In this short article, I touch on three topics, viz. Flow, Attention, System 1 and 2, and then discuss how they might relate to each other.

Flow. Have your ever lost yourself in your work, so much so that you lost track of time? Being consumed by a task like that, while it can be rare for most people, is a state called Flow [1] (also called getting into the zone). Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, the researcher who recognised and named the psychological concept of flow, describes flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost" [2].

Csíkszentmihályi says that flow can occur when a highly skilled person is performing a highly challenging activity in their skill domain.

People who have experienced flow report that they were completely focused on the task at hand, forgot about themselves, others and the world around them, lost track of time, felt happy and in control, and were creative and productive [3].

Attention. Here’s a fascinating fact from Bob Nease’s “The Power of Fifty Bits” [4]”. We are bombarded by 10 million bits per second. Yet, our conscious mind only has the bandwidth for 50 bits per second. Consequently, the vast majority of the information we are immersed in does not receive our attention. Said another way, our attention is a scarce resource. So, much so that a field of economics, attention economics [5], has emerged to help designers solve information management problems. Powerful evidence of our limited attention resource is the famous Invisible Gorilla experiment. If you have not seen this, do yourself a favour … [6].

System 1 and System 2. In “Thinking, Fast and Slow” [7], Kahneman explains System 1 and System 2. Using useful summary notes found in [8] let’s briefly examine System 1 and 2. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; it operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. It allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it. System 1 runs automatically and System 2 is normally in a comfortable low-effort mode, in which only a fraction of its capacity is engaged. The division of labour between System 1 and System 2 is highly efficient: it minimizes effort and optimizes performance. The defining feature of System 2 is that its operations are effortful, and one of its main characteristics is laziness, a reluctance to invest more effort than appears strictly necessary. Activities requiring attention and skill initially require System 2 but, when practiced often, those skills migrate to System 1. This explains why initially learning to drive at first requires lots of concentration, but after enough practice becomes second nature.

So, what can we make of the relationship, if any, between these three concepts?

At the risk of stating the obvious, my hypothesis is that we can achieve flow because of our limited attention capacity and our ability to largely automate our highly-practiced skills. Going out on a limb here, so I welcome all challenges and feedback. The grounds for my hypothesis are outlined below.

Because we have a limited attention resource, we can only apply conscious attention to one thing at a time, despite the false perception that we can multi-task. A highly challenging context (one of the requirements for flow) requires our full engagement and hence other stuff in the environment is shut out. In other words, all 50 bits of our attention resource are attending to the topic. As such, we lose awareness of all else that is going on around us, including the passing of time.

In a context where we are highly skilled at what we are doing, our capability for performing that activity has migrated, at least partly, to System 1 and then our actions happen automatically and effortlessly.

Why should you care? Well, by all accounts, flow is a wonderful thing. If you want it, then it seems that lots of practice is the path. Lots of practice enables you to develop deep skills. And applying those deep skills in a challenging context is the key to entering a state of flow.

Seems fitting to close with a quote from Csíkszentmihályi: “Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.”

References:

[1] https://zenhabits.net/guide-to-achieving-flow-and-happiness-in-your-work/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi

[3] http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/nine_steps_to_achieving_flow_in_your_work

[4] “The Power of Fifty Bits”, Bob Nease

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy

[6] http://theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html

[7] “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, Daniel Kahneman

[8] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow,_by_Daniel_Kahneman