Know the Flow
I attended a lecture last night on the topic of happiness. If you've delved into the subject before, there are rooms full of books on the topic.
I've always been interested in "flow" experiences, and they are difficult to come by. A friend of mine gets into Flow using Photoshop. I can get into them with music, although they are very brief, and are easily interrupted, not by the Internet, but by the process of craft.
Craft always presents problems, unless what you're doing is routine, in which case boredom would be a factor. Routines may seem like flows but they have open doors to distraction. Driving is a routine, so people think they can multi-task while driving. Craft involves making an object or a result based upon the buzz you've gotten from your shot of Flow.
Someone in the audience posed the question whether video games are flow experiences. Many think they are distracting, but perhaps they are precisely about Flow. Add another two related activities to the video game experience and that might be the perfect recipe for Flow. But you wouldn't necessarily have to play video games to get into that brain state, but it would be interesting to follow the studies of brains on games, similar to brains on music.
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10/15/2024
From the recent book by Daniel Levitin, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord, on the transfer of one skill to another, and they can be near or far transfers:
"There are many cases in which learning one skill transfers to a related skill. For example, learning to play the piano and then applying that knowledge to learning to play the violin, or learning to drive a car with an automatic transmission and then learning to drive a manual transmission, are cases of near transfer. Far transfer is when there is no obvious connection between skills, such as finding that you’re better at auto repair after you’ve learned to solve a Rubik’s Cube puzzle, or that you get better at surgery after learning to juggle. Cases of far transfer are far less common than cases of near transfer, making it all the more striking when we run across them. The early evidence is that music lessons result in far transfer. A small number of experiments with randomized control groups show that playing an instrument leads to enhanced verbal ability many years later, and, more impressively, to lifelong benefits to brain health. In particular, musical instrument training is associated with statistically significant improvements in attentional focus and processing speed in aging adults. The most plausible reason that music lessons and performance could provide all these benefits is because music engages nearly every area of the brain that we have mapped. It is a whole-brain activity—not simply left or right, not simply cortical or subcortical." (p. 236)
