth continues, The Behavior Analyst, (24), 1-44 (article is available entire at behavior.org)

Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., and Ryan, R. M. (1999) A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation, Psychological Bulletin, 125, 627-668.

Donahoe, J.W. and D. C. Palmer (1993). Learning and Complex Behavior, Allyn and Bacon

Fried, Itzhak, Wilson, C. L, Morrow, J. W., Cameron, K. A., Behnke, E. D., Ackerson, L. C. and Maidment, N. T. (2001) Increased dopamine release in the human amygdala during performance of cognitive tasks, Nature Neuroscience, 4(2): 201-206

Hollerman, Jeffrey R., and Wolfram Schultz (1998) Dopamine neurons report an error in the temporal prediction of reward during learning, Nature Neuroscience, 1(4): 304-309

Koepp, M.J., Gunn, R.N., Lawrence, A.D., Cunningham, V.J. Dagher, A. Jones, T., Brooks, D.J. Bench C. J., Grasby, P.M. (1998). Evidence for striatal dopamine release during a video game. Nature, 393: 266-268

It is a well established empirical fact, and the subject of several best selling books, that task performances that are accompanied by the perception of a match between the task skill and demand (e.g. rock climbing, performing surgery, etc.) become very emotionally and subjectively rewarding by virtue of the demand/skill match alone. This experience has been defined as including a feeling of ecstasy, a sense of control, loss of self-consciousness, optimal experience, sense of well being, etc. To explore this phenomenon self-reports were utilized to provide knowledge of the ‘psychic events’ which established the content of the flow experience, and also provided the necessary and sufficient explanation for flow.

The conscious, verbally based information that describes flow provides analog representations of the experience, such as sense of flowing, ecstasy, playfulness, well being etc. That is, we understand and accept these representations because they are analogous to similar states we experience under similar as well as widely different situations (e.g. getting married, winning a tennis match, etc). The body of research on flow has exclusively validated the experience through sampling procedures which poll the self reports of individuals as they perform day to day tasks, and through factor analysis has defined flow through various permutations of constructs such as skill, playfulness, attention, control, challenge, etc.

The implicit assumption of these studies, and all interpretations of flow, is that self reports can adequately describe the content of flow. Therefore, no analysis is necessary or valuable regarding the linguistic content of such self-reports. Furthermore, there was implicitly no need to investigate how non conscious information may also parallel flow experiences, and how such information may be mediated by neurological (attentive alertness), somatic (relaxation), and perceptual (demand/skill match) representations that dynamically change in time.

The assumption that the facts of flow, intrinsic motivation, playfulness, etc. can be completely accessed through self reports places the flow literature squarely in opposition to the strongly empirical disciplines in psychology, such as cognitive science, learning theory, psycho-linguistics, and neuropsychology which investigate the predominantly non-conscious factors, both informative and instinctual, that generate behavior. This difference is severe and compelling, since conscious self reports provide the main subject matter of social and humanistic psychology, and these disciplines have historically ignored and disparaged the evidence provided by the more empirical psychological disciplines that have severely limited the use of analog or metaphorical representations in their respective data languages.

If self reports are insufficient or incomplete means to study behavioral phenomena, and the flow response in particular, then the validity and worth of much research within these disciplines must be called into question. The fact that motivational states as represented by self reports have been neatly demarcated into categories representative of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation processes provides a philosophical linchpin for much of the theoretical perspective that underlies social and humanistic psychology. The ultimate purpose of this article is to decisively refute that perspective.

A commonly held position in social and humanistic psychology is that two mutually distinct response processes are accountable for human behavior. These processes are commonly denoted as extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. However, no attempt has as yet been made to reconcile this position with contemporary single process models of learning that are derived from the empirically grounded disciplines of cognitive science, learning theory, cognitive neuro-physiology, and cognitive linguistics. This paper attempts to reconcile these models through a comparison of their respective parsimony, logical consistency, correlation with observational data or predictive power, and degree to which they may be integrated with other scientific principles and observations. The validity of dual process theories is denied. It is concluded that dual factor theories of human motivation in social psychology do not derive from observational data unique to human behavior, but rather stem from inadequate data languages which can only partially describe the perceptual and neurological facts of experience, and indeed confound, ignore, and needlessly complexify those facts. The economy, comprehensiveness, and applicability of single factor learning theory is demonstrated through an analysis of the ‘flow’ experience, and the philosophical implications of learning theory are noted.

The quintessential question in psychology is how behavior is motivated, reinforced, or otherwise selected. What aspects of our daily experience make a particular behavior more likely than another? In contrast to the highly definable subject matter of the physical sciences, psychology has always been encumbered by a lack of consensus as to the most appropriate way to define the processes that instigate behavior. The sheer difficulty in describing these processes has resulted in differing standards as to what terms may be used to describe how behavior is selected. But different approaches to the description of motivation vary not only in the type of nomenclature or data language used to describe this process, but in how that data language may be applied to a wider range of behavior, and what generalizations or predictions may be derived from that description.

The normative standards that separate good theories from less valuable ones simply reflect the relative capability of a data language to derive the widest scope of events from permutations of the fewest descriptive terms. During this century, and within the discipline of experimental psychology, the essential elements that cause behavior to be selected have been reduced to simple elemental perceptual relationships that may be denoted by equally simple descriptive terms. In contrast, social and humanistic psychology has been characterized by the evolution of ever more complex data languages that have progressively limited generality and predictive power. This eclectic trend in psychology underscores the question of whether human behavior is at all subject to the simplifying trends characteristic of experimental psychology. More pointedly, the question is whether single factor explanations of motivation or reinforcement can be applied without loss to complex human behavior, and if not, whether the origin of human behavior is separated from its animal counterpart due to the evidence of unique mental processes. If complex human behavior can be thoroughly described utilizing the data language provided by contemporary models of reinforcement, then multi process theories of behavior become simply artifacts of a terminology that incompletely or inappropriately describes the subject matters it purports to explain.

A convenient distinction between single and multi process theories of behavior that has great currency in contemporary social psychological thought is the division of the reinforcement process into two separate subject matters of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. The concept of intrinsic motivation is distinctively illustrated by the concept of the ‘flow response’, a well-demonstrated experiential state of ecstasy, pleasure, or satisfaction that occurs during the performance of tasks that represent the matching of demand and skill. The primary question we will consider is whether the flow response represents a separate definable process that is unique to humans, or if it may be derived from the application of a set of basic principles that are common to both human and animal behavior alike. The answer to this question not only will help define flow, but will also address the viability of theoretical positions which posit distinctive motivational processes, and allow for the equally simple description of other mental processes (e.g. play, hypnosis, stress, etc.) that have been heretofore considered as separate subject matters due to the idiosyncratic data languages which have been developed to describe them.

We will first examine the empirical standards of the physical sciences and note their generality to the very distinctive empirical traditions of modern experimental and social psychology. Secondly, we will compare contemporary motivational models from these disciplines in terms of their logical consistency (syntax), descriptive thoroughness (semantics), applicability to other subject matters (generality), and theoretical economy (parsimony), and will trace the evolution of the concept of reinforcement as it has been conceived in the respective disciplines of experimental and social psychology. Third, we will demonstrate the simplicity and power of contemporary models of reinforcement by deriving complex motivational states such as play, flow, and stress from the permutation of very simple theoretical principles. Fourth, we will examine how knowledge of how behavior is selected informs us as to what behavior we should select. These philosophical implications span such narrow subject matters as the design of games and Internet interfaces to general issues such as ethics, the design of cultures, and the future of the race itself.

Scientific analysis represents the mapping of empirical (sense-data) phenomena to language. Sense data are defined as what we know from our senses and the instruments that enhance them. The ultimate goal of science is a complete description of all of nature, and is essentially a deductive process wherein specific predictions can be reliably made to account for and predict the facts of nature. The object of science is the attempt to move from deductive conclusions that are derived from partial data to inductive conclusions that reflect a complete accounting for all experience. As such, the history of science represents a transition from deductive to inductive knowledge as more and more natural events have surrendered to progressively more comprehensive data languages and procedures. With a more complete accounting for the facts of nature comes a more enhanced ability to predict and control physical phenomena (and vice versa), and to achieve a greater degree of conceptual integration so that diverse events can be seen as aspects of a common pattern (Marr, 1985).

The physical sciences provide perhaps the clearest example of this progression in empirical knowledge. To illustrate, Aristotle deduced the laws of motion from his own observation of physical events, yet his observations were neither systematic nor mapped to a rigorously defined descriptive language (i.e. mathematics). It remained for such scientists such as Kepler, Galileo, and Newton to actually assemble and codify the extensive data which thoroughly described the behavior of matter. The use of these more descriptive data languages provided an increase in their predictive power and generality to many seeming unrelated events. Thus, Newtonian mechanics allowed a scientist to predict accurately not only the behavior of falling balls, but the flight of feathers and the orbits of moons. Of course, Newton could not account for all the processes which guided the flight of an object in space, and such entities as time, space, and gravity were regarded as unexplained constants that were seemingly barren of any surplus predictive power. It was therefore unnecessary to explain them even though that decision rendered this theory incomplete. Declaring ‘hypotheses non fingo’, or ‘I make no hypotheses’, Newton thought it antithetical to the aims of science to venture an explanation of events that had no correlate in empirical observation. It sufficed merely that the concept of gravity was a concept that was not important to his practical end of predicting the mechanics of motion, and hence merely needed to be noted, not described. Two hundred years later, the concept of gravity did get its due when Einstein demonstrated through his general theory of relativity that gravity was simply the warping of space, and may be described by non-euclidian geometry. Along with a definition of gravity, time and space, Einstein’s theory demonstrated that these entities may be conceptually manipulated to make predictions that would be eventually confirmed by observation and experiment. In such a way, the relativity of time and space were demonstrated, and such bizarre physical entities as time warps and black holes were confidently predicted.

Science represents the continuous attempt to make distinctions between what is essential and what is derived. Historically, the common sense mechanics of Aristotle was subsumed under Newtonian principles, which could be in turn be incorporated under the relativistic principles of Einstein. Each higher level of understanding was represented by a progressively greater degree of generality and predictive power. From a child’s approximation of where a thrown ball will fall to the Newtonian laws of motion to the Einstein view of space time, each successive level of understanding encompassed the lower, and permitted more and more events to be described, new ones to be predicted, and all to be accomplished through the employment of terms of progressively greater economy.

However, an economical description of nature does not necessarily translate into a practical description of nature. That is, describing nature is one thing, but using nature is another, and it may be impractical to use higher order descriptive terms to manage the physical facts of life. Although we can describe the physics of everyday life with Newtonian or even Einsteinian terms, we normally make a trade off from the predictive power and universality of mathematical statements in exchange for simple descriptive terms that have greater utility, but far less predictiveness and generality. Thus, when we throw a ball into the air, we communicate to others not some Newtonian formula, but rather that we threw the ball hard. Of course, the use of a simple description of the act of throwing will not give us the capability to predict exactly where the ball will land, or the ability to use that description to describe how the moon rotates around the earth. But it does give us the ability to generally communicate the motion of throwing a ball, and that is all that is necessary.

We do not of course use higher order mathematics such as the calculus to navigate through life, and our awareness of even the form of Newtonian or Einsteinian interpretations is generally nebulous at best. However, the personal impact of these higher order perspectives is in our awareness of their instrumental value in predicting the motions of a toaster or a star, and how the application of physics through the applied sciences has been instrumental in achieving the material progress of mankind. A less obvious influence of this knowledge is that it constrains us from hypothesizing added terms that do not provide any additional or more precise predictive power. That is, by knowing of Newton or Einstein we can discard Aristotle, and dismiss ideas which would otherwise have the stamp of common sense. Thus the fact that the earth rotates the sun rather than vice versa becomes the new standard of common sense, and the invisible ether is replaced with the bending of space and time.

The progress of the physical sciences represent the evolution of more precise notational schemes that allowed the physical world to be mapped to language, or in other words, to be described. Indeed, the facts of existence are meaningless unless there is a way to codify them, and are merely debatable if they are only partially described. Yet when they are fully described, mathematics coopts argument by proverbially leaving no stone unturned. A fully described event is a fully predictable event, and Newtonian concepts overturned Aristotle because they could accurately describe and thus predict the behavior of matter. Aristotelian notions were squeezed out of the conceptual equation because they could bestow no real or imagined predictive power to events that were already fully predictable. Similar concepts such as phlogiston (a substance that permitted combustion) and ether (a transmission medium for light) were also discarded not because they were unobserved, but because they were ultimately unnecessary.

