Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning (34 page)

Control of consciousness.
Control of consciousness as developed in this chapter includes all four manifestations of self-control reviewed by Klausner (1965) and listed in the note to page 10. One of the oldest known techniques for achieving such controls are the various yogi disciplines developed in India roughly fifteen hundred years ago; these will be discussed more amply in chapter 5. Followers of holistic medicine believe that the mental state of the patient is extremely important in determining the course of physical health; see also Cousins (1979) and Siegel (1986). Eugene Gendlin (1981), a colleague at the University of Chicago, has developed a contemporary technique for controlling attention called “focusing.” In this volume I am not proposing any one technique, but instead will present a conceptual analysis of what control and enjoyment involve as well as give practical examples, so that the reader can develop a method best suited to his or her inclinations and conditions.

Routinization.
The argument here is of course reminiscent of Weber’s (1922) notion of routinization of charisma, developed in his work
The Social Psychology of World Religions
, and of the even earlier Hegelian idea that the “world of the spirit” eventually turns into the “world of nature” (e.g., Sorokin 1950). The same concept is developed from a sociological viewpoint by Berger & Luckmann (1967).

CHAPTER 2

Consciousness.
This concept has been central to many religious and philosophical systems, e.g., those of Kant and Hegel. Early psychologists like Ach (1905) have tried to define it in modern scientific terms, with little success. For several decades, behavioral sciences had abandoned the notion of consciousness altogether, because self-reports of internal states were held to lack scientific validity. Some recent renewal of interest in the topic can be discerned (Pope & Singer 1978). Historical summaries of the concept can be found in Boring (1953) and Klausner (1965). Smith (1969), who coined the term “introspective behaviorism,” gives a definition which is very close to the one used in this volume: “conscious experience is an internal event about which one does do, directly, what one wants to do” (Smith 1969, p. 108). Otherwise, however, there is little overlap between the concept as developed here and that of either Smith or any other behaviorally oriented psychologist. The main difference is that my emphasis is on the subjective dynamics of experience, and on its phenomenological primacy. A fuller definition of consciousness will be provided in the later sections of this chapter.

Phenomenology.
The term “phenomenological” is not used here to denote adherence to the tenets or methods of any particular thinker or school. It only means that the approach to the problem of studying experience is heavily influenced by the insights of Husserl (1962), Heidegger (1962, 1967), Sartre (1956), Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1964), and some of their translators into the social sciences, e.g., Natanson (1963), Gendlin (1962), Fisher (1969), Wann (1964), and Schutz (1962). Clear, short introductions to the phenomenology of Husserl are the books by Kohak (1978) and Kolakowski (1987). To follow this volume, however, there is no need to keep in mind any phenomenological assumption. The argument must stand on its own merits and be understood on its own terms. The same is true for
information theory
(see Wiener 1948 [1961]).

Dreaming.
Stewart (1972) reports that the Sinoi of Malaysia learn to control their dreams, and thereby achieve unusual mastery over waking consciousness as well. If this is true (which seems doubtful), it is an interesting exception that goes toward proving the general rule—in other words, it means that by training attention one can control consciousness even in sleep (Csikszentmihalyi 1982a). One recent consciousness-expansion method has been trying to do just this. “Lucid dreaming” is an attempt to control thought processes in sleep (La Berge 1985).

Limits of consciousness.
The first general statement about the number of bits that can be processed simultaneously was by Miller (1956). Orme (1969), on the basis of von Uexkull’s (1957) calculations, has figured that
¹
/
₁₈
of a second is the threshold of discrimination. Cognitive scientists who have treated the limitations of attention include Simon (1969, 1978), Kahneman (1973), Hasher & Zacks (1979), Eysenck (1982), and Hoffman, Nelson, & Houck (1983). Attentional demands made by cognitive processes are discussed by Neisser (1967, 1976), Treisman & Gelade (1980), and Treisman & Schmidt (1982). The attentional requirements of storing and recalling information from memory have been dealt with by Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968) and Hasher & Zacks (1979). But the importance of attention and its limitations was already well known to William James (1890).

