Humans have a larger neocortex compared to other mammals, which gives them more storage, working memory, and computational potential than other animals.
The curses of the human condition are anxiety and regret, the conditions that render people unable to engage in the present moment. The former is characterised as being stuck in the future psychologically, and the latter is being stuck in the past. Since neither the future or the past can be changed by obsessive thoughts in the present, these psychological conditions are a recipe for unhappiness, because happiness can only ever happen in the present moment, which is lost.
What characterises flow state and mindfulness is total absorption in the present moment.
What if animals that are not burdened by human quantities of neocortex, such as insects and canines, which exist in the present moment, are actually experiencing flow and mindfulness?
The spider weaves its web in perfect concentration, not stopping to contemplate, plan, or exercise executive judgement. Might not that be akin to flow?
The dog and the cat and the cow and the horse, given physical comfort, do not seem to worry about the future or regret the past. Might they not be blessed with a form of mindfulness that humans in the rat race rarely manage to experience?
And it’s the thirst for dodging those thoughts which leads a lot of us into passions, games, videogames and even workaholism, which then becomes its own condition. The addiction of investing in work in order to avoid thinking about the painful aspects of life.
hi i mostly liked your thought trail there, but if you've ever adopted a shelter dog they most definitely regret the past (they clearly experience nightmares)
A relative got a dog from what was obviously an unqualified breeder. The dog was always anxious, distressed, waiting at the window. One day I pet him on the back without making sure he heard me coming. He nipped me in panic, then ran and hid. It was obvious he thought I was going to hit him for it. And since I would never, that must have been from a past experience.
I think he was actually dissociating since I sat there with him for about 10 minutes and he didn't move at all, just stared off into a wall. He finally snapped out of it and accepted one (1) headpat.
Most dog trainers do most of their useful training on the dog owner, not the dog. The trainer gives the owner guidance and strategies for conditioning out these undesirable behaviors and the owner should continue training the dog for the duration of their relationship.
There are classical conditioning strategies which can reduce stress/anxiety of the dog, increase the dog’s socialization / reduce reactivity to stimuli in the environment (like and unexpected touch), and increase the bond between dog and human. Obviously the more severe the trauma, the longer it takes to counter condition the stress response.
That's a thoughtful, considered observation, that adds plenty to this discussion. Your comment is a positive exemplar of the application of the human neocortex.
I think trauma is different. It’s more like scar tissue in your psyche, caused by a specific event but affecting the shape of your thoughts and inclinations in general. Regret is conscious reflection on past mistakes, imagining how things could have been, etc. A bad experience can lead to regret, or trauma, or both, or neither.
My dog (who spent about 3 months in a shelter) sometimes "talks in his sleep", making sounds like he is scared/stressed about something. Other times he makes happier sounds while sleeping. It seems pretty clear that he's experiencing a range of emotions in his dreams, but I don't think it necessarily means reliving specific events.
> The spider weaves its web in perfect concentration
I don't think you can equate the mental capabilities of a human in flow state with a spider following a set of instincts (hard-wired neural processes / behaviours). I'm not aware of any evidence that spiders can engage in any abstract thoughts about their web.
I wouldn’t equate them either, but its a nice comparison. I like the idea that my cat is constantly in a flow except when hungry haha.
Flow state comes about when skill and challenge are maximized. There is an element of perception of both those axis which plays into it. Since we don’t know what the perceptions of non humans are its going to be hard to know if they experience any type of flow.
> I like the idea that my cat is constantly in a flow except when hungry haha.
Alternatively, one could argue that 'sprint' predators like cheetah and Peregrine falcons are in flow-state when hunting (i.e. hungry) and in a non-flow state when resting between hunts / kills. Considering Peregrines, outside breeding season, they might only spend a few minutes flying per day and are then happy to perch on a secluded branch until they need to venture out again for their next kill. If there is a flow/non-flow distinction (and you are right, we may never know), I'd conjecture that flow starts when hunger exceeds a certain threshold and finishes when the bird is fed.
Edit: I work with different types of raptors and can confirm that they vary significantly in their mental capabilities. Owls have relatively small brains because their skulls are full of eye and they are not easily trainable, compared with say a Caracara [0], which to my mind is the bird equivalent of a racoon: smart and pesky. I can imagine a Caracara having a greater flow/non-flow distinction compared with an Owl which is much more instinct-driven.
> Flow state comes about when skill and challenge are maximized.