When information about the world is limited, it invites the postulation of hypothetical processes which fill in the gaps of observation, and which may be used in a post hoc fashion to supplement the limited predictive power of that information. The problem however is that this speculation is immune to logical refutation because there are no logical rules that determine what processes, if any, one is compelled to infer. This results in the creation of competing paradigms that are at least slightly at cross purposes, since neither side will grant the non-empirical assumptions that the other needs in order to make its case, and forces each side to partly talk past each other (Kuhn, 1970). Such speculation is also immune to criticisms of its actual utility because it offers at least the semblance of being marginally useful. Thus, in lieu of any better information, our early ancestors could invent animistic spirits to provide a guiding force behind nature, and could incorporate ghosts and gods in a mechanical chain that at least seems to provide a predictable future. This sort of reasoning explains the persistence of astrology, which fills in the gap of our knowledge of the future by jumping from the correlations of the position of the stars and human behavior to the presumption of causation, and extrapolates these correlations into predictions that have at least the partial semblance of accuracy.

It is the underlying yet central argument of this paper that the great issues of psychology, as in the physical sciences, are ultimately settled not by examining the logic that ties events together, but by improving the language that describes those events. The subject matter of motivation, or of reinforcement, is resolvable not through the constant debate over the relative merits of the logic of derived processes or even of the reliability of the predictions made from those processes. Indeed, this is unprovable or impractical. Rather, the answer can only be found through better data languages that can more comprehensively describe behavior. The question we will address is, are notational schemes available that can more accurately describe behavior, or is behavior inherently indescribable by virtue of its sheer complexity and opaqueness to the descriptive powers of rational introspection and observation?

In keeping with the accepted principles of science, experimental traditions in psychology have always sought the ultimate goal of a complete description of the empirical regularities of behavior that may in turn be enfolded under the most economical set of principles. This compressibility of nature into a spare logical or algorithmic form allows science to derive behavior from a single set of theoretical principles, much like the behavior of the cosmos can be explained by a series of simple mathematical equations. One of the most concise and pivotal explanatory terms in the theoretical lexicon of psychology has been the concept of reinforcement. Reinforcement represents the occasion when behavior is strengthened, directed, and otherwise selected. Reinforcement is by definition a discrete event, yet until recently had not been represented as a directly observable physiological process but was rather inferred from recorded correlations of behavior and other empirical events. As such, reinforcement has been considered a theoretical construct, a mere way of categorizing behavior and its empirical correlates. During this century, the subject matter of experimental psychology has been expanded through the creation of more diverse experimental procedures and more comprehensive data languages to include nearly all of the denotable empirical events that correlate with and consist of behavior. These empirical measures have shifted from a mere recording of overt response measures, such as salivation, bar pressing, etc. to account for all of the empirical relationships that are implicated by behavior. These relationships include not only the sensate properties of physical events or behavior, but the perceptual events which frame them, the neurochemical events that guide the selective perception, and the genetically determined tendencies which cause information to be interpreted or used in certain ways. Thus, perceptual relationships such as time, space, and causality have been included as integral aspects of behavior, and innate or nativistic influences have also been accepted as viable (albeit unobservable) behavioral determinants. That is, behavior can only be understood in terms of the perceptual dimensions it creates, and is defined in terms of future results, present relationships to other events, and historical determinants as revealed through instinct and experience (memory).

In this new interpretation, the content of mental states is understood dynamically by transient rather than static (Port and Van Gelder, 1995) representational properties that may be denoted as brain-environment and body-environment relations. Contrary to traditional symbolic processing approaches to mental states, dynamical mechanisms incorporate temporal events into the representational framework of mental states. The common sense ‘mentalese’ which describes mental states with static and discrete symbolic representations is ultimately inconsistent with the inherently continuous, temporal nature of biological behavior (Treffner, 1997). Thus, the selection of the perceptual content of mental states derives from relational patterns in time (i.e., information) rather than discrete timeless mental attributes. Mental states, and the neuronal assemblies which they represent, may be seen as encoding not only present behavior, but also the temporal contingency of the action required for reaching the goal (Jeannerod, 1994).

This dynamic cognitive model is corroborated by modern learning theory, which along with an expansion of the empirical correlates to behavior has provided an equal expansion of what is meant by behavior, and the derivation of the rules whereby behavior may be selected. According to this new view, behavior is far more than a mere overt response. Rather, behavior represents the ongoing appraisal and selection of information that may or may not be conscious, and may or may not be evidenced in changes in covert or overt somatic responses (muscular flexion, tension, etc.) Reinforcement in turn is the occasion of this selection, and the rules whereby behavior is selected (i.e., the rules of reinforcement) may be applied or mapped to the facts of experience, and thus allow for the more reliable prediction of behavior. The fundamental effect of reinforcement is merely the selection of an environment-behavior relationship rather than the increase of the emission rate of a reinforced response. (Shull, 1995). That is, what is selected is always an environment-behavior relation, never a response alone (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993). This relation can be described as a simple matter of inference (Staddon, 1988), mental rehearsal (Davis and Dougan, 1988), or expectancy (Bolles, 1972). The rules of reinforcement on the other hand simply denote the types of perceptual relationships we will tend to choose and the empirical circumstances which lead us to select them. The types of relationships that we are capable of perceiving and ultimately choose are attributed to evolutionary or nativistic causes. That is, we are genetically predisposed to perceive time, space, and causality (Bolles, 1988), and the manner that we will respond when we perceive certain sets of stimuli (e.g. the smell of a steak, the visual shape of a female, the sound of music, etc.) is attributed to their specific survival value. In addition, we will also choose perceptual relationships that have a general survival value. Thus, perceptual relationships that denote an increase of our power or control over other individuals and things will be chosen over perceptions which do not.

Since reinforcement merely denotes informative relationships, the syntax of reinforcement is therefore simple and logically consistent. Secondly, the more complete mapping of the theoretical principles of reinforcement to empirical observations (semantics) provides greater parsimony due to the possibility to describe many more aspects of behavior with the fewest operating principles. Finally, this new interpretation of reinforcement achieves generality due to its capability to explain other subject matters that had hereto been explained by less economical and descriptive principles.

The generality of a single factor model of reinforcement has been well demonstrated through its applicability to many of the long standing problems of learning such as extinction, stimulus control (habit), response acquisition, etc. (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993). Indeed, the applicability of reinforcement to diverse aspects of behavior implicates the entire subject matter of learning theory, and maintains the strict empirically based standards that define modern behaviorism. However, this hard won generality has not been extended to other subject matters in psychology. In particular, theoretical principles in social and humanistic psychology posit multiple processes to account for human behavior that often have only a partial basis in empirical observation. In general, behaviors that do not have a clear analogue to animal behavior, such as complex emotional behavior ( a sense of guilt, pride, etc.), creative behavior, or complex behavior such as play, leisure activities, etc. have been attributed to multiple processes which are primarily denoted by self reports, and cannot be described through information processing (Goleman, 1996) models. By denying or minimizing the role of information or cognition, self-reports of emotional behavior, play, etc., become mere metaphorical representations of the neurological structures which instigate them and give them form. Thus, many aspects of human behavior are presumed to be representative of unique neurological processes and structures which may be demonstrated or inferred. For example, the expression of emotional behavior can be attributed to ill defined neural processes meditated by brain organelles such as the amygdala or hippocampus, or to inferred processes that have a genetic origin, such as the sociobiologic explanations that attribute altruism, aggression, etc. to instinctive causes. The result of this is a demarcation between explanatory constructs for behavior that trace behavior to discrete, well defined informative events, and those that trace behavior to indiscrete neuro-physiological events that are unmediated by information and are obscurely connected to more diffusely described experiences as relayed by self reports. These issues, and the experimental procedures that are used to explore them have been neatly demarcated into different subject matters that are represented by extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.

Multiple motivational processes refer to conceptually distinct brain states or categories of experience from which behavior ultimately derives. These processes are typically derived from self reports, which generally reflect inexact metaphorical interpretations of empirical events. However, by referring to them we can account for the facts of experience and also gain some measure of predictability. Thus an individual who has a sense of self esteem, self control, or self-actualization can describe his mental state through those terms, and a knowledge of these internal states can permit him to predict the likelihood of his future behavior. Our intentions, or likelihood to behave, are thus derived from these intrinsic motivational states. The concept of intrinsic intentionality was coined by the philosopher John Searle (1980) as a conceptual counter weight to the depersonalizing reductionist tendencies in psychology. Intrinsic intentionality represents the ‘aboutness’ of our thoughts, beliefs and desires (Dennett, 1987), and our behavior can only be understood and predicted by understanding how it fits under these practically irreducible categories of experience. That is, short of a neurophysiological explanation, there is no higher order of description that can explain intrinsic intentions. The absence of higher order explanations leaves self-reports as the only practicable means test for the exploration of intrinsically motivated states. The identification of intrinsic motivation with subjective experience (Graef, Csikszentmihalyi and Giannino, 1983) rules out objective (neurally grounded) causes for such states, with the result that behavior becomes self sustaining. That is, people engage in an activity because they enjoy that activity, or perceive their action as an end in itself (Kruglanski, 1978). On the other hand, many behaviors can be described quite well through their correlation to discrete events that are easily measured and reproduced. These strictly empirical measures represent extrinsic motivating events, which motivate by representing future goals. The functional properties of extrinsic events are sufficiently described by the verbal representation of those events and not through any expectancies that may be signaled by those events. That is, extrinsic motivating events are sufficiently described by the mere names we give them, and decomposing them to constituent expectancies does not allow one to better predict behavior. Thus a monetary reward does not gain any predictive power if it was decomposed into positive and negative (i.e., dissonant) perceptual events. These combined positive and negative expectancies represent a list of all the things you can buy with money, or the information it mediates as to the inherent desirability of the behavior that preceded it, as when a child infers that reading behavior must be bad if he is paid for doing it.

Intrinsic motivators represent indiscrete processes that are impractical to decompose, and extrinsic motivators represent discrete events that are unnecessary to decompose. In other words, extrinsic and intrinsic motivators are derived from the relative incapability or lack of necessity to provide a more detailed empirical description of the circumstances that elicit behavior. Their use constitutes a shorthand for the true processes that cause behavior to be selected, and not a systematic empirical description of those processes. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivating characteristics or states only suggest the general rather than the exact circumstances that lead to behavior, and leave the true details to the observer to infer from his own limited observation and personal experience. As such they provide only metaphorical as compared to empirical descriptions of behavior. Thus, if we note that a person is behaving creatively and courageously, the individuals we communicate this fact to will define those motivating states in terms of their own observations of the situation that led to that behavior, and in terms of what they consider as creative or courageous from their own analogous experience. Hence communication will always be quick, but at the price of imperfectly representing the truth.

As a matter or practice or philosophy, a descriptive shorthand for behavior may be limited to those events that can be empirically rather than metaphorically described, and this narrow empiricism is represented by behavioristic points of view, which historically ignore events that cannot be demonstrated through experiment and codified in precise terms. If on the other hand this shorthand is applied as well to events that cannot be or have not been fully described, then empirical principles are implicitly rejected, with the result that any terms may be freely inferred, since they need not be completely anchored to observed facts. The postulation of intrinsic motivational states thus allows for the creation of an endless list of new subject matters by virtue of the idiosyncratic data languages that are used to explain them, and not the empirical data which embody them. The arguing point that continues to separate psychologists is whether inquiry should adhere to a narrow empiricism representing a strict inductive approach that effectively limits the types of predictions about behavior to those events that can be described and predicted, or to reject it in favor of a broadly deductive approach which coins new terms with abandon, and yet strays from the predictability of behavior because the terms refer less and less to behavior. In short, The dilemma is whether one should accept incomplete or inaccurate descriptions of behavior.

This debate may only be resolved by reconciling the separate dynamics of inductive and deductive analysis through the derivation of better procedures and data languages that can more completely and accurately investigate and describe behavior. However, a common misconception is that this has not occurred. The popular appraisal of behaviorism is that that it has not grown past the limited procedures and dogma of fifty years ago, and that the ‘dustbowl empiricism’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997) of behaviorism has lost its ascendancy in psychology because of its incapability of explaining the hidden world of intrinsically motivated states. Nothing can be further from the truth. As we will see, the modern history of behaviorism is a chronicle of a gradual evolution of an ever-broader array of principles that at present can map the heretofore indescribable facts of intrinsic motivation with precision and reliability.