Limits for processing speech.
For the 40-bit-per-second requirement see Liberman, Mattingly, & Turvey (1972) and Nusbaum & Schwab (1986).

The uses of time.
The first comprehensive tabulation of how people spend their time was the cross-national project reported in Szalai (1965). The figures reported here are based on my studies with the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, Larson, & Prescott (1977), Csikszentmihalyi & Graef (1980), Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1984), Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi (1988).

Television watching.
The feelings people report while watching television are compared to experiences in other activities in ESM studies by Csikszentmihalyi, Larson, & Prescott (1977), Csikszentmihalyi & Kubey (1981), Larson & Kubey (1983), and Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi (in press).

Psychic energy.
The processes taking place in consciousness—thoughts, emotions, will, and memory—have been described by philosophers since the earliest times, and by some of the earliest psychologists (e.g., Ach 1905). For a review, see Hilgard (1980). Energistic approaches to consciousness include Wundt (1902), Lipps (1899), Ribot (1890), Binet (1890), and Jung (1928 [1960]). Some contemporary approaches are represented by Kahneman (1973), Csikszentmihalyi (1978, 1987), and Hoffman, Nelson, & Houck (1983).

Attention and culture.
The Melanesians’ ability to remember precise locations by floating on the surface of the sea is described by Gladwin (1970). Reference to the many names for snow used by Eskimos can be found in Bourguignon (1979).

The self.
Psychologists have thought of innumerable ways of describing the self, from the social-psychological approaches of George Herbert Mead (1934 [1970]) and Sullivan (1953) to the analytic psychology of Carl Gustav Jung (1933 [1961]). Currently, however, psychologists try to avoid speaking of the “self”; instead they limit themselves to describing the “self concept.” A good account of how this concept develops is given by Damon & Hart (1982). Another approach uses the term “self-efficacy” (see Bandura 1982). The model of the self developed in these pages has been influenced by many sources, and is described in Csikszentmihalyi (1985a) and Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi (1988).

Disorder in consciousness.
Psychologists have studied negative emotions, such as anger, distress, sadness, fear, shame, contempt, or disgust, very extensively: Ekman (1972), Frijda (1986), Izard, Kagan, & Zajonc (1984), and Tomkins (1962). But these investigators generally assume that each emotion is separately “wired” in the central nervous system as a response to a specific set of stimuli, instead of being an integrated response of the self system. Clinical psychologists and psychiatrists are familiar with “disphoric moods” such as anxiety and depression which interfere with concentration and normal functioning (Beck 1976, Blumberg & Izard 1985, Hamilton 1982, Lewinsohn & Libet 1972, Seligman et al. 1984).

Order.
What order—or psychic negentropy—implies will be discussed in the pages below; see also Csikszentmihalyi (1982a) and Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1984). Basically, it refers to the lack of conflict among the bits of information present in an individual’s consciousness. When the information is in harmony with a person’s goals, the consciousness of that person is “ordered.” The same concept applies also to lack of conflict between individuals, when their goals are in harmony with each other.

Flow.
The original research and the theoretical model of the flow experience were first fully reported in
Beyond Boredom and Anxiety
(Csikszentmihalyi 1975). Since then a great number of works have used the flow concept, and extensive new research has been accumulating. A few examples are Victor Turner’s (1974) application of the concept to anthropology, Mitchell’s (1983) to sociology, and Crook’s (1980) to evolution. Eckblad (1981), Amabile (1983), and Deci & Ryan (1985) have used it in developing motivational theories. For summaries of the various research findings, see Massimini & Inghilleri (1986) and Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi (1988).

“It’s exhilarating…”
The quote is from Csikszentmihalyi (1975), p. 95.