This is why I so rarely experience flow state. Programming is largely about learning new things. Whether its new programming languages, new libraries, new platforms, new build tools, or even just new software domains.
I've been a developer for close to 15 years and the learning never stops. It's a rare week / month where I get to just relax and code something that I've done before, or, at least have enough tangential skill to enter into a flow state where I'm not constantly looking up documentation, trying things, pouring over logs, trying more things, etc.
Sounds great, but your reasoning is not actually based in a solid scientific basis. It "kinda makes sense", sure, but is more anthropocentric than based on evidence.
For the longest time people defined humans as "we're the only animals who can use tools; we're special". Nonsense, there are countless examples in the animal kingdom of tool use. "Oh but we're the only ones who can _make_ tools." Also nonsense. "Oh but only we can think ahead strategically!" Nonsense. "Only we have feelings". Nope.
The whole "only we have anxiety and regret" is in the same ballpark. It's a claim without evidence. The connection with the neocortex is less clear than you made it sound, and the conclusion doesn't even hold up. Dolphins have a larger neocortical area. Not just by a bit, by over 50%!
So let's keep the whole "humans are the only animals who ..." out of this which only serves to make us feel special. (And by extension is mainly used to exploit nature without regret. Whole religions are based on the concept of us being special and justifying atrocities against thousands of species.)
Honestly it's absurd to think that only humans can experience flow. (Even disregarding that we don't seem to have a common definition of that state anyway, against which such claims could be tested.)
My cat absolutely gets into a flow state when something triggers her to groom herself fully. Other than significant external pressure to stop (getting picked up and/or prevented from grooming) she will persist in grooming even if it isn't herself: my arm if I picked her up, a blanket if I relocate her, the air for a few seconds until she breaks out of the "loop".
> Since neither the future or the past can be changed by obsessive thoughts in the present...
Is this really true, though?
The past certainly cannot be changed, but the future is not set in stone. If I spend my time obsessively thinking about what kind of person I want to be, what kind of career I want to have, or what sort of companion I want to have in life, then it seems reasonable that these thoughts will lead me to pursue different courses of action than I would have pursued had I _not_ spent all this time in such ruminations. And, ideally, such thoughts should lead to better future outcomes, if the actions born from such thoughts are well-reasoned. Granted, this may not necessarily be the case in all circumstances, and an excess in obsessions may potentially lead to detrimental outcomes. But I think our ability to feel anxiety can be a blessing, not just a curse, when we work through our anxieties carefully and productively.
For me the dividing line is in how productive the thought is. If the thought leads to new understanding and behavioral change, I'd call neither regret nor worry obsessive.
That said, there's a bit of a definitional trick being played here by most people. In the just-released "The Tomorrow War", one character is portrayed as irritatingly obsessive about a science topic. Their detailed knowledge turns out to be useful later, at which point respect for him is portrayed. The judgment criteria shift in retrospect, even though the behavior is the same.
A darker example comes from "Maus", a memoir about a Jew who barely escaped Nazi Germany. His pre-escape behavior in abstract could easily be described as obsessively worried. But in practice, the ones who were more "reasonable" went into the ovens.
My takeaway from this is that apparently maladaptive behavior is often just adaptive to a different environment. That's certainly my experience.
I think your comment made something click and it may just change my life. I'll try stick to being mindful of what you said:
> The curses of the human condition are anxiety and regret, the conditions that render people unable to engage in the present moment. The former is characterised as being stuck in the future psychologically, and the latter is being stuck in the past. Since neither the future or the past can be changed by obsessive thoughts in the present, these psychological conditions are a recipe for unhappiness, because happiness can only ever happen in the present moment, which is lost.
Hopefully it will have a positive effect on how I approach things, since anxiety/regret are the main things that affect my work, I believe.
We'll see.
In any case, even if there's no noticeable effect in the near future, I'm very happy I stumbled across your comment. Thank you very much!
If you think this is life-changing (and it is), you should definitely learn more about Buddhism. The part you quoted is literally "Buddhism 101" (just look up "Four Noble Truths"). And it goes much deeper than that.
> Humans have a larger neocortex compared to other mammals, which gives them more storage, working memory, and computational potential than other animals.
Computational cognition models are more and more replaced by embodied cognition models. Not only that, "computation-like" functions of human consciousness is by far not limited to the neocortex. Much older parts like cerebellum play a significant role in noise filtering for example. Just like we have adapted our tongues to a new purpose of speaking, we have been adapting the existing information processing machinery to perform higher level cognitive functions. Neocortex is not the add-on consciousness chip.