The empirical position in psychology, as generally defined, is that our knowledge, personality, behavior and entire psychological makeup is a product of our experience (Bolles, 1988). Nonetheless, as Neal Miller (1959) noted, pure empiricism is a delusion, since "multitudinous events could be observed and an enormous number of relationships could be determined among all of these events, gathering all the facts with no bias from theory is utterly impossible. Scientists are forced to make a drastic selection…. on the basis of explicitly formulated theory." Theories provide the guidelines that determine a scientist’s interest in and interpretation of specific empirical events. Without these preconceived conceptual guidelines, science would be impossible. Necessarily, these guidelines should only be as broad as necessary to encompass the subject matter that is the focus of the theory. Thus Newton’s laws of motion were postulated to explain only the movement of bodies in space, and not the nature of space or time, and no surplus terms were introduced that did not explain, redundantly explained, or expanded beyond that subject matter.

When empirical relationships are discovered which cannot be explained within these guidelines, then a scientist must expand his procedures and data language to account for them, or else define them as representing a different subject matter that is describable by entirely different sets of laws. At the beginning of the century, Ivan Pavlov’s research into the physiology of digestion led to observations that could not be accounted by a description of digestion as a mere homeostatic mechanism. Pavlov observed that salivary and other digestive responses were complexly mediated by perceptual or psychic events, and he created an entirely new set of procedures and data language to explore them. Pavlov’s analysis of these ‘psychic secretions’ unwittingly became one of the bases of the field of experimental psychology. In time, the subject matter of psychic secretions provided a set of descriptive terminology which could map not only salivation, but other covert responses that engaged the smooth and striated musculature, and suggested an exact analogue in hypothetical neurological processes which mirrored the Pavlovian language of stimulus and response.

Rendered most simply, Pavlov’s original experiments explored how instinctive or unconditioned responses, such as salivation, could be evoked not only by unconditioned stimuli that the animal is instinctively prepared to respond to, but also to neutral events that occurred in spatial or temporal proximity to those stimuli. By virtue of this pairing, these neutral stimuli could take on the properties of the unconditioned stimulus, and these conditioned stimuli could be utilized to describe events as wide ranging as the evocative power of language and the essential elements of emotion.

The broadening of the applicability or generality of the Pavlovian data language to many more aspects of behavior than its original subject matter of digestive response has occurred with a corresponding broadening in the empirical description of what constitutes a stimulus and a response. Originally, the only important empirical relationship that occurred within Pavlovian or classical conditioning was the creation of a stimulus-response pairing. A stimulus of course creates relationships in time and occupies space, but the dimensionality or perceptual field of a stimulus was discounted because it did not seem to lend any greater predictiveness than the simple description of a stimulus response pair. For example, if the sight of food occurs simultaneously with the sound of a bell, the bell will take on the properties of the unconditioned stimulus or US (sight of food), and therefore will elicit salivation. How well the stimulus actually predicted the occurrence of food did not seem to matter. Yet the notion that the correlations between a stimulus and the likelihood of a response were important was first demonstrated when laboratory animals (Miller, 1962) were observed to respond differentially to how well a conditioned stimulus predicted the onset of food. The fact that predictiveness does matter was decisively confirmed by Rescorla’s (1967) demonstration that the temporal proximity of a conditioned stimulus or CS (e.g. a bell) was not sufficient for classical conditioning, but that the CS also had to predict the occurrence of the US. The conditioned response or CR (e.g. salivation) also embodies a predictive function through its correlation with the imminent onset of the US (e.g. food). However, if the probable onset of food was not merely correlative but contingent upon the occurrence of salivation, then salivation may be considered to change that probability, and thus ‘operate’ on its perceptual environment. The operative as opposed to correlative relationship between behavior and its consequences adds a measure of control by the individual (Staddon, 1988) , and this element of control, whether perceived consciously or unconsciously, represents operant behavior.

The transition from respondent to operant conditioning represents merely an expansion of predictive events from those that an individual passively assimilates to those that he actively controls. Nonetheless, these two types of conditioning have often been perceived as representing certain types of behavior rather than merely certain classes of predictors. Behavior has often been neatly demarcated between involuntary response classes (e.g. emotion, salivation, stress reactions) and voluntary (e.g. walking, talking) that represent different muscle groups (smooth vs. striated musculature) whose actions are mediated by differing neurological structures. However, as Kimble (1970) demonstrated, so called involuntary and voluntary acts are merely artifacts of the type of proprioceptive feedback that is available to control them. For example, if the act of salivation received prosthetic feedback which permitted that behavior to control a far wider variety of events than the onset of food, salivation would assume the properties of a voluntary behavior, and could be easily recreated without the need for the real or imagined evocative stimulus of food. Likewise, when individuals received delayed or intermittent feedback for simple voluntary behaviors like walking, the voluntary control over that behavior is progressively lost.

The inclusion of predictive or cause-effect relationships introduces a cognitive element that supplants the mechanistic reflex-like process that classical conditioning originally suggested, and expands it to include the class of voluntary or operant behaviors. Because a stimulus mediates relationships, and can only be defined through them, these relationships provide a new order of description that has an analogue to informative rather than neurological events. The fact that the behaviors commonly described by classical conditioning were mappable to predictive patterns of information or expectancies rendered them no different than the perceptual relationships between behavior and reward that sustained voluntary or operant behavior. Although no distinct learning processes could be demonstrated to separate involuntary and voluntary response classes (Hearst, 1975), the data languages used to describe them remain quite distinct. They continue to be widely employed because of their applicability to simple problems in learning and their clear correspondence with the simplified explanations derived from common sense. That is, because classical and instrumental conditioning are not processes, but procedures and effects of procedures (Staddon, 1988), they continue to be employed only because of their practical use in experimental inquiry and everyday language. In simple situations mental events seem to be isomorphic to information denoted by experimental contingencies or simple descriptions, and prediction is reliable and precise. But this isomorphism, if true, would thus extend to more complex behavioral situations, which it does not. The fact that the logic of behavior does not correspond to the formal logic of environmental events or contingencies implies that humans are genetically disposed to use and to process information in certain ways, and that the common analogy of the human mind to the relatively straightforward computational capabilities of present day computers is at best imperfect.

Our environment is awash in information, and the infinite permutations of the informative events which may be derived from our perceptual world range from the concrete (seeing an apple) to the abstract (calculating the volume of a cube). Ultimately, the reason that we do not spend our days as idiot savants performing rote or otherwise meaningless information processing is that we are genetically constituted to favor events which have some meaning. As products of an evolutionary selection process, this meaning is found in information that has a survival value. The concept of drive has long been used as a way of denoting our sensitivity to information that has such survival value. Put in another way, drives represent a collection of basic preferences in biological regulation, and represent basic value (Damasio, 1994). Drive acts as an intermediary between information and behavior to reflect innate sensitivities to specific stimuli that gain importance or salience as a function of the degree to which we are deprived of them. They are in turn recognized and acted upon due to the physical discomfort of hunger, thirst, anxiety, or boredom. These stimuli may have distinct sensate properties, such as the smell of a steak or the shape of a female, or they may represent abstract perceptual properties such as the relative novelty of a stimulus (exploratory drive) or its causal properties (anticipatory drive). This latter sensitivity to stimulus causality represents sensitivity to stimuli that mark greater degrees of control over our physical or social environment.

Of course, the shape of a reaction to a stimulus must also account for the perceptual field that those stimuli create as well as the memory of the general courses of action that follows past experience. A perceptual field represents the dimensional attributes of a stimulus event in terms of its past history, present dimensional characteristics (i.e. height, width, position relative to other stimuli), and possible future histories. For example, a bird has an instinct or drive to build a nest, and will be sensitive to the stimulus properties that correspond with nesting materials. However, nesting materials are scattered about its environment, and the bird must continually choose different flight patterns to obtain them. The nesting drive determines the goal of behavior, but it cannot determine the course or type of the behavior itself. Behavior is ultimately determined by the perceptual field (where the nesting materials are located, how long they will be there) that permits the animal to choose between alternative course of action. Thus, the bird may walk, fly, or even swim to obtain the materials it needs, and it may travel long, short, or circuitous distances to get to them. The rate and form of this behavior is not determined by instinct, but rather by information about its environment that it processes presently and stores in memory for future utilization. However, this memory store is not only strengthened through direct experience, but is enhanced and strengthened through cognitive rehearsal that occurs apart from experience. In particular, for lower order mammals as well as humans, the modeling or rehearsal of perceptual events not only prepares one to respond immediately, but allows the individual to act without having to sample again the same information in its original environmental setting (Davis and Doogan, 1988). In other words, behavior changes not only as a function of the processing of information occurring in parallel with current changes in environmental events, but is also a function of the preparatory processing of important or salient information that derives from and is committed to memory. Furthermore, this processing does not occur intermittently, but continuously. However, the type and amount of information processed may vary, and may change gradually or in discrete steps. On the behavioral level of description, the selection of a particular environmental behavior relation is defined as reinforcement, which on the neural level causes the neurotransmitter dopamine to be liberated in synaptic clefts between coactive pre- and post synaptic neurons (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993). The functional role of dopamine stabilizes active neural representations in the prefrontal cortex (i.e., attention), and thereby protects goal related delay activity against interfering stimuli, (Durstewitz et al. 1999). Dopamine also labels stimuli with appetitive value, and may provide advance reward information before behavior occurs (Schultz, 1999). Dopamine also mediates the cognitive effects of pleasant feelings that may be denoted by self reports of pleasure, happiness, or satisfaction (Ashby, Isen, & Turken, 1999).

Reinforcement may be defined as a molecular event that represents a change in an environment-behavior relationship, and is isomorphic to corresponding neural events. In addition, reinforcement may also be employed as a molar event, and acts as a taxonomy that classifies information processing choices and levels. Molar reinforcers are signified by perceptual markers that mark the transition between the type, degree, and number of perceptual relationships that are processed in a specific interval of time. These perceptual markers may act as reference points or benchmarks for the sum of continual changes or as demarcation points for discrete changes in environmental-behavior relationships. Thus, these perceptual markers may be defined as discrete events (molecular events), or as indiscrete collections (molar events) of perceptual relationships.

For example, an individual walking to the store for a bouquet of flowers may simultaneously entertain all of the romantic possibilities that may ensue when he presents them to his girlfriend. If however he was uncertain as to whether he could afford the same flowers, he may refrain from his romantic reveries until he finds out whether he can indeed buy the flowers. At that time, he may entertain in rapid succession all of the many romantic implications of his dinner date. The time when the flowers are actually possessed corresponds to the moment when his behavior is ‘reinforced’, yet the figurative implication that his behavior is now somehow ‘glued’ to the reinforcer is a but a semantic convenience. On a molecular level, reinforcement occurs at each momentary instant that the individual shifts his attention to a salient or important perception, whether it is a momentary thought of his girlfriend, or a turn in the road leading to the flower shop. On a molar level, these expectancies are signified by verbal representations that act as taxonomies for clusters of expectancies, or as benchmarks for changes in expectancies. Thus going to the store to buy flowers signifies groups of similar expectancies, and discovering that the flower store is open acts as a benchmark for discrete changes in groups of expectancies. Finally, the level of attention given to any aspect of his behavior will depend upon the number and salience of behavior-event outcomes or expectancies that must be processed in time. For example, walking to the store may involve little processing of new information, but discovering the store open will open new possibilities (i.e. the improved likelihood and implications of a successful date) that will involve the immediate processing of many chains of information. This processing of a high level of salient information may also be distinctly pleasurable, and thus give rise to the impression that taking possession of the flowers per se, and not the expectancies mediated by flowers, imparts some unique pleasurable or reinforcing effect.

