"Thought is the enemy of flow"

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
flow is just the latest monetised lifestylist bullshit trend isnt it? the concept that you can somehow get in a "state" where you have unbridled access to creativity, it's like the endpoint for all the drivel about personal optimisation and life-management (which is nothing but toxic and exploitative),
are you living your best life, then where is your flow?
if you don't got one then you must get off instagram, and if you can trap and exploit your flow then you will be rewarded with social megaprosperity, no?

sure in a marketable lifestyle context but professional sport is increasingly constructed around it, not just moneyball, more the interaction of aspects below which is the most rudimentary Biscuit’s style graph available via google images

D8350C84-57B8-4066-A3FF-175F4733A3CB.jpeg

if you’ve worked as part of team, or under high pressure, or both, you know this graph is kind of on the nose, even though it evaded me personally as a schoolboy rugby player
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
This is how Mercedes markets products referencing flight, free-climbing and other “jeez this lass has her lifestyle choices down to a science, maybe I could leap off cliffs in a squirrel cape too because flying is just like driving, right?”




Neurochemical factors - dopamine, endorphins, norepinephrine, serotonin and anandamide
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
The best way to access a flow state for me is either

1) posting on dissensus
2) playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare for 8 hours
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
folks like Steven Kotler can pimp flow to anyone with a few dollars spare, eg wow that was fun!

7858B7A8-3232-4166-BECC-6BE57A2AA80A.png

no mention of Call of Duty but mibbe Master and Commander is flow state experience for you @Corpsey
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
Dunno about music so much but surely in sport there are those moments of pure instinctual play. I tend to think that there is probably a mixture of longer term thinking and moments where there is a surrender to the flow. Say in football a player is carrying the ball and actively thinks "I will bring it down the wing and take on the fullback" but the actual moment of trying to go round the defender is not based so much on thought but on a number of instinctual foot and body movements, the precise choice of which is made by the subconscious depending on the position of the ball and the defender and his body position etc

Is that what you're talking about or am I misunderstanding the question?

yeah i was thinking that sports is where this maxim of the world-famous drummer does apply

is this what sports people mean when they talk about being "in the zone" - where it's all automatic and reflexive...

perhaps sports is like a reversion to the state of grace of the animal - the instinctive movements of the predator and the prey

animals follow the rules of their nature, responds to the threats or opportunities provided by other creatures who are following the rules of their nature

no deliberation, no self-doubt, no decisions to made as such
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
i am a supremely mediocre tennis player, but playing tennis I have felt something like this flow, and it is a kind of animal-like ecstasy of action, you make a shot that outwits your opponent and you feel like a wily fox... you leap like a leopard to make a difficult return...

football or a team sports, perhaps that is more like herd-consciousness or pack-consciousness - depending on whether in the defensive or attacking mode maybe - the antelope or the wolf
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
is "flow" just a near-synonym for "be here now? so not thought is the enemy so much as either future-oriented thinking (planning, anxiety, anticipation) OR past-oriented thinking (memory, regret, retracing footsteps etc) - anything that detracts/distracts from the moment-to-moment thinking

i have played games maybe a dozen times in my life but i should imagine as Corpsey suggests the flow-state is a major part of the attraction

i wonder where gambling fits in this - it's not quite in the moment but there's a tremendous tension directed towards a moment to come (the horse crosses the line, the hand of cards is revealed) but it's so imminent and so tensed that all else is blotted out - all other worries in your life contract to this single Worry. I wouldn't know, i'm not a gambler, but I did just recently watch California Split, the great Altman film about addicted gamblers

those automatons you see at the fruit machines in Vegas are in a kind of flow (which begs the question of whether thre are state-of-grace flows and profane, profoundly-fallen flows)

(in Vegas there is actually a college of Gambling Studies, a grim looking building on the outskirts of town)
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Line breaks in rugby when you cut through the defensive line and the entire field opens up is a tricky process to summarise without flow. You have an opportunity to score but you have to be aware of support runners (and their lines), weigh up who could catch you up from the opposition and manoeuvre them and yourself accordingly

You have to phase your play to create mismatches, eg fast against chunky, chunky vs wee. A good positional example illustrating these moments are props, the battle tanks of any forward pack, who illustrate the combined perfection of power, skill and in some instances speed too. The crowd uproar tells you when this magic occurs for the layman. If you could bottle the moment this feeling hits when there are no tacklers and the pitch looks both tiny and huge, I’d huff it at least a couple of times a day

 

sufi

lala
i am a supremely mediocre tennis player, but playing tennis I have felt something like this flow, and it is a kind of animal-like ecstasy of action, you make a shot that outwits your opponent and you feel like a wily fox... you leap like a leopard to make a difficult return...

football or a team sports, perhaps that is more like herd-consciousness or pack-consciousness - depending on whether in the defensive or attacking mode maybe - the antelope or the wolf
that's like muscle memory innit, combined with that heady Neurochemical cocktail mentioned above
are we saying that produces some sort of extra performance boost? that is definitely what the lifestyle marketers would like us to think

i mean you will play sport better if you concentrate a bit for sure
 

sufi

lala
Line breaks in rugby when you cut through the defensive line and the entire field opens up is a tricky process to summarise without flow. You have an opportunity to score but you have to be aware of support runners (and their lines), weigh up who could catch you up from the opposition and manoeuvre them and yourself accordingly

You have to phase your play to create mismatches, eg fast against chunky, chunky vs wee. A good positional example illustrating these moments are props, the battle tanks of any forward pack, who illustrate the combined perfection of power, skill and in some instances speed too. The crowd uproar tells you when this magic occurs for the layman. If you could bottle the moment this feeling hits when there are no tacklers and the pitch looks both tiny and huge, I’d huff it at least a couple of times a day

and yeah that occurred to me too - if there's a performance boost then can we synthesise it? or are there drugs that do that already? (i don't think so)
 

sufi

lala
and yeah that occurred to me too - if there's a performance boost then can we synthesise it? or are there drugs that do that already? (i don't think so)
you might feel like you're in the zone but actually youre a tripped out dribbling stoner
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I've read the book "Flow". I don't recall it being about productivity so much as happiness (though productivity might be a byproduct of that).

I recall him writing that people make a mistake in devoting their leisure time to passive activities like watching TV, because we're actually happiest when we're doing something challenging, though not too challenging to enjoy and not too easy to be completely inane.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Erling Haaland is definitely consciously thinking for all his time on the pitch. It's why he's unstoppable rn.
 
it is definitely a real thing like, attention held over time by the right mix of challenge and reward occuring at a frequency where only quick decision making informed by experience can keep things rolling
 
There is no such thing as a collective unconscious, this is unscientific. there is consciousness and its subconscious reciprocal element. But the unconscious as a kind of collective archetype that people are born into is theocratic guff sneaked in to accord with secularism.

yeah I think it a bit daft in that it evokes an idea of some separate dimension, or sea of psychic material we all unknowingly suck from. but there's value to that mythic stuff, though kind of crass... our complex collective interactions in our shared environment result in the same patterns and types of guy emerging the world over and across time dont they? we play roles etc . its trying to explain that and overreaching
 

luka

Well-known member
concentration is not the same as thought. thought is a distraction. awareness is what is key and awareness is the opposite of thought.
 
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