Complexity.
Complexity is a function of how well the information in a person’s consciousness is differentiated and integrated. A complex person is one who is able to access precise, discrete information, and yet is able to relate the various pieces to each other; for example, a person whose desires, emotions, thoughts, values, and actions are strongly individuated yet do not contradict each other. See, for instance, Csikszentmihalyi (1970), Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi (1988), and Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1984). The notion of complexity used here is related to the same concept as used by some evolutionary biologists (e.g., Dobzhansky 1962, 1967), and it has been influenced by the poetic insights of Teilhard de Chardin (1965). A very promising definition of complexity in physical systems, defined as “thermodynamic depth,” was being worked on by Heinz Pagels (1988) before his recent untimely death. By his definition, the complexity of a system is the difference between the amount of information needed to describe the system in its present state and the amount needed to describe all the states it might have been in at the point at which it changed from the last previous state. Applying this to the psychology of the self, one might say that a complex person was one whose behavior and ideas could not be easily explained, and whose development was not obviously predictable.

“[There’s] no place…”
The quote is from Csikszentmihalyi 1975, p. 94.

CHAPTER 3

For research on the relationship between happiness and wealth,
see Diener, Horwitz, & Emmons (1985), Bradburn (1969), and Campbell, Converse, & Rodgers (1976).

Pleasure and enjoyment.
Aristotle’s entire
Nicomachean Ethics
deals with this issue, especially book 3, chapter 11, and book 7. See also Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi (1988, pp. 24–25).

Children’s pleasure in activity.
Early German psychologists posited the existence of
Funktionlust
, or the pleasure derived from using one’s body in such activities as running, hitting, swinging, and so on (Groos 1901, Buhler 1930). Later Jean Piaget (1952) declared that one of the sensory-motor stages of an infant’s physical development was characterized by the “pleasure of being the cause.” In the U.S., Murphy (1947) posited the existence of sensory and activity drives to account for the feeling of pleasure that sight, sound, or muscle sense occasionally gives. These insights were incorporated into a theory of optimal stimulation or optimal arousal mainly through the work of Hebb (1955) and Berlyne (1960), who assumed pleasure was the consequence of an optimal balance between the incoming stimulation and the nervous system’s ability to assimilate it. The extension of these basically neurological explanations for why one finds pleasure in action was provided by White (1959), deCharms (1968), and Deci & Ryan (1985), who looked at the same phenomenon but from the point of view of the self, or conscious organism. Their explanations hinge on the fact that action provides pleasure because it gives the person a feeling of competence, efficacy, or autonomy.
Learning in adulthood.
The importance of learning in later life has received much needed attention lately. For some of the basic ideas in this field see Mortimer Adler’s early statement (Adler 1956), Tough (1978), and Gross (1982).

Interviews.
Most of the interviews mentioned here were collected in the course of studies reported in Csikszentmihalyi (1975) and Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi (1988). Over 600 additional interviews were collected by Professor Fausto Massimini and his collaborators in Europe, Asia, and the southwestern United States.

Ecstasy.
Extensive case studies of ecstatic religious experiences were collected by Marghanita Laski (1962). Abraham Maslow (1971), who coined the term “peak experience” to describe such events, played a very important role in helping give legitimacy to the consideration of such phenomena by psychologists. It is fair to say, however, that Laski and Maslow looked at ecstasy as a fortuitous epiphany that happened more or less by itself, rather than a natural process which could be controlled and cultivated. For a comparison between Maslow’s concept of peak experience and flow, see Privette (1983). Ecstatic experiences are apparently more common than one might think. As of March 1989, over 30 percent of a national representative sample of 1,000 U.S. respondents answered affirmatively to the item: “You felt as though you were very close to a powerful spiritual force that seemed to lift you out of your self.” A full 12 percent claimed that they had experienced this feeling often or on several occasions (
General Social Survey
1989).

Reading
as a favorite flow activity. This finding is reported in Massimini, Csikszentmihalyi, & Delle Fave (1988). A recent book that describes in detail how reading provides enjoyment is by Nell (1988).

Socializing as a flow activity.
All the studies conducted with the Experience Sampling Method confirm the fact that simply being with other people generally improves a person’s mood significantly, regardless of what else is happening. This seems to be as true of teenagers (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson 1984) as of adults (Larson, Csikszentmihalyi, & Graef 1980) and of older people (Larson, Mannell, & Zuzanek 1986). But to really enjoy the company of other people requires interpersonal skills.