The individual’s behavior occurs and is directed by arrays of salient perceptual events that may occur continuously or discretely, and may reflect low to high levels of information processing. Save for an awareness of innate response sensitivities or drives that direct the outcome of behavior, the form of behavior is determined entirely by informative events, and no appeal to any further higher order process is required. However, when the informative properties or semantics of a walk to the flower shop are not distinguished, buying flowers may be instead referred to metaphorical processes that reflect the imposition of other perceptual domains. This reference is necessarily an obscure one, since there are no logical reasons to infer separate processes for such intrinsic and extrinsic motivating states save for our inability to preconceive the informative events that underlie them. The last refuge of this obscurantist position is the fact that extrinsic and intrinsic reinforcing states actually ‘feel’ differently, and that different neurological and somatic processes occur concurrently with these states. These emotional states are normally considered to be separate from the perceptual events that may instigate them, and this dichotomy sustains the notion that the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic reinforcement is more than mere semantics. But is rationality "guided by and swamped by feeling" (Goleman, 1996), or are feelings cognitive, computable, and intelligible (Damasio, 1994), and are therefore integral to rather than separate from the perceptual facts of thought and experience?

The integration of the separate response classes of respondent and operant behavior as well as nativistic sensitivities (i.e. drive) under singular cognitive explanatory schemes provides a logical and systematic descriptive language for behavior. However, these models still operate under the common notion that information processing occurs separately from other specialized neurophysiological processes, and that the latter normally interferes with rather than enhances cognition. The notion that specialized neurological and somatic processes are antagonistic or are mere appendages to thought processes contrasts with newer findings which conclude that they are integral to cognition and are in themselves cognitive events, and that decision making would be crippled without them.

The reinforcement of covert response is of course an accepted fact. From the psychosomatic response of an upset stomach that a child may display to avoid school to the daily anxieties that propel and inhibit our behavior, somatic responses daily occur and are reinforced because they indirectly create new relationships that have value. This value however is accentuated not only by the results of behavior, but by the reduction or prolongation of the somatic response itself. For example, a student who leaves an exam room not only delays taking the test, but also escapes the anxiety that surrounded it. Moreover, an individual will often scan the central representation of a repertoire of responses, inhibiting those associated with fear and facilitating those associated with the pleasurable reaction of hope (Mowrer, 1960). Nonetheless, the fact that covert somatic responses mediate expectancies suggests merely that they are incidental and not integral to behavior, and that cognition would occur just as if not more efficiently without them. Given the procedures available to learning theorists, it has not been possible to test this assumption by isolating the human mind from the influence of the somatic responses as particularly evidenced in emotion and generally felt by one’s sense of his body proper. However, this isolation has been recently observed from the entirely different subject matter of neurophysiology.

Behavior seems inextricable from the emotions that may underlie it, but anatomically, the basic or primary emotions arise from brain structures other than those that govern reasoning. If these structures become disassociated due to disease or injury, then cognitive and emotional processes may be analyzed as separate functions. As an information processor, the human brain has been likened to a computer that reaches conclusions by consciously or unconsciously examining and comparing all alternatives. Yet when the neural structures that process such cognitions are isolated from other structures which are responsible for emotion response, decision making accuracy markedly declines (Damasio, 1994). Emotions, it appears, are not extraneous to or disruptive of decision making, but are integral to thought..

This relatively new role for emotion particularly emphasizes the cognitive or perceptual aspect of somatic or bodily states. These somatic changes, and their resulting interpretation as emotion, act to restrict the combinatorial possibilities that reason has to face (De Sousa, 1987) and mark and add value to the myriad choices that we do not time to sequentially examine (Thagard and Barnes, 1996). These appraisal approaches to motivation begin with the assumption that emotions are adaptive, and prepare and motive us to respond adaptively to situations (Kirby and Smith, 1997). This adaptive or functional property of emotions has been extended to included low level or background somatic states that represent the continuous somato-sensory feedback received by the body proper (Damasio, 1994). More specifically, somatic responses that are evidenced in emotions, feelings, or the diverse sensory events which constitute daily experience are processed as information, and may act as markers for perceptual relationships, and also as a booster for continued memory and attention. In other words, a somatic marker is not only an aspect of cognitive function that attenuates conscious cognitive appraisal or deliberation, but also performs a reinforcing function through its incorporation into new expectancies that change behavior.

Somatic markers make cognition more efficient by paring the number of alternatives that will be rationally considered, yet the value of the particular decision is also weighted by the value of the somatic marker itself. That is, although decision making is expedited through a somatic marker, the marker also distorts the value of that decision by virtue of its correlation with that decision. When the perceptual marker is mildly pleasurable or painful, this distortion will be minor, but when the marker is very painful or pleasurable, then the value of behavior can become obviously distorted and detrimental to one’s rational goals.

For example, the defining characteristic of stress is the muscular tension that occurs when we are placed in demanding situations (McGuigan, 1976), and tension therefore originates with the cognitive processing of these perceptual events (McGuigan, 1978). However, in almost all popular interpretations of stress, muscular tension is described as a useless artifact from man’s hunter gatherer past, and although signaled by information, stress is merely a reactive state that provides only a marginal adaptive function. In contrast, a somatic marker interpretation of tension would hold that muscular tension permits one to easily shift from one course of action to another without having to consciously deliberate on all of the available alternatives, and therefore promotes cognitive efficiency and provides functionality by adding value to behavior. Tension, as felt as emotional stress or anxiety, tends to focus attention on threatening stimuli and influences perception to interpret ambiguous stimuli as threatening (Williams et al. 1988, Mineka and Sutton, 1992). It is associated with fast response times, minimal involvement of cognition in decision making, reduced memory consolidation, and promotes quick and crude decision-making. In contrast, muscle relaxation promotes more complex integration of information and the elaboration of existing schemas to accommodate new knowledge (Nugent and Mineka, 1994). In other words, muscular tension or relaxation is originated by as well as mediates information, and controls or determines behavioral outcomes. However, the definition of a somatic marker incorrectly implies that it is static and invariant across time, and does not require a descriptive language that can map changes in the form or topography of a somatic response across time. The provision of such a behavioristic language denotes the informational patterns or contingencies that parallel that response, and its introduction transforms the definition of a somatic maker from a passive undifferentiated response to an operant behavior. However, the functional role of a somatic marker as an operant behavior becomes greatly distorted in situations that create high anxiety, with the result that decision making is significantly impaired. For example, a student may feel test anxiety prior to going to school, and may call in sick or otherwise avoid school because of that anxiety. Because anxiety adds value to the student’s decision to avoid school, it distorts the intellectual or rational order of events that he would normally follow, and is sustained or reinforced through its reduction by the act of avoiding school.

By definition, a somatic marker represents a trade off between cognitive efficiency and cognitive distortion. In general this trade off is favorable to the individual. However, the biasing aspect of a somatic marker is not favorable in extreme situations (e.g. high anxiety), and can be absolutely detrimental to rational functioning. The distorting elements of emotion are ironically the price we pay to think effectively, as the individual instances wherein emotions are harmful are outweighed by the general circumstances in which emotions are absolutely essential to decision making.

Besides somatic changes, the subjective experience of neurological events also influences how we feel and how well we can make decisions. The integration of these events with the somatic changes of the body itself provides a formal definition of emotion. Emotion is the combination of a mental evaluative process, simple or complex, with dispositional responses to that process, mostly toward the body proper, resulting in an emotional state, but also toward the brain itself, resulting in additional brain changes (Damasio, 1994). Thus, although the ‘feel’ of a somatic response as embodied in emotion is purely cognitive and computable, brain changes as represented by neurological activity also have a particular feel, and although they cannot be referred to any specific visceral or neuromuscular state, they are often perceived as pleasurable or painful. Cognitive modes which involve the rapid processing of information are more rewarding than those which entail minimal processing, and we often characterize high levels of information processing as euphoric, hypnotic or trance like states in which awareness of normal bodily states is markedly reduced or lost. The neurological substrate for this subjective interpretation has been attributed to neurochemical activity that seems to mark the importance or salience of environmental stimuli. In particular mesolimbic dopamine (DA) activity has been conceptualized as a reward signal that marks the importance of perceptual events (Horvitz , Stewart, and Jacobs 1997), and promotes the effective processing of afferent signals simultaneously arriving at the midbrain. A cascade of multiple salient perceptual events would presumably accentuate DA activity and facilitate the switching among alternative cognitive perspectives (Ashby, Isen, and Turken, 1999). This neuro-chemical activity would not only facilitate the rapid and efficient focusing of the mind on a wide range of images, but would also be frequently interpreted as highly pleasurable. Preliminary confirmation of this has been provided by neuroimaging studies that demonstrated the increased release of dopamine during activities (a video game) that required sustained shifting of a cognitive set (Koepp, 1998).

In contrast, if events are non salient or aversive, dopamine production will be depressed (Schultz, 1998). The emotional concomitants of these states would perhaps correspond with feelings of elation and depression, and confirm Damasio’s (1994) observation that "The cognitive mode which accompanies a feeling of elation permits the rapid generation of multiple images such that the associative process is richer and associations are made to a larger variety of cues available in the images under scrutiny…. The ensuing wealth promotes ease of inference, which may become over inclusive..." "By contrast the cognitive mode which accompanies sadness is characterized by slowness of image evocation, poorer association in response to fewer cues, narrower and less efficient inferences, over concentration on the same images, usually those which accompanied the negative emotional response. The cognitive state is accompanied by motor inhibition and in general by a reduction in appetite and exploratory behaviors."

Ultimately, reinforcement is dependent not only upon the type and the amount of information processed, but also upon the somatic responses that mediate as well as provide information, and the neurological events which are perceived as various degrees of attention, alertness, and may be felt as pleasurable excitement or euphoria. That is, reinforcement not only represents changes in information, but also the nonconscious processes which mediate that information, and may be felt as pleasurable or painful events. Given these facts a new definition of rewarding or reinforcing events emerges that defines them as perceptual events that often have a felt hedonic component. Stimuli are proposed to function as reinforcers to the extent that, on the behavioral level, they provoke a behavioral discrepancy (i.e. a salient change in information). On the neural level, they cause dopamine to be liberated (Donahoe and Palmer, 1993), and on the neuromuscular level they may be marked by somatic responses (e.g. muscular tension, relaxation) (Damasio, 1994). These neural and somatic markers both mark and add value to behavior, and have a felt hedonic component (i.e. they feel good or bad).

The true nature of these hedonic events cannot be preconceived, since that depends upon language that is grounded on a fine grain description of neural, neuromuscular, and perceptual events. Because of the ambiguous nature of the causes and results of the hedonic element of reinforcement, encoding algorithms may nonconsciously impose on them pre-existing interpretive categories, even if the stimuli "objectively" do not match those categories (Lewicki et al. 1992). The verbal or conscious descriptions of these events may be further distorted through the use of verbal structures that are borrowed from different perceptual experiences or domains. This use of metaphorical description can further distort an objective conceptualization of these events. For example, work anxiety or stress is not due to the job per se, as we could otherwise imagine it, but to the perceptual context in which the work occurs (e.g. impossible deadlines, demanding boss, noisy environment). The origin of stress if further distorted through a metaphorical description that permits us to preconceive stress as being ‘pulled’ by a stressful event, as representing negative energy, or may be hydraulically released by cathartic tantrums or a good back rub.

The goal of isolating the content of mental processes and to simultaneously reduce the philosophical encumbrance of interpretative categories derived from naïve experience and its metaphorical representation (i.e. common sense) implicates the subject matter of cognitive science and its sub-disciplines of learning theory, neuropsychology, and cognitive linguistics. Unfortunately, cognitive science is at odds with sub-disciplines in psychology such as humanistic and social psychology that routinely accept metaphorical mental structures as elemental, with no need to ground them to their neural and neuromuscular correlates. This disembodiment of psychological as well as philosophical concepts permeates the social sciences, and has been comprehensively refuted by modern cognitive linguistics (G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, 1999). In particular, the root motivational mechanisms for human behavior as conceptualized in humanistic and social psychology are accepted because they match our own naïve experience, and the metaphors that we use to explain that experience. These basic mechanisms are metaphorically defined as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

The expansion of the perceptual or informative determinants of behavior to include all somatic and neurological responses, along with the integration of dynamic (i.e. temporal) informative factors with inborn instinctive and biological sensitivities provides a higher order language that can describe all of the facts of behavior. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivating states are ultimately derived from this higher order language, and exist as taxonomies and not separate processes. That is, they are linguistic tools that only generally describe the content of environment-behavior relationships, and are not processes themselves. Ultimately, like the similarly dismissed entities of phlogiston and ether that were once hypothesized as the respective catalytic and transmissive mediums of fire and light, an appeal to motivating states is a mere convenience of language. It describes behavior no better than a child describes the motion of a ball by saying that he threw the ball hard.

