There's actually a huge body of psychological research on what, exactly, creates and boosts flow. In a nutshell, it happens when an individual with high skill meets a problem that they find subjectively challenging, while working with a certain degree of autonomy. There are also personality types that can slip in to flow states more easily (this is known as the autotelic personality, though research on this is a bit sketchy), and there's some evidence to show that flow can be artificially induced through a process called trans-cranial direct current stimulation. Google Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi if you're interested, he's spearheaded a lot of the research on this stuff.
I wrote a pretty significant research paper about this stuff once upon a time... one of these days, I should sit down and write up a proper blog post on it.
It was just a lit review - nothing original. I did it as a final for an upper level Personality Psych course in college; the paper itself focused mostly on the autotelic personality and the tDCS 'artificial flow' stuff.
Comments
There's actually a huge body of psychological research on what, exactly, creates and boosts flow. In a nutshell, it happens when an individual with high skill meets a problem that they find subjectively challenging, while working with a certain degree of autonomy. There are also personality types that can slip in to flow states more easily (this is known as the autotelic personality, though research on this is a bit sketchy), and there's some evidence to show that flow can be artificially induced through a process called trans-cranial direct current stimulation. Google Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi if you're interested, he's spearheaded a lot of the research on this stuff.
I wrote a pretty significant research paper about this stuff once upon a time... one of these days, I should sit down and write up a proper blog post on it.
I'd love to see that post and the research behind it. Where were you when did this research?
It was just a lit review - nothing original. I did it as a final for an upper level Personality Psych course in college; the paper itself focused mostly on the autotelic personality and the tDCS 'artificial flow' stuff.