Neuropsychology of Flow

Avner Peled

I was always fascinated by the fact that one could experience very intense emotions simply by playing a basic
video game. Surely, I'm not undermining the intensity of emotions one could achieve by reading a book or watching a
movie, but there was something very different about gaming – the fact that the experience was controlled by your own
actions. When you are a part of the experience itself, the feeling gets much deeper. This fascination eventually led me to
pursue a job in the gaming industry.
Naturally, when coming up with a topic for this paper, I knew it had to somehow involve video games. I had
once attended a very inspiring short game design workshop by the old time Israeli game designer - Haim Shafir,
founder of “Shafir games” of the Taki fame. The workshop involved learning about all kinds of principles in creativity,
fun and game design. Haim had recently presented a short talk in TEDxTelAviv about creativity and I emailed him
asking for any suggestions and research material on creativity or emotion in games. Little did I know, that in Haim's
reply I will get acquainted with a concept that addresses both and even touches the problem of consciousness, my
bachelor’s degree subject. The concept of Flow.
Originally advanced in the 1970s, the concept of Flow as used today in positive psychology is fully described
in the 1990 book of Hungarian psychology professor Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (MEE-hye CHEEK-sent-mə-HYE-ee)

titled “Flow – The Psychology of Optimal Experience” (Csíkszentmihályi , 1990). It is a described as a discrete
optimal state of human experience in which one's potential is realized through a specific activity that demands an
optimal amount of individual resources. It is also referred to as being “In the Zone” in sports. It is a somewhat
meditative state of intense concentration and intrinsic enjoyment. More specifically, it is characterized by:
a) A sense of balance between one's skill and the challenge presented.
b) A clear view of the goals and direct and immediate success/failure feedback.
c) A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention.
d) A loss of self-consciousness, a holistic state which merges action and awareness.
e) A distorted sense of time.
f) Lack of awareness for the surrounding environment and even for basic bodily needs such as fatigue and
hunger.
g) An intrinsic feeling of pleasure which is derived from the action itself regardless of the consequence or its
difficulty. Effortlessness of action.

The following graph by prof. Csíkszentmihályi emphasizes the importance of the high balance between
challenge and skill level by depicting the emotions which emerge when they are not balanced or not high enough to
achieve flow:
 The initial purpose of prof. Csíkszentmihály was to better understand the notion of happiness through the
concept of flow. He developed a method called the “Experience Sampling Method” (ESM) to measure people's
happiness level, or how close they are to flow at various moments. Subjects would carry a beeper which beeps 8 times a
day at random intervals. When the beeper beeps they are required to report what they are doing and how happy they are.
Increased flow levels were found within professional music composers, sport athletes, and karate masters but also
within scientists and other more theoretical occupations. That means that flow doesn't have to be a sensual or physical
experience but can also be a flow of thought.
Csíkszentmihály identified high levels of flow within people who seem to have an “autotelic” personality. An
autotelic person is someone who is internally driven, with a sense of purpose and curiosity. Someone who is able to
concentrate his attention on the experience and be driven by it, instead of being driven by external things such as
comfort, money, power, fame or any other motivating force which is not the action itself.
Some research has been done which supports the possibility of an autotelic personality and provides an
hypothesis for its neurophysiological basis. A study by Dr. Jean Hamilton (Hamilton, 1977) used a test in which
subjects had to look at an ambiguous figure (like a Necker cube) and manually reverse the image in their mind. She
found that students who reported less intrinsic motivation in daily life needed in average to fix their eyes on more points
before they could reverse the image. Presumably, these people had better control over their conscious visual experience
and therefore could enter flow's high state of focus more easily.
It seems that it has become a common principle in psychology studies to define a personality as autotelic by the
average amount it reports being in flow using ESM. Rathunde (1996) has suggested that autotelic personality is most
strongly fostered in a family environment referred to as ‘‘complex family’’, where support and challenge are
simultaneously provided. Another study by Kioshi Asakawa (2009) used ESM and a sample of Japanese college
students to test the relation between the perceived level of challenge and skill, the autotelic personality and optimality of
the experience. He has found that high challenge/high skill situations generated to most optimal experience. He also
found that Autotelic students perceived the level of challenge/skill to be most balanced and also tended to select
challenges with level higher than their skill – a finding which shows that autotelic personalities are less worried by the
cost of action.
Prof. Csíkszentmihály has credited flow not only to happiness and optimal experience, but also to greater
creativity (Csíkszentmihály , 1997) . Even though creativity requires out of box thinking and freedom of thought, while
a flow is a process with very clear rules and goals, the extreme focus of attention and clear mind of the flow state allows
for a better creative process.
After understanding the concept and implications of flow, I will now focus on the research being done towards
understanding flow in the neurophysiological level. In general, it would make sense to assume that the phenomenon of
flow would be characterized by an increased brain activity of attentional networks, reward and goal detection, activity
of conscious experience and pleasure.
Studies researching selective attention have varying results, but it appears that other than the relevant sensory
areas in the cortex, attention is mainly regulated by the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex (DLPFC). One study (Kondo, 2004) found bilateral activation of the DLPFC (mainly right) in dual-task
conditions but not in single-task conditions and the right ACC was activated under both conditions. Another study
(Coull, 1998) concluded that the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate are activated when subjects
must selectively respond to target stimuli and refrain from responding to distractors. A study of division and focus of
attention (Johnson, 2006) found that only when the attention is divided there is activation in the DLPFC. While being in
a flow state implies focusing only on one task, one might hypothesize that the DLPFC and possibly the ACC are areas
which participate in the action of focusing the attention and ignoring anything not relevant to the task.
When Prof. Csíkszentmihály first started to investigate flow, he focused on professional music composers
because they have repeatedly reported being in flow while creating music. A recent study has investigated the cortical
regions involved in the generation of musical structures during improvisation in pianists (Bengtsson et al., 2007).
Interestingly enough, a key finding in the study was the activation of the DLPFC during improvisation. The article
states that the DLPFC was consistently more active during tasks that are freely chosen, as opposed to repetitive or
externally determined by a stimulus. A result which is inline with many earlier studies.