Expanding upon this analogy, the relative difficulty in describing dynamic continuous events in terms of discrete motivating states demonstrates how the exclusion of the temporal dimension can result in the multiplication of explanatory terms, and illustrates the difficulties in utilizing a two or three dimensional language to describe a four dimensional space. We can ‘explain’ a ball’s flight in the air by saying that its flight is the result of the force applied to throwing it, and the effects of inertia, wind resistance, and gravity. Although a ball in motion possesses dynamic properties, these explanations are not incorporated into a dynamic language that can describe and predict in time the motion of the ball. That description requires the employment of the Newtonian calculus, and it is the calculus, not a static description of dynamic states, that is used by physicists to explain and predict the motion of balls, moons, and satellites. The dynamic properties of inertia, gravity, and the like may be derived from a higher order descriptive language, just as discrete motivating states may be derived from a higher order descriptive language as afforded by modern cognitive science and learning theory. Human behavior represents non verbal movement or motoric responses (e.g. reflexes) as well as verbally based information (e.g. descriptions of houses, mental states) that historically have been described separately, yet both can be united under a single, uniform, abstract type of representation relying on formal symbol manipulating operations. This discounts any fundamental difference between perceptually based and verbally based information (Jeannerod, M. 1994, Pylyshyn, Z. 1984). Thus, verbal representations of mental images and mental states are derivable from a higher order language that represents the symbolic nature of linguistic relationships (Kosslyn et al. 1979). That is, the mental imagery that is at the core of distinct motivating states is not a genuine phenomenon, but derives from the representational mechanisms that are involved in the processing of information generated by the mind, the body, and the perceived world.

Ultimately, the mentalistic language that posits discontinuous, non interactive mental attributes or states is attractive because behavior can be easily described and categorized, and is used because of its economy or practicality in explaining behavior events, and not because it can accurately map and predict changes in perceptual states. Yet, although we may easily dismiss the notion that common sense physics represents an irreducible description of the mechanics of the world, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation remain qualitatively different (Deci and Ryan, 1985) phenomena. This distinction is assumed not because it refers to different informative or physical events (which it does not), but because it provides a de facto explanation for observations that do not at first seem to be reducible to informative or other causes.

Intrinsic motivation has been most commonly invoked to explain how children respond to the contingent rewards for behavior. It has been repeatedly noted that school children only comply with verbal, monetary, or other rewards as long as those rewards are contingent upon performance, and that the quality, permanence, and subsequent desirability of that performance actually declines because of the contingent application of these extrinsic rewards. The application of an extrinsic reward thus decreases the child’s own appreciation of the intrinsic value of the behavior that is being rewarded, and this appreciation may only be recovered when such rewards are discarded. For example, representative studies have demonstrated that children who are paid to drink an unfamiliar beverage as compared to being merely requested to drink it are more inclined to find the drink less appealing in the future (Birch, Marlin, and Rotter, 1984), and that subjects who are paid to write term papers submit work that is far less creative than if they were motivated by the task alone (Kohn, 1993). In particular, grades have been found to undermine creativity, long term memory, interest in learning, and a preference for challenging tasks (Butler and Nisan, 1986, Grolnick and Ryan, 1987). Without exception, these and other studies that attribute student behavior to intrinsic and extrinsic motivators exclude an analysis of the information that is mediated by the reward, the performance, the environmental setting of the behavior, and how it is interpreted due to the personal history of the individual. The refusal to account and control for the informative elements that are otherwise subsumed under the terms intrinsic and extrinsic reward results in simplistic conclusions that would be absurd if proposed in other than in a journalistic setting. For example, the conclusion that "rewards cause people to lose interest in whatever they were rewarded for doing" (Kohn, 1993) would come as some surprise to art and music historians, who would note that much of artistic creation would not have occurred without the "extrinsic" monetary and social reinforcement of popular and aristocratic patronage.

Indeed, the situations that seemingly demonstrate the counterproductive effects of extrinsic motivators are unremarkable, and may be transposed to our own experience. If we were paid for example to drink a new soft drink, we may think less well of the drink that if we otherwise had freely tried it. Our dislike of the drink is not because of the reward per se, but because of contrary or dissonant information about the drink that is mediated by the reward. Contrariwise, we would rightfully expect a trophy or cash reward to increase rather than decrease the motivation of the recipient, whether that person is a musician, artist, or little leaguer, since such awards generally do not mediate dissonant information. Besides the dissonant information that discourages behavior, information may not be presented that actually encourages specific behavior. Thus, a student who hands in a less than creative term paper is not less creative because a grade decreases his motivation, but rather because a grade is not specific to creative behavior. Similarly, a stockbroker who reaches quota by misrepresenting his company is not a poor performer because selling is rewarded, but because those rewards are not specific to selling ethically. The imposition of an award, whether it be a grade for a paper or meeting quota for a stockbroker, will not change behavior unless the teacher or manager makes it contingent upon the behavior he implicitly as well explicitly requires. Thus the effective use of extrinsic rewards requires the active appraisal of the information that is being mediated by those rewards, and how the subject may likewise interpret that information.

Finally, the observation that "learning is devalued insofar as it comes to be seen as a prerequisite for receiving the teacher’s approval" (Kohn, 1993) ignores the fact commonly overlooked by educators and psychologists alike that a knowledge of the facts of a subject matter is not coextensive with the information that leads to a liking of that subject matter. That is, learning about a subject, whether it be classical music, cooking skills, or Elizabethan poetry may not entail actually experiencing the informative elements that make such subjects rewarding. For example, if a child’s first exposure to baseball was in a classroom setting that demanded a rote memorization of the rules of baseball, baseball statistics, and the like, it would be no surprise that baseball would subsequently have less interest subsequently to the classroom course. More specifically, the formalized classroom introductions of the humanities dehumanize them by excluding them from the social setting that fostered and embodied them, and thus create a disinterest in the student. The fact that Shakespearean plays were written and debuted for the pleasure of a nutcracking, woman ogling crowd rather than a group of starchy English professors, and that Mozart’s music was a vehicle for royal and popular entertainment, parties, and the Viennese equivalent of the local sock hop underline the fact that the socially detached formality of learning, not the extrinsic rewards that may follow learning, is more likely responsible for the devaluation of an interest in school curricula. Indeed, for a child to actively like to learn, he must first broadly sample the subject matters he will later study in the original social settings that incubated them, as liking will accompany learning only if it first precedes it.

Ultimately, the common sense dichotomy between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation can be traced to the simple metaphor, derived from our appraisal of conscious decision making strategies, that motivational processes are discrete events that occur in a serial order. By saying ‘Johnny walks to his room to get a ball’, walking behavior occurs, and is metaphorically ‘glued’ to a reinforcing event (the ball). Similarly, if Johnny learns reading and writing and arithmetic, taught to the tune of a hickory stick, his behavior is likewise motivated by his avoidance of an aversive event (a whipping). This simple paradigm has unfortunately been copied all too well by school systems, with the well documented (Kohn, 1993) result that students lose interest in their curriculum, and are far less creatively involved in the learning process. The metaphor that likens children to passive computers who merely need the right programming to learn engages yet another metaphor, that of the computer. Our metaphorical conception of the mind as computer derives from our conception of computers as devices that process simple chains of information in a serial order. However, our actual minds process information not serially but massively in parallel. The metaphor of mind as computer reflects a preconception of how information it processed, and not merely that it is processed. Yet this metaphor, as well as the common sense metaphor that motivational process are discrete serial events, precludes the postulation of multiple concurrent informative causes for behavior.

Behavior is the result of the concurrent conscious and nonconscious assimilation of information that is received from innumerable somatic, neurological, and sensory sources. Therefore to describe behavior as guided by singular extrinsic motivators makes the a priori assumption that the informative content mediated by these sources is nonexistent, indeterminate, or unimportant. Thus, the qualitative aspects of behavior that cannot be traced to singular extrinsic causes somehow emerge from the behavior itself. Individuals who are intrinsically motivated are rewarded by the behavior itself, since singular extrinsic causes cannot explain them.

Behaviors that particularly involve multiple concurrent informative events such as creativity and play cannot be explained through the serial cause-effect relationships between behaviors and reinforcers, but they can be explained with equal economy if those relationships were simply conceived as plural and concurrent. For example, in the movie ‘Shakespeare in Love’, Will was commissioned to write a play that would pay his bills and keep his patron from being dispatched for his bad debts. ‘Paying the bills’ is of course a perfect ‘extrinsic motivator’ that does not quite explain the poetry and power of the resulting play: Romeo and Juliet. Thus, posterity, and not a few armchair psychologists, would attribute such genius as arising from some inner muse, a motivating spark that comes from the mere act of writing. Of course, the play is not only the thing, but it also must meet the demands of a Queen who likes pratfalls, a girlfriend who swoons with romantic phrases, a crowd expecting its share of sex and violence, actors who demand good parts, getting out a better play than his rival Christopher Marlowe, not to mention the judgement of posterity. Doubtless, Shakespeare had to be aware of the concurrent demands made by dozens of similar ‘extrinsic’ motivators, and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ certainly met all of them. Without the shaping extrinsic motivators provided by dozens of often-contradictory demands, Shakespeare’s unrivalled corpus of work could never have occurred.

Ultimately, genius, and the creativity that guides genius, is a cultural affair. It occurs because crowds and kings and girlfriends and posterity demand it. The requirement to simultaneously meet the constraints of a dozen different demands requires the exercise of a mental calculus that demands an ever shifting attention to a thousand details, and a subjective experience that one would find nothing less than exhilarating. Ironically, to increase intrinsic motivation and the special pleasures that attend to it is to increase the involvement of those cultural forces that embrace complex and demanding goals. In the final analysis, Vienna demands its Beethoven, Florence demands its Leonardo, and London demands its Shakespeare. Genius is inseparable from its times, or in other words, its reinforcers.

Like a pointillist picture emerging from a thousand dots of paint, intrinsic motivation emerges from the effects of a thousand extrinsic demands that are modeled in the mind. By accounting for these concurrent informative causes for behavior, the linear metaphorical conceptions of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation become untenable. Motivation is a function of multiple interlocking patterns of information that are continually in flux. But motivation is more than information, it is activation, and the ability to account for many concurrent patterns of salient information requires activation or alertness to all relevant possibilities. Generally, the somatic and neurological events that comprise this alertness are consciously appraised as incidental to behavior, with little or no influence on behavioral choice. Thus people generally perform actions to achieve ends which are justified by informative outcomes, whether those outcomes reflect the purchase of a car or the earning of a college degree. However, when information is extraordinarily salient, neural and somatic activation can become strongly hedonic, and very obviously acts to determine behavior and one’s subsequent judgement of value. But just as the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is a mere artifact of the refusal to account for concurrent informative events, a similar refusal to account for concurrent neurological and somatic events has also created a special category of intrinsic motivator that is just as spurious. This category of intrinsic motivator falls under the rubric of ‘peak experiences’, and has been distinctively labeled as the ‘flow experience’.

This final and perhaps best example of an intrinsic motivating state is described by the unique and highly pleasurable emotional state that occurs concurrently with situations that ironically would seem hardly conducive to anything remotely pleasurable. In the early seventies, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered from the basis of thousands of interviews a common subjective experience of pleasure, interest, and even ecstasy that was derived from activities that perfectly matched one’s skills with the demands for performance. Rock climbers, musicians, chess players, surgeons all reported this "flow" state when their activities possessed this perceptual structure (Csikszentmihalyi, 1977), and subsequently reported a greater interest in these tasks as a result of this experience. Csikszentmihalyi defined the flow response as a "holistic response" or an "optimal state of experience is one in which there is order in consciousness." "This happens when psychic energy, or attention, is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunity for action." (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) Flow "provides a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting a person into a new reality. It pushes a person to higher levels of performance, and leads to previously undreamed of states of consciousness. In this growth of self lies the key flow activities." "Potentially negative experiences can be transformed into flow by 1) setting clear goals to strive toward, 2) becoming immersed in the activity chosen, 3) paying attention to what is happening, and 4) learning to enjoy immediate experiences." The flow state has been defined as "an intrinsic reward for participation in an activity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1977), an optimal state that occurs when there is a balance between the perceived challenges of a situation and a person’s skills or capabilities for action (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), as a centering of attention on a limited stimulus field (Webster, Trevino, and Ryan, 1993), and is characterized by a heightened sense of playfulness (Webster and Martocchio, 1992), self control (Ghani and Deshpande. 1994), increased learning (Canter, Rivers and Storrs, 1985), and increased positive subjective experiences (Csikszentmihalyi, 1977). In keeping with the implied reality of multiple motivational processes, these definitions scarcely refer to information but rather to mind states such as levels of consciousness, attention, or playfulness or states of intentionality such as intrinsic reward, self control, goal setting, etc.

