Flow

Can people upload the links to where they found their lit reviews for the cyberpsychology CA, really struggling to find any :\

According to Csíkszentmihályi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous, even rapture, while performing a task. Colloquial terms for this or similar mental states include: to be //on the ball//, //in the moment//, //present//, //in the zone//, //in the groove//, or //keeping your head in the game//.
 * Flow** is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.



20 years ago, with an intention to explain happiness, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found Flow, the feeling of complete and energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment. [Debold 2002] Csikszentmihalyi developed a series of theories to help people get into their Flow state. Since then, these theories have been applied to various fields for designing better human interactive experiences. One of his most inspiring achievements in these theories is the definition of the Flow Zone, also known as “the Zone” by the gamers:

In order to maintain a person’s Flow experience, the activity needs to reach a balance between the challenges of the activity and the abilities of the participant. If the challenge is higher than the ability, the activity becomes overwhelming and generates anxiety. If the challenge is lower than the ability, it provokes boredom. Fortunately, human beings have tolerance, there is a fuzzy safe zone where the activity is not too challenging or too boring, and psychic entropies like anxiety and boredom would not occur. [Csikszentmihalyi 1990] Due to the special relationship between challenge and ability, Flow has been used in fields like sports and tutoring. The famous GRE test is a good example of design based on the concept of the Flow Zone. The description of Flow is identical to what a player experiences when totally immersed in a video game. During this experience, the player loses track of time and forgets all external pressures. It is obvious that gamers value video games based on whether or not those games can provide Flow experiences. [Holt 2000] Thus, much research is being done about how to use Flow to evaluate video game experiences. However, there are only a few researchers out there dealing with the actual implementation of Flow inside video games. Methodologies that help game designers to realize and maintain players' Flow experiences are not well defined. [|Video]


 * ===He has looked at many different answers to this question in domains as separate as art, religion, and sport, and in the past as well as the present, and sees that there are many different forms of answer. Indeed he noted there seems to be a need to reinvent or reexpress the answer every couple of generations. He saw the need to find or refind the answer as urgent as people do not seem to know what to do to live happy lives. ===

//"How to live life as a work of art, rather than as a chaotic response to external events..." //
===He started with artists, or with those that were "creating meaning". Many described an "ecstatic state" or a feeling of being outside of what they were creating with their hands. Ecstatic comes from the Latin for "stand to side". Csikszentmihalyi accounted for this feeling of being consciously outside of the creation as due to the psychological limits of consciousness, that at higher levels of consciousness the more mundane aspects become subconscious in order to restrict conscious attention to the number of items it can manage. So a pianist described not noticing the room, his hands, the keys, the score, but rather being conscious of only "being one with the music and expressing emotion". === ===He noted that a major constraint on people enjoying what they are doing is always being conscious of a fear of how they appear to others and what these others might think. Ecstasy includes rising above these constraining concerns of the ego. === ===Csikszentmihalyi concluded that stepping outside of normal daily routines is an essential element of what he was looking for. This might be obtained through diverse routes or activities, such as reading a novel or becoming involved in a film. === ===Csikszentmihalyi has based most of his research on empirical data based on surveying people spontaneously about what the activities they were undertaking and the way they were feeling (along several dimensions) at the time. He used a watch which beeped at random times during each day and required his subjects to immediately complete a standard survey. For many subjects he followed them for one week a year for several years. The research has been undertaken and confirmed in several countries, and now reaches 250,000 surveys. === ===In simple terms the research showed that people were generally unhappy "doing nothing", were generally happy doing things, and generally knew very little about what made them happy. ===

How does it feel to be in "the flow"?
===1. Completely involved, focused, concentrating - with this either due to innate curiosity or as the result of training ===

2. Sense of ecstasy - of being outside everyday reality
===<span style="font-family: 'Arial Narrow','sans-serif'; font-size: 8pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; tabstops: list 36.0pt; text-indent: -18pt;">3. Great inner clarity - knowing what needs to be done and how well it is going === ===<span style="font-family: 'Arial Narrow','sans-serif'; font-size: 8pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; tabstops: list 36.0pt; text-indent: -18pt;">4. Knowing the activity is doable - that the skills are adequate, and neither anxious or bored === ===<span style="font-family: 'Arial Narrow','sans-serif'; font-size: 8pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; tabstops: list 36.0pt; text-indent: -18pt;">5. Sense of serenity - no worries about self, feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of ego - afterwards feeling of transcending ego in ways not thought possible === ===<span style="font-family: 'Arial Narrow','sans-serif'; font-size: 8pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; tabstops: list 36.0pt; text-indent: -18pt;">6. Timeliness - thoroughly focused on present, don't notice time passing === ===<span style="font-family: 'Arial Narrow','sans-serif'; font-size: 8pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt; tabstops: list 36.0pt; text-indent: -18pt;">7. Intrinsic motivation - whatever produces "flow" becomes its own reward === || Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Philosophical Theories on Time
We use our concept of time to place events in sequence one after the other, to compare how long an event lasts, and to tell when an event occurs. These are three key features of time. Yet despite 2,500 years of investigating time, many issues about it are unresolved. Here is a short list in no particular order of the most important ones: What time actually //is//; Whether time exists when nothing is changing; What kinds of time travel are possible; Why time has an arrow; Whether the future and past are as real as the present; How to analyze the metaphor of time’s flow; Whether future time will be infinite; Whether there was time before the Big Bang event; Whether tensed or tenseless concepts are semantically basic; What the proper formalism or logic is for capturing the special role that time plays in reasoning; What neural mechanisms account for our experience of time; Why there isn’t more than one dimension of time; and Whether there is a timeless nature beyond spacetime. Physical time is public time, the time that clocks are designed to measure. Psychological time or phenomenological time is private time. It is perhaps best understood as awareness of physical time. Psychological time passes relatively swiftly for us while we are enjoying an activity, but it slows dramatically if we are waiting anxiously for the water to boil on the stove. The slowness is probably due to focusing our attention on short intervals of physical time. Meanwhile, the clock by the stove is measuring physical time and is not affected by anybody’s awareness. Some philosophers claim that psychological time is completely transcended in the mental state calle nirvana because psychological time slows to a complete stop.