> The curses of the human condition are anxiety and regret, the conditions that render people unable to engage in the present moment.
I will object to this on the basis of being an overly romantic notion. The preoccupation with future and past is simply requirements for the predictive processing we have to do in order to have any agency in the world. Normally this is fantastically adaptive, and a requirement to fulfill our needs, which I presume is required for what you call happiness. (Not to mention this is not even a human-specific trait). Being genuinely stuck in past or future is the disease state of this otherwise adaptive feature, and because it is an emergent property of a complex adaptive system, it is harder get out of it because it resists that shift.
Which is why one trick interventions like "be in the present" moment are likely to fail to get one out of those states in isolation.
> What characterises flow state and mindfulness is total absorption in the present moment.
We need to expand several notions here. Being in present moment is such a vague metaphor that it barely describes anything. A more apt description would be being in perfect conformity and harmony with the task at hand, being able to dance with it, being able to adapt to the challenges it throws at us. And it brings different criteria for flow state vs mindfulness; in flow state there is usually a sense of dissolving ego boundaries, there is a sense of being one with the task itself. E.g rock climbing. Mindfulness is a more complicated state, because the task at hand is tightly related to the metacognitive state of the person. There is usually much more ego awareness, because the focus is the ego content. The eventual aim is to gain flexibility over the ego content, and being able to shift the opacity of it (i.e. swiftly switching between thinking from "i am thinking this" to actually thinking it, and during that process more fluidly change the "it"). As such, I would agree animals could be in something that resembles the flow state, but can't really do mindfulness.
> The dog and the cat and the cow and the horse, given physical comfort, do not seem to worry about the future or regret the past.
I again find this to be an overly romantic notion. Just like I've mentioned, animals do have a capacity for learning, because it is adaptive to be able to undertake predictive processing. Which makes way to the "worry"s you mention. If you spend time with any animal that has PTSD, you'll immediately realize that they are stuck in a state of predicting harm that doesn't exit. That is an expensive, low precision state and not one of comfort. They can be trained out of their traumas, sometimes more easily than with humans, but they also can't do any of the rational/cognitive interventions that we could do.
Basically you're advocating for a lower state of consciousness because our cognitive machinery can fail more drastically than other animals. I would agree with the second part, but not the first part. We have been developing a plethora of techniques to upkeep our psyches, mindfulness training being one (and remember one intervention alone can't do much with complex adaptive systems), we've been just not good at scaling the know-how over time and people, at least not in comparison to our default state of ignorance.
What's interesting about Flow to me is that on the face of it it's the exact opposite of mindfulness. As a meditation teacher, I've learnt that meditative spaces are those where you are concentrating fully on the moment, and your thoughts in that moment. The specific scientific basis for this is activation of your PNS and suppression of your SNS.
As a musician, I also understand extremely well the Flow state, or "being in the zone" as us muso's call it.
The two states are similarly euphoric and blend many traits, but they seem very different in attention terms. Fascinating stuff.
This is honestly one of the few things I miss having moved into management after coding for the first 12 years of my career. I actually don't miss the coding itself much (though I still do a bit of it as a hobby). But that feeling of working on one problem for hours at a time, wholly absorbed. There really is something amazing about it.
No, you don't feel like you are accomplishing something difficult. I've been on both sides, coding and managing coders. To the extent that the team is doing something difficult, there's often no specific point that is "job done".
When you're coding, there's a specific thing that you're trying to do that gives a certain satisfaction: there are stages of completeness that you hit (eg all the tests pass) which feel like natural checkpoints. Passing them makes you feel good. You struggle with nature, you prevail, you feel good. Before you did your thing it was broken, now it is fixed.
When you're arranging stuff for a team, the actual thing you're doing doesn't provide satisfaction in the same way. Arranging meetings, setting goals, that sort of thing is a softer level of completeness. For one, there's no real failure: the meeting will happen sooner or later, the goals are kinda obvious even though they are vague (grow revenues, make a roadmap). You can't mess this up, so you can't succeed. Yes there are reckonings when you're a manager, but they're not little ones that come every day on a timescale of a few hours.
With flow you need to feel like the thing you're doing is challenging. You need to be strong to break your PB in weightlifting. You need to be smart to fix that bug. There's nothing in powerpointing a slide deck where you are challenging yourself, it's mostly grind.
I'm not the OP but I couldn't agree more with them.