What is immediately distinguishing about almost all commentary on the flow experience is its thoroughgoing metaphorical content. Flow occurs because psychic energy is invested, consciousness is ordered, undreamed states of consciousness are reached, and when we are immersed into activity. Flow doesn’t refer to behavioral, neural, or somatic variables, but to other domains of perceptual experience that reflect disembodied levels of experience. Flow is composed of distinctive rational, perceptual, and emotional domains that follow with each other like the chain of boxes in a flow chart. Thus a demand/skill match is followed by attention that is followed or attended to by ‘senses’ of playfulness, self control, enjoyment, etc. All of these different domains act as different segmented psychological faculties. These domains represent different psychological phenomena, and are seen as separate but interacting agencies. Flow is distinctive among intrinsic motivating processes because it is not only signaled by a perception of a matching of skill and demand, but also incorporates other intrinsically motivating processes such as hypnosis, play, self actualization, and psychic energy (attention). Indeed, the critical element of purely informative or perceptual events such as the matching of skill to demand seem almost incidental when lost in this profuse list of motivational processes which are incorporated into the flow construct.

In contrast to the profusion of interpretive or metaphorical characteristics of flow, the physiological correlates to flow have been scarcely investigated and have been only generally or partially described, or in the case of somatic responses, not described at all. Indeed, the neural correlates to flow have been reduced to metaphorical representations of the mind that engage hydraulic or electromechanical models that render the mind with cartoonish simplicity. Thus, flow is depicted as the result of the vaguely defined containment, channeling and alignment of emotions, feedback loops, attentional energies and forces, mental "cool" states, or as the tuning of the arousal and inhibition of neural circuitry (Goleman, 1996). More remarkably, there has been no experimental investigation into the nature of the somatic states that parallel flow. Specifically, the visceral and musculoskeletal concomitants to flow have never been examined.

However, these musculoskeletal correlates may be inferred from a related experience to flow called meditation. The circumstances which create flow as well as its unique experiential characteristics are generally shared by and may be subsumed under the class of ‘meditative’ experiences that have been studied far more exhaustively. Pleasant emotional experiences that are characteristic of meditation have long been associated with strict attentiveness to specific stimuli or stimulus classes and seen as a byproduct of that attentiveness (Goleman, 1976). Like flow, meditation has been associated with unique physiological and experiential states (Goleman, 1976, Brown, 1977; Deikman, 1963), but unlike flow, the neurophysiological and somatic correlates to meditation have been exhaustively studied Fenwick (1977),Michaels (1976), Wagstaff (1975), Pagano and Warrenburg (1983), Holmes (1984, 1988), and have been found to represent no unique neurophysiological or somatic state, but are merely relaxation. The fact that meditative experiences represent no unique physiological state calls into question the validity of similar claims that flow reflects such states, and refers the topic back to an analysis of the informative events which sustain the state of relaxation which is most likely a major component of the flow response.

The purpose and results of Csikszentmihalyi’s study of flow has been to discover the separate components of flow, and not to derive flow from higher principles or to demonstrate how the terms denoting those components can translate into one another. However, this conceptualization of flow invalidates it as a scientific construct since it fails to meet the major criteria that define acceptable scientific inquiry. The scientific value of the flow concept is marginal at best not because the facts of flow are wrong, but because those facts are not logically interconnected or may be logically derived from higher theoretical principles. That is, "If we accept the crucial assumption that the overall aim of science is to discover the maximum amount of order inherent in any field of inquiry, then paradigms that aim simply at discovering ‘what’s there’ without any commitment to discovering orderly relationships would be then judged unscientific or less scientific than their competitors." (Harris, 1979) The scientific inadequacy of the flow concept derives from its poorly developed logical structure and the resulting difficulties in operationalizing or using flow to predict and explain other facts. Because flow has a poor logical basis, it is difficult to understand through the application of logic, and the difficulty in communicating logically what flow means relegates the concept of flow to an intellectual backwater since it cannot be easily described utilizing related data languages of such subject matters as neurobiology or learning theory.

The decomposition of flow into mere lists of real and hypothetical processes underlines its weaknesses as a scientific construct. Primarily, the theoretical explanation for flow has poor syntactical structure because of the uncertain way its defining terms are related to each other. Flow is generally described as a loosely integrated collection of mental or motivational states or processes that are validated primarily by self reports. Because these states are only described metaphorically through self reports, and can be subsumed under no higher order principles, they cannot logically translate into one another, and therefore cannot be related to one another in any logical way. Secondly, the semantics of flow is weak to non-existent. Outside of the self reports which describe flow experiences, the theoretical terms for flow refer to few behavioral or informative events, with only a fragmentary or metaphorical consideration of its physiological correlates. Thus no aspects of flow can be traced in time, since none are precisely defined. Ultimately, the flow construct is unparsimonious and incomplete since it relies primarily on a profuse variety of self reports and literary and descriptive terms that suggest meaning rather than define it, and because those reports are not deconstructed into underlying facts of experience as reflected in somatic, perceptual, and neurological events. Thus, explanations of flow cannot be generalized to such related motivational processes such as meditation, hypnosis, emotion etc., and it links up with no other subject matters in psychology such as learning theory, neurobiology, etc.

Although the concept of flow ultimately fails as a scientific term, this however is due not to any lack of validity in the self reports which clearly demonstrate that a very rewarding emotional state does occur during certain perceptual circumstances. Because the interpretation of the flow response traces almost exclusively to Csizkszentmihalyi’s extensive writings on the subject, its failure stems from his decidedly literary explanatory style that poses as rather than embodies the principles of science. More pointedly, because flow represents a mere taxonomy of real and obscure events rather than a bona-fide scientific theory, the empirical facts surrounding flow have been rendered unapproachable by the different types of inquiry which could best explain it. That is, since the behavioral or informative events that parallel flow have been ignored or only partially described, this restricts experimental inquiry to methodologies that cannot adequately explain flow, and indeed seem to confirm the description of flow as a mere collection of separate motivational processes. These methodologies are evidenced in Csikszentmihalyi’s own studies on flow.

In addition to utilizing self reports to validate the flow experience, Csikszentmihalyi compared groups of self reports from individuals in different work and social environments. Using an experience sampling method (ESM) (Csikzsentmihalyi 1990) consisting of self reports of individuals that were polled as they engage in daily activities, optimal experience or flow was found to correlate with certain structures of life experience. This between group experimental design distinguished differences between classes of events, such as the general circumstances that were likely to produce flow, but it was nonetheless incapable of delineating the processes that constitute those events. Since flow has been defined as a steady state behavior, it is by definition a transition-less state, and resists decomposition into constituent parts. As we have noted, the impracticality of decomposing such behavior may also reflect the lack of a higher order descriptive language. For example, Aristotle came to the conclusion that heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects by simply observing how classes of heavy objects fall faster than similar groups of lighter objects. His de facto between group design could not account for the behavior of individual objects in time and their behavior when subjected to varying independent variables such as wind resistance, force, acceleration, etc. He was also incapable of employing a within group analysis of how individual objects behave because he had no mathematical language to describe force, acceleration, and inertia. A comparison of how separate groups of individuals respond to different perceptual conditions can only provide general conclusions as to what conditions they will likely respond to, with specific behavioral processes remaining undetermined. This use of separate groups in between subject designs "destroys the continuity of cause and effect that characterizes an irreversible behavioral process…." (Sidman, 1960), and "destroys, confounds, or omits the significant data of moment to moment rate changes in a single organism’s behavior" (Krantz, 1971). A key to a within group trial is the reversibility of a behavioral phenomenon. Reversibility means that a steady state behavior (flow) may be mapped to specific informative patterns or contingencies, and can be recovered over and over again after the subject has been shifted temporarily to other conditions and then returned to those original conditions.

The flow response has never been subjected to a within group analysis because dynamic informative patterns have been generally ignored in the flow literature. The flow experience is elicited by the perceived matching of demand and skill, yet in all theoretical models for flow, variations in this demand/skill equivalence are not mapped in time, nor are they mapped to the differing objective consequences of those real and anticipated variations. Indeed, the individual’s present and anticipated perception of these consequences represents a major independent variable that correlates with significant aspects of the flow response. For example, a perceived matching of demand and skill may occur among rock climbers (Csikszentmihalyi, 1977) and internet users (Novak and Hoffman, 1997), yet the anticipated consequences of a perceived overmatching of demand to skill would be very severe for a rock climber (namely, falling off the mountain), and insignificant for the web surfer. An accounting for the projection or anticipation of the possible results of behavior in time transforms the static demand/skill match into its dynamic representation as a behavioral contingency. That is, climbing a mountain or surfing the net not only gains anticipated results, but performing these skills at a high rate that is characterized by strict attentiveness to these tasks also avoids the consequences that would occur if those behaviors were less attentively performed. In addition, the fact that a climber and surfer also anticipates future correlations between demand and skill, and that these correlations will implicitly vary, suggests that it is not the matching of demand and skill that elicits flow, but the slight anticipated mismatching of demand and skill that will occur in the near future. Finally, the emotional concomitant to this behavior, namely somatic responses such as muscular tension and relaxation may also result in dynamic changes in contingencies (or environment-behavior outcomes), and as we will later note, may be interpreted statically as somatic markers, or dynamically as operant behaviors.

Only a within group design could address why flow is often reported to occur prior to or in anticipation of entering a flow channel, or how flow declines or extinguishes subsequently to performing within that channel. Ultimately, the between group methodology utilized to explore flow reflects the fact that since flow is defined as a steady or transition-less state, it can only be defined by the methodology which in effect confirms that presumption. The procedure acts to sustain a self-fulfilling prophecy, since any results provided by such a procedure cannot disconfirm the multi-process explanation for flow. Ultimately, the between group design used by Csikszentmihalyi is incapable of determining how flow is acquired, how it is sustained, and how it declines. Moreover, self reports are also inadequate indices of flow, since they are not true empirical data, but are interpretations of empirical events that do not become any more definable when averaged. Moreover, these events are understood through their metaphorical representation in similar experiences. Thus we can understand a sense of playfulness, control, and ecstasy since they are analogous to similar experiences that have occurred in the same or different circumstances. Ultimately, the content of flow, namely play, ecstasy, attention, etc. is derived from self reports, and constitute individual processes that are "built into" the perceptual parameters of demand and skill, and are inferred rather than empirical constructs. Unfortunately, this implicit conclusion of a content specific character of the ‘flow channel’ is not supported by modern cognitive science. Lewicki (1998) summarizes this position thusly: "In hardly any experimental procedure do cognitive researchers assume that they can directly learn how humans process information by simply ‘asking’ them to report the contents of the procedural knowledge they follow. No matter how cooperative and well trained our subjects are, they cannot tell us how they go about processing information (e.g. how they encode shapes of objects in three-dimensional space, or how they generate esthetic judgments). This is because subjects not only do not know how they do all those things but have never known it, and they do not have the slightest idea of how they learned all those information-processing algorithms and heuristics that are involved in the cognitive "software" that is indispensable for their psychological functioning. At the same time, there is no doubt that most of this procedural knowledge and skills result from experience and thus that they have been learned at some point." The stimulus presentations in any experiential situation yield much more learning than can be subsequently reported verbally by subject (Greenwald, 1992). Thus, the ESM procedure can only yield partial information at best regarding the content and causes of flow. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the ESM procedure has been greatly overstated since the content of self reports has been incorrectly assumed to be representative of separate processes, with little or no interpretation of the conscious and non-conscious information that is mediated by neural (attention), perceptual (demand/skill match), and somatic (relaxation) events. Because informative variables are barely considered in all flow studies performed utilizing the ESM procedure, the theoretical conclusions of such studies are nearly worthless.