“It is as if we were floating on a river, carried by the current past the manifold of events which is spread out timelessly on the bank,” said one philosopher trying to capture time’s flow with a helpful metaphor. Santayana offered another: “The essence of nowness runs like fire along the fuse of time.” The philosopher’s goal is to clarify the idea of time’s flow, the passage of time. Everyone agrees that time //appears// to flow, but not everyone agrees that it actually does. There are two categories of theories of time’s flow. The first, and most popular among physicists, is that the flow is an illusion, the product of a faulty metaphor. Time exists, things change, but time does not flow objectively. There may well be some objective feature of our brains that causes us to //believe// we are experiencing a flow of time, but the flow itself is not objective. It is as subjective as the feeling that there is a here as opposed to a there. This kind of theory is often characterized as a “myth-of-passage” theory. It is more likely to be adopted by those who believe McTaggart’s B-series is more fundamental than his A-series. The second category of theories of time’s flow are the dynamic theories of time, which imply that the flow is objective, a feature of our mind-independent reality that is to be found in, say, today scientific laws, or, if it has been missed there, then in future scientific laws. A dynamic theory is closer to common sense, and has historically been the more popular theory among philosophers.

One dynamic theory implies that the flow is a matter of events changing from being indeterminate in the future to being determinate in the present and past. Time’s flow is really events //becoming// determinate, so dynamic theorists speak of time’s flow as “temporal becoming.” A second dynamic theory implies that the flow is a matter of events changing from being future, to being present, to being past. This is the kind of flow associated with McTaggart’s A-series of events. Opponents of these two dynamic theories complain that when events change in these senses, the change is not a real change in the event’s essential, intrinsic properties, but only in the event’s relationship to the observer. For example, saying the death of Queen Anne is an event that changes from present to past is no more of a real change in the event than saying her death changed from being approved of to being disapproved of. This //extrinsic// change in approval does not count as a real change in her death, and neither does the so-called second-order change from present to past or from indeterminate to determinate. Attacking the notion of time’s flow in this manner, Grünbaum said: “Events simply are or occur…but they do not ‘advance’ into a pre-existing frame called ‘time.’ … An event does not move and neither do any of its relations.”

A third dynamic theory says time’s flow is the coming into existence of facts, the actualization of new states of affairs, but unlike the first dynamic theory there is no commitment to events changing. A fourth dynamic theory suggests the flow is reflected in the change over time of truth values of declarative sentences o proposition. For example, the sentence “It is now raining” was true during the rain yesterday but has changed to false on today’s sunny day. It is these sorts of truth value changes that are at the root of time’s flow. In response, critics suggest that the indexical (or token reflexive) sentence “It is now raining” has no truth value because the reference of “now” is unspecified. If it can not have a truth value, it can not change its truth value. However, the sentence is related to a sentence that does have a truth value. Supposing it is now midnight here on April 1, 2007, and the speaker is in Sacramento, California, then the indexical sentence “It is now raining” is related to the more complete or context-explicit sentence “It is raining at midnight on April 1, 2007 in Sacramento, California.” Only these non-indexical, non-context-dependent, complete sentences have truth values, and these truth values do not change with time. So, fully-described events do not change their properties because complete or “eternal” sentences do not change their truth values.

There are other dynamic theories of time. John Norton (Norton, 2010) argues that time’s flow is objective but so far is beyond the reach of our understanding. Tim Maudlin argues that the objective flow of time is fundamental and unanalyzable. He is happy to say “time does indeed pass at the rate of one hour per hour.” (Maudlin, 2007, p. 112)

Regardless of how we analyze the metaphor of time’s flow we also need to analyze the metaphor of time’s having a direction—the arrow of time.

Does anyone know where to find information about the experience of flow while reading