To answer your question... no they don't. Or perhaps very, very rarely. It doesn't make sense to spend hours at a time on any of those tasks, and you can't anyway because someone always needs something from you.
Yes, but, for me, it's no where near the same. When coding, I feel like I'm very heavily leveraging working memory in my brain and, at times, this becomes almost zen like. I don't get this way with project planning.
>He wondered how wealth fit into the happiness equation, but the data suggested money wasn’t the answer; beyond a certain, basic threshold, increases in income hardly affected well-being.
Yet the majority of Earth's population can never reach that certain threshold.
I think people are debating the wrong question. Happiness? Well-being?
It seems to function more like oxygen. You know when you don’t have it and your priorities shift completely to constantly dealing with that. You want an unlimited, self perpetuating supply so that you never think about it.
I read on HN that flow is achieved when work is only upto a certain level of difficulty for you. Flow is achieved because you can create comfortably and still feel like working through a challenge. If it's easier it doesn't feel like a challenge anymore, more difficult and it puts you out of the zone.
Yes, this is the theme of the work by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I have even thought it somewhat similar to the state of mind that Cal Newport tries to promote in his book "Deep Work".
I'm not sure that is universal. I can lose myself in mechanical rote work, or lose myself in technical research, flow doesn't necessarily stop on a switch of focus if the end goal remains in sight.
> But I can remember accessing a state resembling flow only a few times; the vast majority of the hours I spend writing are closer to a grind than a trance. With any project, there are so many variables I can’t predict. Will my sources respond? Does the information I seek exist? Will someone send me a text starting ‘OMG’ to take me away from my focus?
This resonates a lot. I never understood why people in software talk about flow so much. For me completing a challenging task always means oscillating between several pieces of documentation and jumping between various places in the code to understand the interconnections and where the task naturally belongs. There is hardly any flow there, and a lot of decision making.
Then when I want what I'm going to write, it's almost mechanical, I can complete it with various degree of focus, but even when I'm focused, it's definitely closer to "mindfulness" than to "flow" because it lacks challenge - all the challenge was about deciding what and how has to be done.
You can't hack flow. You definitely cannot aim for mindfulness. All these are classic cart-before-the-horse conditions. Such flawed notions may sell books, but they don't resolve inner conflicts.
There's a paradox at the heart of this that is difficult to grasp but is true nonetheless.
Same. Flow always seems easier with certain music. I make no claims as to the rigor used in this paper but since seeing it, I really do think sound is where it's at for getting momentum.
"Optimal Tempo for Groove: Its Relation to Directions of Body Movement and Japanese nori"
I would experience this many times but as I got older it's pretty much gone or I am choosing the wrong activities.
My earliest experience of flow that I recall is when I was maybe 7 years old. We were studying how to tell time on analog clocks. I still recall the feeling of the ah ha! moment. But also during that same class after the "ah ha" I was writing in the activity book. The class had left, I was alone, the teacher had to come shake me to tell me to move along.
Art is also a common way I would experience it. I used to draw and would find that I got into a trance-like state when drawing.
Just losing track of time isn't flow in order to be flow you have to actually create something. You need to accomplish something, some task using your own skill. I know some people with ADHD and they certainly do get into a trance state but often do not accomplish anything. Often the person goes over a task many times or never finishes a task to their satisfaction.
This is going to sound contrarian or skeptical, but I wonder if there's any solid support for "flow" being necessary for creative work. So much of what we believe about the workplace and creativity is just folklore.
Don't get me wrong, it's a great feeling, and if someone in the workplace believes that it helps them work for whatever reason, I'd be supportive of it.
The curses of the human condition are anxiety and regret, the conditions that render people unable to engage in the present moment. The former is characterised as being stuck in the future psychologically, and the latter is being stuck in the past. Since neither the future or the past can be changed by obsessive thoughts in the present, these psychological conditions are a recipe for unhappiness, because happiness can only ever happen in the present moment, which is lost.
What characterises flow state and mindfulness is total absorption in the present moment.
What if animals that are not burdened by human quantities of neocortex, such as insects and canines, which exist in the present moment, are actually experiencing flow and mindfulness?
The spider weaves its web in perfect concentration, not stopping to contemplate, plan, or exercise executive judgement. Might not that be akin to flow?
The dog and the cat and the cow and the horse, given physical comfort, do not seem to worry about the future or regret the past. Might they not be blessed with a form of mindfulness that humans in the rat race rarely manage to experience?