By ignoring the informative variables that are correlated with learning processes, Csikszentmihalyi simply could not derive from these reports any higher order language to thoroughly describe the true empirical correlates to flow, namely the neurological, somatic, and behavioral events that comprise it. The fact that he scarcely defined these events is attributable in large measure to the inadequacy of his method of exploring the flow experience, and not to the unavailability of a better language or the inexplicability of flow. To say that water is wet does not describe water, as an allusion to processes does not describe a process. The subjective language used by the individuals who report flow, even when averaged, is self contradictory, complex, and confusing. However, if the independent variables which correlate with flow are defined abstractly as patterns of information, then flow may be mapped to that information, and easily explained. The emphasis on how behavior dynamically changes with information, in contrast to how it is statically represented by information, represents the guiding principle of behavioristic psychology. Behaviorism’s unique emphasis on information and behavior shifts the emphasis from a study of static steady state behavior to how behavior varies with all values of the independent variable (i.e. information), and how it can be recovered when those values are repeated. As compared to the between group designs which are prevalent in experimental and social psychology, a within group design can trace behavioral processes in time, but is practicable only when dependent and independent variables can be precisely defined and easily observed or reliably inferred. With the availability of higher order descriptive language for behavior, we can now do just that.

The characterization of flow as a holistic experience characterized by attentiveness, playfulness, a unique state of consciousness, and intrinsic satisfaction merely describes a taxonomy of real or imagined processes, and does not allow for the derivation of these processes from any higher order principles. The fact that these processes are therefore implicitly indivisible renders them useless as scientific criteria unless they may be integrated into and derived from a higher descriptive language for behavior which can map all somatic and neurophysiological responses.

If all behavior may ultimately be mapped to information, then flow is no different. Indeed, it may be very simply derived from as ordinary a behavior as walking with a ball in hand. For this mind experiment, let us consider a ball lying in a sports park. The ball of course has color, texture, and shape, and creates a perceptual field through its different points of reference that may be represented by fences, grandstands, or chalk markings on a field. The ball also creates has a variety of possible histories and futures, and this temporal dimension is created through a Bayesian map that can be inferred from the facts derived from the situation or one’s personal history. Thus we can perceive different branching histories for the ball, and trace backwards the ball from how it came to rest in the field to how it was manufactured. Similarly, we can perceive different futures for the ball that would project who would likely pick it up and how it could be used in the future. The myriad number of these perceptual ‘facts’ do not enter consciousness, but rather represent latent behavior-environment relationships or expectancies that come into awareness when they are perceived as instrumental in achieving important or salient outcomes. In this case, let us assume that the individual is promised a small loving cup and monetary reward by simply picking up the ball and walking to a goal a few hundred feet away. Walking to the goal achieves the money and a little cup, and behavior is presumably motivated by this extrinsic reward. Because the behavior is otherwise well practiced and unremarkable, he does not consciously appraise the path he is taking, and he can think of other things besides his walk to the goal. Indeed, the task would otherwise be boring or aversive in lieu of any need to mentally rehearse his behavioral options or the implications of the goal event. Now let us complicate the individual’s task by forcing him to avoid or dodge other individuals who are running towards him with the intent of taking the ball away. Now, the ball carrier must simultaneously consider the many running patterns that will allow him to avoid his pursuers. These multiple patterns of information, although otherwise always available or latent, are now salient to him and are actively considered. This increase in the amount of information considered requires a high degree of mental alertness in order to infer optimal choices from the myriad options available. This active survey or appraisal of alternative choices represents the processing of a great number of environment-behavior relationships in time, and thus represents a highly reinforcing situation that is felt as a state of elation or pleasure. The situational requirement of processing multiple informative precepts in a task environment is called a ‘game’, and because this information is mediated by behavior rather than a discrete physical object, this process of cognitive selection becomes intrinsically desirable or rewarding. If the individual must choose his running pattern within some time constraint, he must therefore process more information in time, and the behavior will become more narrowly focused and more reinforcing as that time constraint narrows. If this time constraint is too narrow, the demands of the situation will be perceived to overmatch his perceived skills, active cognitive appraisal will become less useful, and muscular tension will occur. This tension or anxiety will promote the quick and crude decision making that will allow the individual to escape the situation or make decisions more rapidly (Williams et al. 1988). In other words, anxiety may occur and detract value from his content of the current precepts he is appraising. If some of those precepts were extraneous to his appraisal of the proper running moves, such as a momentary reverie about a personal relationship, then anxiety will increase his cognitive effectiveness by eliminating extraneous thoughts and sharpening his focus on the precepts relating to running patterns. If however no extraneous thoughts existed, then anxiety would reinforce choices that are less optimal, and the effectiveness of his behavior will decline. If the present and anticipated demands of the situation briefly and slightly under or over matched his perceived skills, this pattern of small and momentary variances may otherwise signal momentary inattentiveness or anxiety, either of which will be detrimental to performance. It is hypothesized that in such a situation relaxation would be elicited instead, and act as a somatic marker to keep the individual on his course of action rather than diverting him from it, and would be incompatible with or countercondition any anxiety elicited by intermittent or anticipated variances in the perceived matching of demand and skill. Finally, the intensity of this relaxation response will be scalable with the perceived importance of the reinforcing event. Thus it would be predicted that the ball carrier will find the experience more pleasurable if the stakes for winning were much higher. It is this combination of a highly reinforcing state and a varying intensity of the somatic marker of relaxation that is interpreted as a flow response.

Flow represents the performance of a highly reinforcing behavior that is defined and sustained through a sensitivity to its perceptual content and the pleasant somatic (relaxation) and neurological states that accentuate the importance of that content. That is, flow represents the combined feeling of relaxation, the neurological activity that parallels attentive alertness, and the near simultaneous processing of multiple chains of similar information. Moreover, the separate motivating processes or constructs that have been hypothesized to constitute flow may be derived from the combinatorial aspects of the perceptual, behavioral, and neurological events that comprise flow, and prove to be mere subsets of empirical events. Thus play represents merely the rapidly successive perception of salient patterns of information, and attention, arousal, or involvement represents the homogeneity of these patterns plus alertness. A sense of control denotes the ability to correctly choose fitting patterns of information, and the ‘autotelic’ (Csikzsentmihalyi 1991) or self reinforcing aspect of intrinsically motivating flow states is due to abstract rather than discrete perceptual markers. Skill represents the class of responses an individual may call upon to achieve a goal, and challenge represents the consequences that may occur if those responses are not performed in a certain form and timeliness. Finally, the static matching of skill and challenge can be dynamically represented as informative dependencies or contingencies, and the special state of consciousness in flow represents the repeatedly reconstructed biological and perceptual state that comprises these events (Damasio, 1994).

The description of a behavioral event is coextensive with a description of the cognitive state that parallels those events, and an empirical as opposed to common sense analysis merely provides a more thorough description of those events that represents their dynamic and temporal as opposed to static and timeless qualities. Thus a baseball in mid flight causes the movements of the outfielder who will catch it, yet an empirical explanation of an outfielder’s behavior does not attribute that behavior to a reaction to the stimulus event of a ball momentarily frozen in space, but rather to his unconscious appraisal of its momentum, direction, and speed. Similarly, the mere sight of a lion does not cause a sudden urge to run away, but rather is dependent upon an appraisal of the lion’s intent, distance from us, and direction of movement, and our own estimate of whether running is the most effective means to make our escape. Moreover, the fact that other concurrent neural, somatic and visceral responses (e.g. attentional arousal, muscular tension, hormonal reactions, etc.) are also initiated and sustained by similar cognitive appraisals as well as mediate cognitions demonstrates that seemingly simple behavioral phenomena may only be understood by decomposing them into the respective informative events that are mediated by the mind and the body proper. The fact that all behavioral and emotional events can be decomposed into patterns of information mediated by the varying inputs of perceptual, musculoskeletel, visceral, or neurological events renders the explanatory power of undifferentiated global definitions of such events of marginal utility. The concept of ‘stress’ for example represents a cognitive appraisal of a situation that parallels various permutations and degrees of muscular, hormonal, and neurological reactions. Thus a stressful event, if undefined, may have a score of very different meanings, and thus mean little or nothing at all.

To illustrate, stress may represent a challenging or demanding event that evokes no concomitant physiological response, save for a heightened attentiveness, or that appraisal may seem automatic or reflexive, as in a ‘flight or fight’ response, and elicit hormonal, visceral, and muscular reactions. Finally, that appraisal may be deliberative or conscious, and initially elicit mainly muscular reactions, as when a student becomes tense in anticipation of a final exam. Although information is at the root of the many different responses that may be termed stress, that information may nonetheless be mediated by different neural structures that prime an individual to rapid and more deliberative responses. Thus the fear or startle reactions that comprise the flight or fight response occur through the intermediation of mid brain structures such as the amygdala that are sensitive to gross aspects of a stimulus, such as novelty, shape, and movement (Ledoux, 1996), whereas the muscular tension characteristic of the workaday demands of life occur with relatively less rapidity, and are elicited by abstract perceptual events that are assembled by higher cortical brain structures, and may be mapped to environmental contingencies.

The elimination of false process distinctions between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and the innumerable subprocesses such as flow, stress, play, etc. which comprise them moves an analysis of behavior from mere compilations of poorly defined processes to information itself. The use of information as the common denominator for overt and covert behavior allows for the better understanding of behavioral situations and outcomes, and provides for better and more parsimonious procedures for the control of behavior. The practical implications herald a potential recasting of the Babel of conflicting paradigms that represent the subject matters of social psychology, humanistic psychology, psychotherapy, etc. into a far more parsimonious model that embodies a common language for behavior that all psychologists may share. The ability to decompose behavior into various physical modalities that mediate information ultimately forces psychologists to talk to rather than past each other, and ultimately resolves perennial debates through the precise definition of terms. As importantly, the move to informative rather than process distinctions permits testable hypotheses and practical procedures, and allows for the decisive refutation of hypotheses. The ability of a theory to be decisively falsified (Popper, 1959) distinguishes good theories from bad, and allows for the resolution of many theoretical problems that are otherwise impossible to resolve. Thus we have noted that theories explaining the flow response are essentially unfalsifiable because they are barren of significant testable conclusions, since they rest on the ever shifting terminology and meaning of self reports.

In particular, an information processing or expectancy theory for the flow experience provides testable procedures that permit the derivation of new and powerful procedures for self control. Besides the theoretical description of flow, its practical implications are the useful procedures which may be derived from the flow experience. Crucial to the construction of such procedures is an analysis of how flow may occur independently of the perceptual setting (i.e., demand/skill match) which elicits it. As has been noted, no studies have been performed to explore how flow declines after its sustaining perceptual parameters have ceased. Logically, it would be predicted that the emotional components (relaxation, arousal) of flow would abruptly end. But evidence from self reports and neuro-psychology demonstrates this is very likely not the case.

For example, for individuals who experience similar meditative states, relaxation does not cease, but often continues for quite some time. This emotional trait effect (Goleman and Schwartz, 1976) describes the continuing presence of relaxation subsequently to the cessation of the circumstances that originally created that relaxation. The trait of relaxation refers to the continuation of a relaxed state without conscious awareness or intervention, or in other words sustained by nonconscious processes. However, the nonconscious processes that sustain relaxation, if ultimately referred to information, must reflect the recreation of the proprioceptive stimuli that constitute the feeling of relaxation, and the recreation of the perceptual set which elicited relaxation. That is, relaxation may be evoked through the nonconscious elicitation of relaxation due to one’s being sensitized towards the somatic events that comprise it, or by recreating the stimulus events or patterns of events that elicit and sustain relaxation. These events constitute the emotional memory of an event, and will decline in their evocative potential in time as an inverse function of the duration, intensity, and value of the emotional event. Thus the anxiety attending a traumatic event will likely be sustained far longer subsequently to that event than a mildly stressful event.

Finally, the greater number of stimuli that are associated with a response, the more likely that any given environment will contain some of those stimuli, and hence the response will reoccur and/or persist. This ‘over-expectation’ effect, or behavioral momentum (Nevin, 1992) would assign a discriminative function to otherwise neutral stimuli that have been associated with the response. Thus, the continuation of an emotional response long after its proximal causes have ceased may be attributed to remaining in the original environmental setting (office, laboratory) of that response.

This analysis becomes a bit more complicated when situations that elicit the sustained release of dopamine are considered. The positive affect caused by unexpected rewards has been attributed to the release of the neuromodulator dopamine, yet dopamine release continues long after dopamine cells have stopped firing (Ashby, Isen, and Turken, 1999). Although dopamine release has been noted to occur up to thirty minutes after the stimulation of dopaminergic systems, it remains unclear how emotional memory or behavioral momentum may facilitate or inhibit the degree and persistence of the release of dopamine over time.

