What Happens In The Zone?

"willing to work hard for extended periods in narrow solenoidal magnetic fields"

Sounds like a typical grad student in a typical grad student office.

I'm not smart enough for the theoretical breakthrough Zone cases, but the two definite Zone-like moments I can attest to were both caused by extreme stress/deadlines.

Writing up my thesis in the last two weeks - I was working in an isolated building that had had several break-ins as thieves made off with Sun workstations. The combination of working from 8pm to 4am completely on my own in the building, the security light occasionally flickering on and off due to foxes, and the occasional odd groan and creak in the hundred year old building all led to a weird, paranoid state of mind that was great for cranking out the chapters.

Second one was writing an ultimately successful grant two years ago on behalf of the PI who got very sick in the last two days. Having his Boss looming over me and suggesting complete section rewrites with less than three hours to go before the Sponsored Projects deadline led to brain-jumping-the-tracks non-linear thinking, and ultimately new simplified ways of presenting the science case.

I suppose it'd be prudent to compare with fMRI studies of serious meditation, creative writing and other fugue states.

And dead salmon. Don't forget dead salmon.

Ok, we have a plan.

We get good senior grad students.
Move them to a new "special office" - bonus is they will accept the absence of laptop and working cell phone.
Put them under intense pressure and paranoia from external factors.

And dead fish. Smoked or fresh? We must investigate.
I think we should also try cod.

So... who want to do the paperwork?

I've been in the zone even with distractions. That's the beauty of "the zone"; you're so focused on something, everything else disappears. Time disappears.

Mine have never been induced by stress or pressure, though.

A researcher with the eminently googleable name of "Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi" studies this phenomenon. He calls it "flow", but I believe it is the same mental state. If you google his name and "fMRI", you do get some promising hits, but I haven't followed the links yet. Also, you might just ask him - the one time I met him, he seemed like a very friendly person.

A guy who is kind of a wiseass named "Dr. Mezmer" has a webpage which discusses Csikszentmihalyi's theories. My take is that he isn't entirely fair, for the sake of being funny, but there is a reference to functional MRI experiments in the first paragraph of the first link on this page: http://flowstate.homestead.com/csikszentmihalyi.html I think he is being unfair in that csikszentmihalyi's research is intended to help educators, not research psychologists.

Anyway, Dr. Mezmer reports (without an apparent source) that people hooked up to fMRI who engage in flow-producing taks show heighted levels of dopamine.

Steinn, I suppose your post was pretty tongue-in-cheek, but I think that a) fMRI isn't fine grained enough, and b) we know so little about how the brain works, that even if fMRI was extremely fine grained, we wouldn't undestand what we were seeing.

Another instance of "The Zone" - I think - is when proficient instrumentalists completely cease to think about their instrument, the scales and chord progressions, the dynamics and rhythms cognitively, and get so caught up in the atmosphere that everything falls into place, the notes come pouring out just right - it's the moment when everything comes together and productivity/quality of output are increased.

I would venture a guess that this happens when not just external distractions are absent, but when the mental (conscious or unconscious) processing isn't still looking for a schema, or making the effort to produce one to fit the situation, but when the schema is found and applied without further effort being put into pattern recognition/search for a mode of processing that makes everything fall into place, everything come together. When this processing schema is found, this might reduce cognitive load, so that more processing capacity is available for using the resources within the schema to produce quality output...

... but that's just an idea.

It seems to me that "The Zone" happens when we are able to quickly switch back and forth between two very distinct states of mind, both of which are crucial to solving a complex problem: one is that of seeing the problem from afar, the big picture; of thinking creatively and letting one's imagination flow-- and the other is that of extreme focus.

At least from my limited experience, being in the zone means being able to switch back and forth between that intense focus and that bird's eye view. If you're too focused on the task at hand, you can't come up with original solutions because you can't consider the problem from different points of view; the converse is true when you're merely daydreaming: you may have very interesting ideas, but if you just jump from one thought to the next you can't do anything with those ideas.

--
http://noamgr.wordpress.com

If you could arrange teaching relief and post a guard to keep my students away, I'd
totally go into a solenoid for this study!

RE "What? We're going to let some Buddhist Monks figure this out first?"
--You're hundreds of years late. Talk to any Buddhist monk and you'll see how in the zone they are at all times. It comes from heavy meditation, and from what I've seen of Tibetan Buddhist monks, lots of hearty laughter. Take-home message: we shouldn't take ourselves so seriously.... and then we'll come up with serious answers.

What happens in the Zone... stays in the Zone...

I think for me personally, the zone is all about interest. It requires an intense interest which leads to an air of excitement. It becomes the Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

I'd suggest Rubik's Cube as a model for testing - solving that is a repeatable, teachable, modestly difficult task that uses several cognitive abilities - observation, 3-D mental imagery, planning, short-term memory and so on. That's the closest I've been to The Zone, I seemed to exist on two planes of existence at the same time, The World and The Cube, I could be chatting with people and hear a clock ticking, and yet be totally focused on the Cube as well.
Some of it might be practice - I agree with the comment above about musicians; accomplished athletes also say they hit The Zone. But Wayne Gretzky or Tiger Woods wouldn't perform well in an fMRI machine.

I could be chatting with people and hear a clock ticking, and yet be totally focused on the Cube as well.

As the wise ass Dr. Mezmer, here is my response to Eric Goldstein's post. This post includes a definition of flow from the perspective or neuroscience, and of course includes the references that he found earlier omitted.

http://mezmer.blogspot.com/2004/07/flow-intrinsic-motivation-and-2nd.ht…