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CHAPTER 6

Reading. In the interviews conducted by Professor Massimini around the world, reading books was the most often mentioned flow activity, especially in traditional groups undergoing modernization (Massimini, Csikszentmihalyi, & Delle Fave 1988, pp. 74–75). See also the study by Nell of how reading provides enjoyment (1988).

Mental puzzles. The Dutch historian Johann Huizinga (1939 [1970]) argued that science and scholarship in general originated in riddling games.

“Works of art…” is from Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson (in press).

The normal state of the mind is chaos. This conclusion is based on various lines of evidence collected with the ESM. For example, of all the things teenagers do, “thinking” is the least intrinsically motivating activity, and one of the highest on negative affect and on passivity (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson 1984, p. 300). This is because people say they are thinking only when they are not doing anything else—when there are no external demands on their mind. The same pattern holds for adults, who are least happy and motivated when their mind is not engaged by an externally structured activity (Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi in press).

The various sensory deprivation experiments also show that without patterned input of information, the organization of consciousness tends to break down. For instance, George Miller writes: “The mind survives by ingesting information” (Miller 1983, p. 111). A more general claim is that organisms survive by ingesting negentropy (Schrödinger 1947).

The negative quality of the television viewing experience has been documented by several ESM studies, e.g., Csikszentmihalyi & Kubey (1981), Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1984), Csikszentmihalyi, Larson, & Prescott (1977), Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi (in press), and Larson & Kubey (1983).

Mental imagery. For some of Singer’s work on daydreaming, see Singer (1966, 1973, 1981) and Singer & Switzer (1980). In the last decade, a widespread “mental imagery” movement has developed in the U.S.

The Buñuel reference is from Sacks (1970 [1987], p. 23).

Reciting names of ancestors. Generally, the task of remembering belongs to the elder members of the tribe, and sometimes it is assigned to the chief. For example: “The Melanesian chief…has no administrative work, he has no function, properly speaking…. But in him…are enclosed the clan’s myth, tradition, alliances, and strengths…. When he delivers from his own lips the clan names and the marvelous phrases which have moved generations, he enlarges time for each one…. The chief’s authority rests on a simple quality which is his alone: he himself is the Word of the clan” (Leenhardt 1947 [1979], pp. 117–18). One example of how complex kinship reckoning can be is illustrated by Evans-Pritchard’s work on the Nuer of the Sudan, who divide their ancestors in maximal, major, minor, and minimal lineages, all connecting to each other for five or six ascending generations (Evans-Pritchard 1940 [1978]).

Riddles. The rhyme translated by Charlotte Guest, as well as the material on the following page, come from the famous account Robert Graves (1960) gives of the origins of poetry and literacy in The White Goddess. Graves belonged to that wonderful period of British academic life when serious scholarship coexisted with unfettered flights of the imagination—the period when C. S. Lewis and R. R. Tolkien taught classics and wrote science fiction at Oxford. Graves’s mythopoetic reconstructions are controversial, but they provide the layperson with a feeling for what the quality of thought and experience might have been in the distant past, to an extent that one cannot get from works of more cautious scholarship.

Rote learning. H. E. Garrett (1941) has reviewed the experimental evidence that contributed to the demise of rote learning in schools; see also Suppies (1978). This evidence showed that learning nonsense syllables did not improve a generalized aptitude for remembering. It is difficult to understand why educators would have thought such results