It is important to understand that the evocative power of memory is not due to the decay of a memory trace, but to incompatible information available which elicits incompatible response, or acts as a signal for no response. Thus, an individual will more likely continue to be anxious if he remains in the physical context of that anxiety (e.g. the scene of a crime, accident, etc.) than if he was removed to a neutral location that signaled no danger. Indeed, if the individual was confronted with some cue that reminded him of the original event, such as a memento of a romantic evening, the emotional memory (including of course the emotion it signifies) of that evening may also be recalled. Finally, these memories may be rapidly recovered when an individual anticipates the imminent recreation of the emotional event. These ‘as-if’ emotional memories (Damasio, 1994) represent a preparatory response that enables an individual to rehearse all components, including emotional components, of a response prior to revisiting the context which will directly elicit that response. Furthermore, the rehearsal of these stimulus compounds, which includes emotion, is equivalent to a reinforcing event (Davis and Doogan, 1988), and provides survival value by fixing in memory important patterns of information, and preparing the individual for imminent action.

As has been noted, the ‘flow theory’ as elucidated by Csikszentmihalyi is not a true scientific theory, since it contains severe difficulties in its logical syntax and semantics. In addition, because Csikszentmihalyi imports meaning through his ample use of metaphor, he succeeds in capturing only the phenomenological reality of the experience. Just as one may in turn explain ‘green’ as a property that inheres in things in the world and on the neural level a multiplace interactional property, the phenomenological and neural levels of understanding provide two different modes of understanding. The first is in terms of everyday experience and the second is in scientific terms (Lakoff, 1999). The confusion occurs when the flow theory is assumed to represent a science, when it does not.

As conceptualized by Csikszentmihalyi, the flow theory does not suggest any testable hypotheses that can verify what flow is or how it can be manipulated. However, if a significant dependent measure of flow is alertness and relaxation, and if both can be mapped to dynamic patterns of information that correspond to a demand/skill match and may be grounded to actual neural events, then a theoretical model for flow can be derived, along with valuable procedures for behavioral control. As is generally accepted, a feeling of ecstasy, calm, pleasure, etc. is often elicited when an individual performs some important task that continually tests him to the limit of his capabilities. This demand/skill match represents merely a behavioral contingency that engages one’s entire perceptual resources, and is otherwise represented by a high volatility in perceptual discrimination since the individual must constantly shift between multiple salient precepts. This high level of involvement finds a neural correlate in a high level of information processing which is felt as a high alertness or a state of elation. The more salient the task, the greater will be the number of attributes of that task that must be attended to, and hence the more accentuated will be the activity of midbrain dopamine systems. Ironically, Csikszentmihalyi was correct with his identification of flow with focused attention. His error was in defining attention in literary metaphor rather than grounding it in actual neural processes. The flow response is a discrete event because it’s metaphors are discrete (psychic energy, order in consciousness). But as defined as an actual neural process, flow becomes an indiscrete event, and becomes more pleasurable or intense as the relative salience and number of cognitive precepts increase in time. Thus, attention given to moderately unsalient perceptual events (e.g. driving a car) will be less pleasurable than events that have high salience (e.g. playing an ‘addictive video’ game, watching an engrossing movie). The latter in turn will be less pleasurable than events that have an extraordinarily high salience (mountain climbing, performing surgery). The scalability of this pleasurable effect is due to the increase in activation of dopamine mid brain systems. The more activation of these systems, the more intense the pleasure.

Secondly, along with the pleasurable sensation accompanying focussed alertness, it is hypothesized that relaxation also will occur, and will also scale with the level of salience of attended perceptual events. As the presence of dopamine moderates alertness and through its hedonic quality signifies value, relaxation responses perform much the same function. Relaxation, as a somatic marker, will also signify the value of the cognitive precepts is parallels, help fix attention on those precepts, and of course will be felt as a pleasurable emotion. The degree of relaxation will also scale with the importance of the task.

Flow does not represent a special state, but is rather a category reserved for a particular aggregation of unremarkable perceptual, behavioral, and neurological events. However, the elements that are mundane when considered separately combine to create an emergent or holistic experience which is optimally rewarding and unique. As with the stuff of life itself, the components of flow are ultimately nothing special or mysterious. Indeed, the very aura of mystery that has long surrounded the components of flow has obscured the practical and philosophical implications of the flow experience.

The psychology of flow and the optimal experience it embodies represent in reality the search for the factors in life that combine to reinforce optimally, and these factors ultimately derive from elemental sensitivities that derive from our evolutionary past. If behavior is best defined through the abstract language of information as guided by nativistic sensitivities, then our values may be defined as abstractly, and value becomes denoted not in objects, but in information. The implications of flow range in a continuum from the practical procedures and innate preferences that guide the construction of individual behavior to the formation of social groups and the design of cultures. But to illustrate these implications, let us return to our mind experiment.

When we left our ball carrier, his effort to reach the other end of the field was motivated by a monetary reward and a loving cup. However, the relatively insignificant aspect of a loving cup in hand gains greater currency if there was a stadium audience that voiced approval if the ball carrier succeeded in his attempt to reach his goal. The cup signifies the expectancy that would reflect his indirect control over the behavior of others, and his rehearsal of this precept and its many offshoots would therefore be very reinforcing. Moreover, after the game has finished, the loving cup acts a perceptual marker to elicit the memories of his success, and continues to reinforce, even though the game occurred in the past. The game is very reinforcing because of information that is created virtually, and this information may be suggested by memory and through the memories elicited by the presence of a physical object. The non-material basis of reinforcement implies that reinforcers must be judged in terms of how they mediate information, and not through their physical basis. This indiscrete aspect of reinforcing events is further extended by the fact that perceptual markers for information may continue to elicit memories of past information, and this adds to their ultimate value. Thus, the ball carrier would find it more reinforcing to win his prize in an arena of real people that provides recurring informative value than to repeat the same experience with a virtual audience (such as in a video game) that has the mere semblance of meaning.

The implication of modern learning theory is that behavior is dependent upon the perception of patterns of information that can be reduced to a perceptual geometry, and that the type of information that is selected is chosen due to a biologic sensitivity towards stimulus patterns and events that have a rudimentary survival value. This value in turn is ultimately chosen by natural selection. Events are valued in proportion to the type and amount of information they mediate in time, yet the physical properties of those events serve as mere markers for value rather than as intrinsic possessors of value. That is, value can be denominated in checkers and stamp collecting just as well as it can be measured in a dictatorial power over people.

The native ability to perceive causal relationships that reflect personal control has been accompanied by a tendency to select such information because of its intrinsic survival value. Unlike the specific sensitivities towards food, drink, and sex that translate into behaviors that provide individual benefit, rudimentary sensitivities have general and not specific survival value, and may weigh against the survival of individuals, but yet be selected because of the value it provides to the group. Hence whole armies can march to their deaths for God and country, yet their demise has personal meaning and value that is denoted in the appraisal of other people who continue to survive. Thus individuals who have highly developed ‘senses’ of honor, justice, courage, etc. simply have the ability to model the minds of other people and how they regard or would regard one’s behavior. This empathic quality reflects the ability to model the intentions of other people and the emotions that parallel them. For example, an athlete who is encouraged by a roaring crowd not only understands what is in their minds but also can model or reflect their feelings. His awareness of his surroundings reaches a culmination in his knowledge of and a resulting feeling for others. Therefore, an empathic individual not only has a greater insight into the interpersonal implications of his actions, but he also processes more information and is more reinforced than an individual who is less or non-empathic. Empathy improves decision making because it provides reliable information as to the cognitive states of others, but also our resulting behavior is determined or reinforced by an estimate of those states. Moreover, this estimation does not and often will not result in any change in the behavior of other people, and behavior can be maintained through the virtual rather than actual reflection of the behavior of others.

Reinforcers are specific to the quality of the information rather than the aspect of the medium that signifies or transmits that information, and are also specific to our capability to model causality in terms of future events and in terms of the future behavior of others. In time, the more positive information that can be mediated by the greater number of events, whether those events represent physical objects or the mind-sets of other people, the more reinforcing or rewarding will one’s life be. Thus the meaning in life represents the continuous creation of value that is sustained through our sensitivities to specific types of information and by our ability to model the present and future outcomes in our physical world and in the mental worlds of other people.

If reinforcers are information specific, then the progress and value of cultures are judged by the type and amount of information that is mediated by its artistic and social institutions. Complex cultural artifacts such as classical music and literature, representational art, classic and folk dance, complex games (e.g. chess, football) etc. mediate more information than simpler forms of music, art, dance, and sport, and are therefore potentially more reinforcing. Moreover, the individual possession of knowledge of these genres becomes a medium of exchange between other people. Thus, the more people have the capability and ease to communicate common interests, and in particular about complex things, the more they will be reinforcing to each other. Finally, the advancement through cultural design of multiple interests shared in common increases social interaction between all people, and the resulting ability to empathize with more people eliminates social and class distinctions.

The object of cultural design is not a continuous advance in material progress, for social as opposed to practical meaning is not intrinsic to better cars or better mousetraps, but is rather imposed upon them by the manner that they influence the behavior of other people. Indeed, meaning can be mediated by more portable, accessible, and economical objects than the material objects that we are continually enticed to buy through the advertising media. As social reinforcers, castles in the sky can be just as real as castles on land, yet are insignificant in cost and may be possessed universally. Ultimately the scientific design of cultures reflects values and goals that promote idealized values that all people share, and these are the exaltation of art, science, and sport, along with a cultivation of universal empathy. The results of science is not the often feared diminishment of value, but rather the recognition of the universal biologic values that reach apotheosis in a Mozart, a Shakespeare, and a Christ. Ironically, the best of all possible worlds demands only good friends, good books, and a comfortable physical environment in which to enjoy them.

The postulation of separate motivating processes implies that such processes are incommensurate, and cannot be translated into one another or be practically derived from higher order principles. If motivating processes can only refer to a literal bundle of nerves rather than to a unitary set of principles, then the impracticality of referring separate motivational processes to separate neural structures condemns psychology to forever define mental processes in terms of an ever growing and convoluted list of discrete metaphorical motivational states, since it cannot derive them from a set of principles that represent the elementary conscious and non-conscious information that is dynamically mediated by somatic, perceptual, and neurological events. In social and humanistic psychology, the persistent refusal to systematically account for the rudimentary patterns of information that underlie behavior has resulted in a massive corpus of confounding, confusing, and redundant research and theory that is described not in precise logical terms, but in the tonnage of an endless train of journalistic jargon.

The philosophical lineage of this multi-process view of human nature derives from Rene Descartes, who rejected a monistic view of nature in favor of dualistic split of human nature that posed a separate seat of reason and of emotion. However, as a principle of science, this dualism was inherently unscientific because the separate terms were unconvertible and irreducible. In the physical sciences the postulation of separate forces are recognized as mere temporary waypoints until higher order principles are discovered, and its progress has always been measured by the derivation of ever simpler governing principles. Cartesian philosophy effectively put arbitrary limits to this process, and preserved a dualism that has assumed the modern guise of an ever increasing list of insubstantial motivating forces that has made much of modern psychology unreadable, incomprehensible, and useless. In contrast to the obfuscating principles that have proven devastating to the science of psychology, higher order principles may now be advanced that can describe all of the facts of behavior. This monistic viewpoint assumes that all of nature, including human nature, derives from one substance, and may be described by mathematical law. It is built upon an empirical methodology that describes reliably recorded facts, and does not jump to abstractions or universals. Through experiment and observation, it recognizes that all human behavior, including emotion, may be described through a perceptual geometry, and may be derived from first principles. Finally, it recognizes the native values that our biologic heritage impels us to pursue, and that the purpose of life is to preserve value.

Remarkably, these principles are not new, and were advanced by a contemporary and student of Descartes who deduced a perceptual geometry for behavior over two hundred years before the birth of experimental psychology. His recognition that biologic value is essential to human life led him to believe that any philosophy must lead to the embrace of melioristic principles. To this end Baruch de Spinoza developed a philosophy built upon a rigorously deductive logic that explained the facts of his experience and the purpose that experience serves, and named it ‘The Ethics.’ The description of behavior begins in physiology, advances to psychology, and ends in philosophy. The unification of all knowledge hinges ultimately on what is a reinforcing event, or what is value. From that knowledge, all psychology may be derived.

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