New technologies could unlock the reasons behind the state of mind
Flow has also been associated with a number of longer-term wellbeing outcomes—everything from buffering against burnout at work to buffering against depression to increasing resilience.
To date, most of the research on flow has been psychological, relying on participants’ own reports of how they’re thinking and feeling. While these studies are important, scientists have a lot of questions that purely psychological studies may not be able to answer. Chief among these is: What’s actually happening in the brain when we’re in a state of flow?
But to answer questions about the neurobiology of flow, scientists needed to bring flow from the soccer field or artists’ studio into the lab, which is no mean feat. They had to figure out a task that would reliably induce a flow state that could be performed by average people without any particular expertise.
The task also needed to have adjustable difficulty. If a task is too easy, you probably won’t get into a flow state, Dimitri van der Linden, a behavioral science professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, explained to The Daily Beast. Instead, you’ll be bored, or your mind will wander to other things. But if the task is too hard, you’ll get stressed or frustrated. “At the intermediate level, that’s where flow tends to occur,” he said.
Many researchers are using video games, or gamified versions of tasks regularly used in cognitive neuroscience. This is perhaps unsurprising, as Csikszentmihalyi identified many similarities between play and flow.
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