When discussing the functional role of the DLPFC in this type of task (creative tasks) they hypothesize that
according to previous studies, it may relate to attention to the selection of action rather than free choice per se.
Nevertheless, some studies (Nathaniel-James & Frith,2002) have reported a positive relation between
the number of available alternatives in a free choice situation and the level of DLPFC activity,
suggesting that the DLPFC is also involved in the selection process. The DLPFC is known to be
strongly implicated in working memory for action-relevant information. The article (Bengtsson et
al., 2007) suggests that it may be involved in a creative strategy which constantly monitors recent
responses and thus avoids repeating them in order to create more versatile responses. One study
(Jahanshahi et al.,1998) showed that disruption of DLPFC activity using transcranial magnetic
stimulation (TMS) during pseudorandom number generation tends to make the responses more
stereotyped. One role of the DLPFC in free selection may thus be to inhibit unwanted habitual
responses.
I have explored some of the neurophysiology of flow in the aspect which relates to focusing, attention and
creativity. There still remains a large aspect which involves the great sensation of intrinsic reward and pleasure and the
nature of the qualitative experience. Following Prof. Csíkszentmihály's work, there has been a growing number of
studies which investigate the rewarding sensation of flow, but instead of ascribing it to more occupational tasks such as
work and art, they have studied it through media enjoyment - Especially through video games. A recent article by
Rene Weber, Ron Tamborini, Amber Westcott-Baker, & Benjamin Kantor (2009) provides a good
coverage and suggests further research.
John L. Sherry (2004) utilized flow in order to describe media enjoyment as a balance of
challenge and skill. He argues that just as the creative tasks Csíkszentmihály suggested can be
measured by level of difficulty, so can various media forms be measured. For example a book using
complex language, a musical score using uncommon structures, a film or television serious
containing many outside references and so forth. The skill of the user is his ability to deal with
those various complexities.
Sherry argues that when there is a good balance between the user's skill and the media's
level of challenge than optimal enjoyment is achieved. He describes how video games can directly
match Csíkszentmihály's flow conditions such as well defined rules and goals and difficulty which
gradually increases with the user's skill level. It can also often cause the above mentioned effects
such as a distorted sense of time and a loss of self-consciousness. As an example of the effects of
flow, he shows that male and female tend to prefer different types of video games in according to
their differences in cognitive ability. Males, who are better in 3d rotation, targeting and spatial
perception prefer shooters and fighters while females, who have better verbal and color memory
prefer board games and puzzles.
Arne Dietrich (2004) has attempted to apply cognitive neuroscience knowledge to the
concept of flow. He portrays the principle of balance between challenge and skill using the
distinction between implicit and explicit information processing in the brain. The explicit system is
involved in a more conscious and aware processing and is associated with higher cognitive
functions of the frontal (and especially pre frontal) lobe and medial temporal lobe structures. Once
an explicit skill is highly practiced it becomes implicit in what Dietrich calls “transient
hyperfrontality”. He contends that flow should be characterized by totally implicit processing with
the inhibition of explicit processing.
Weber et al opposes this idea and deems it basic and oversimplified. It misses the very
important point that flow is characterized by a highly conscious and focused experience. That point
is backed up by fMRI studies such as the ones I have shown that clearly show distinct activation in
prefrontal networks during states of focused, meditation-like attention.
A very interesting approach (especially for me because it touches my field of study) which
Weber et al employ when dealing with flow is through what is known as “The binding problem” -
the problem of how different brain processes such as recognition of color and shape patterns bind
into one whole conscious experience. “How does an individual perceive different properties of an
apple not separately as red, round,in a certain location, and of a certain size, but as a discrete
object?” (Weber et al, 2009, page 407). One prominent theory which tries to solve the binding
problem involves the mechanism of neuronal oscillatory synchronization (Buzsaki, 2006).
Like many others, Crick and Koch (1999), leading consciousness researchers, have also
