While I was watching Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Ted Talk I was really struck with what he said about Cognitive flow. While he was talking about cognitive flow and how different people experience it, that the passing of time seems unnoticeable. In my life two things I do let me experience cognitive flow. The first being the creating of art. I could produce art every day of the week for hours on end and not even notice time has passed. I call it my time machine. At the beginning I’m looking at something blank, empty, formless, and the next thing I know I see something creative, developed, formed. It doesn’t matter what medium I choose, metal work, drawing, painting, photography, the absence of time, the joy that it brings, it’s a natural high where after I am done with the project I can’t wait to get my hands on the next project or dream up something new for me to do. I remember one time I was alone in the studio, I had gone in at around 10 am, what felt like 10 minutes later my classmate at the time came in and was asking me how long I’ve been down in the room, I asked her what time it was and she said it was 6pm and wanted to know if I wanted to go to dinner with her. Now the room had no windows, no clocks, and I had been working on a metal jewelry artwork that I had wanted to do, I had no idea that 8 hours had just flown by.
(some of my artwork)
Another way that I have experienced cognitive flow in my life is through a few forms of Physical activities, such as dancing, swimming, and hiking, and in that order too. My whole life I have felt the need to dance, to move in a structured way to music that may be playing out loud or music in my head. I don’t always get a chance to go to events that allow me to dance, as much as I would like but when I do it’s magical. I love the way things around me fade out where all that is left is the action of moving by body to the music that is playing. I can easily dance non stop for hours at a time, unaware of how tired I am getting, if I am getting hungry, or again what the time is. The same goes for swimming and hiking. Though for hiking the weather or monkeys can distract me from the hike, for example if it starts to get too hot or rain, or if monkeys are chasing me by the dozen, we have monkeys in our mountains in Hong Kong.
One of the videos I watched this week was Jim Gee’s Principles on Gaming, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aQAgAjTozk, there are a 13 things that help people really connect to learning and aid with cognitive flow. Out of the 13 principles, Empowering learners, identity principle, problem solving, and pleasantly frustrating were 4 aspects that caught my attention. I think to help make time fly, and to help me with cognitive flow these four are the ones that I connect with the most. After listening to Csikszentmihalyi’s Ted Talk and Jim Gee’s Principles on Gaming I realised that 1. I was experiencing cognitive flow when I do either art, dancing, swimming or hiking. And 2 that I found that I enjoyed things because I felt it empowered me, that I had ownership over what I did, that it mattered to me and I was able to create the outcome I wanted. That there is a problem that needs solving, for example with art, turning a blank space to an artwork, to master the footwork, to speed up my lap time. And to be pleasantly frustrating, I never thought about a challenge could be called pleasantly frustrating, to find the right balance in effort level. Only increasing the effort level at the pace of the learner so that they are able to continually excel.
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