Babies can’t think outside the box because, for them, there is no box. It’s all inside - everything. That’s what I gather from a Boston Globe look Inside the Baby Mind.
Thanks to mccn for sending it my way. It turns out, ‘babies take everything in: their reality arrives without a filter.’ Babies are naturals at some of the flow characteristics we’ve mentioned here.
Person in flow: completely involved in what we are doing - focused, concentrated
Baby: utter absorption in the moment
Person in flow: A sense of serenity - no worries about oneself and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego
Baby: incredibly aware of what's happening - experiences are very vivid - not self-conscious at all
Because of an undeveloped prefrontal cortex, babies lack the ability to filter. They absorb whatever comes their way, voracious egalitarians.
And flow is not just the province of babies and creatives. Consider the study of adult brain states when captivated by a work of art. Scans of viewers engrossed in a Clint Eastwood movie showed patterns of activity where their prefrontal cortexes were suppressed, similar to those of jazz musicians in the midst of improvisation:
The scientists compare this unwound state of mind with that of dreaming during REM sleep, meditation, and other creative pursuits, such as the composition of poetry.
Jonah Lehrer Boston Globe
You don’t have to be making something yourself to experience flow. If the art is engrossing enough, you can get your flow on from the peanut gallery.
This might explain why a listening audience can infuse live performance with flow-on-steroids, amping up the unwound state of mind for creators and receivers of music. We are enabling each others’ childlike openness to new experience.
Awareness of what’s going on inside and outside of you, without over-filtering, invites relationship. Lately I’ve been re-purposing my relationship to my car, by now hardwired into my approach to locomotion. Driving: efficient and isolating. Compare this to walking, swimming or biking, where the bumps in the road and the line of your body come steaming into your consciousness in a vivid maelstrom. In awareness training, the simulation-like car experience can’t compete.
I was meditating on all this before breakfast while swimming between lane lines under the wide sky. As a kid, I bounced around in the water for the magic of wetness. Today, I work out. Is lap swimming efficient but dull - water play chaotic and liberating? Not really. Prefrontal cortexes mature in late adolescence so that we can laser focus our way through important life choices. But they serve us well in creativity, too. Craft involves experienced editing. Clint Eastwood was not some dude who wandered onto the set one day and decided to act cool.
As with life itself, creativity asks us to explore balance. My relationship to my car, my audience or my best friend is visited by ‘flow’ from within and without when I’m honest and aware. I can train myself to glimpse life unfiltered for the sake of making my box more vast, but I may as well honor the box. A baby has grownups around to handle the heavy lifting. You and I, we’re on the improv stage with a mallet and keys, a suave fedora and several sharp pencils.
We know what we have to do.
From public domain painting Mary Cassatt, After the Bath
- Susan Weber's blog
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Susan, what a great point you
Susan, what a great point you make about how we don't have to rely on ourselves alone to create flow - that it can come from feedback between ourselves and others.
That makes experiential sense - anyone who's done a public performance knows that the audience will affect that performance, no matter what it is - and so will your interior state. You sound different when you're happy or sad or distracted. And I guess the objects of art, too, affect flow - I think of different focus I have when drawing a building late at night as opposed to a scene in bright day - or drawing a person posing for me. I guess creativity has to do with interaction - you can't do it in isolation, because you're always thinking about something.
__________________
'Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.'
Neil Gaiman, Sandman
Intriguing
Consciously or subconsciously, you're absorbing your surroundings and processing your inner life. Is it essential to be aware of all this psychic/emotional activity to make the best creative use of it? This observation by Muriel Barbery (The Elegance of the Hedgehog) would suggest otherwise:
Freed from the demands of decisions and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as though they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence.
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Jung might have explained some of this inner sea as the collective unconscious. I like that idea a lot, because it could explain where all these uncanny 'knowings' come from while interconnecting every human (and non-human entity?) on the planet.
But it's not a supernatural knowing for me. I tend to think of it as the ultra-super-absorbancy of our beings from birth onward. Witness a dream to see how our minds are constantly remembering and making connections. Last night I was calculating the sales tax on a $6.48 stack of firewood while admiring a small mahogany book case with my (now deceased) mom.
Flow, though, is probably more likely to produce viable art if we practice with our tools. I'm presently meddling with the tools of videography like the rookie that I am. I know what I want to achieve but spend a great deal of time impeding the flow of creation by searching for tools and wrangling them badly. Once I'm a natural at video editing, I may begin to express something interesting from my unique absorptive sphere.
As always, thank you for your elucidations!