identified synchronization as a mechanism for conscious awareness. Oscillatory network
synchronization could also explain how the brain performs cognitive functions using various wave
techniques to communicate between neurons and/or groups of neurons (Basar,2006). Oscillation
can also explain the classic 7+-2 items that can be held in short term memory (Lisman and Idiart,
1995).
Haken (2006) describes a synergetic theory of brain function where logical functions are
nonlinear and contain some parameters of “bistability” - that is, two possible states. Basically that
means that when some oscillating network is suddenly synchronized, it can lead to an entirely
different qualitative state. For example when looking at a necker cube the brain would be swirling
between two different synchronized states of oscillation for each variation.
Interestingly, Baldo and Kelley (2007) have also found a discrete character, but to the state
of consummatory reward when researching control of feeding in the nucleus accumbens. Rewarding
behaviors can be characterized as appetitive or consummatory. Appetitive behaviors include those
actions involved in seeking rewards, such as foraging for food. Consummatory behaviors involve
the actual act (consummation) of gaining the reward and are usually associated with the pleasurable
experience.
Although dopamine transmission has largely been associated with reward for many decades,
Baldo and Kelley (2007) show that dopamine's role in rewarding behavior only affects the
appetitive process by mediating incentives (“wanting”) or predicting rewarding outcomes. By
showing that lesions to dopaminergic regions do not affect consummatory behavior, they reject its
role in the hedonic pleasure (“liking”) of the consummatory act.
The striatum is known as the main site of actual pleasure (Baldo and Kelley, 2007). Baldo
and Kelley review the evidence for linkage between the striatal opioid peptide release and the
experience of reward during consummatory behavior. It appears to be regulated in a discrete toggle
fashion by amino acid transmission in the nucleus accumbens shell. In fact, EEG data on animals
shows patterns moving rapidly from synchronized to non-synchronized upon initiating the
consummatory act. Preliminary data from humans involving thirst quenching (Hallschmid et al,
2002) also shows wave synchronization being involved in the experience of consummation.
Thus, one might hypothesize (Weber et al, 2009) that flow is some kind of a discrete
balanced state to an oscillating system of attentional and reward networks that requires a balance
between challenge and skill. Neural synchronization has been shown to be energetically cheap
(Laufs et al., 2003) which could explain why being in flow during task performance is effortless and
is not perceived as taxing even though the challenge level is high. We could think of motivational
processes and reward as a potential “energy source” that is necessary to fuel an oscillating system.
Weber et al (2009) suggest that flow is a qualitatively new experience that emerges from the
synchronization of specialized neural networks and is perceived as a state of holistic consciousness
that is more than its parts.
 Although this field of research is in its infancy, there is already some preliminary empirical
support for the synchronization theory of flow. While investigating attentional networks in video
games, Webber, Alicea and Mathiak (2009) found a positive correlation between the level of
attention (measured by the time it takes to respond to a distraction) and functional connectivity
(synchronicity) among attentional networks. They have also found an increase in functional
connectivity of the reward networks discussed above. At some critical point of distraction,
synchronous activation of attentional and inner limbic cortical regions could be observed.
While in the past, most scientific studies involving video games researched the affect a
video game has on the player after he played it, now it is realized that video games provide a
controllable simulation of real-life scenarios and thus enable us to research just about any aspect of
the human mind through. Bohil and Biocca (2007) provide a method of cognitive modeling of a
player using a video game and decision theory. Decety et al (2004) used a specialized video game
and fMRI to determine the neural bases of cooperation and competition. Mathiak and Weber (2006)
used violent video games to study the role of the anterior cingulate and the amygdala during
threatening and violent situations.
The research of Prof. Csíkszentmihály's flow through video games and brain imaging is in
my opinion one of the most exciting and fascinating research directions in neuropsychology. It can
provide an insight on attention, reward, conscious experience and happiness in general, as
Csíkszentmihályi has shown in his book. I will surely set my foot into it in the future.

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