Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [77]
To avoid this condition, people are naturally eager to fill their minds with whatever information is readily available, as long as it distracts attention from turning inward and dwelling on negative feelings. This explains why such a huge proportion of time is invested in watching television, despite the fact that it is very rarely enjoyed. Compared to other sources of stimulation—like reading, talking to other people, or working on a hobby—TV can provide continuous and easily accessible information that will structure the viewer’s attention, at a very low cost in terms of the psychic energy that needs to be invested. While people watch television, they need not fear that their drifting minds will force them to face disturbing personal problems. It is understandable that, once one develops this strategy for overcoming psychic entropy, to give up the habit becomes almost impossible.
The better route for avoiding chaos in consciousness, of course, is through habits that give control over mental processes to the individual, rather than to some external source of stimulation, such as the programs of network TV. To acquire such habits requires practice, however, and the kind of goals and rules that are inherent in flow activities. For instance, one of the simplest ways to use the mind is daydreaming: playing out some sequence of events as mental images. But even this apparently easy way to order thought is beyond the range of many people. Jerome Singer, the Yale psychologist who has studied daydreaming and mental imagery more than perhaps any other scientist, has shown that daydreaming is a skill that many children never learn to use. Yet daydreaming not only helps create emotional order by compensating in imagination for unpleasant reality—as when a person can reduce frustration and aggression against someone who has caused injury by visualizing a situation in which the aggressor is punished—but it also allows children (and adults) to rehearse imaginary situations so that the best strategy for confronting them may be adopted, alternative options considered, unanticipated consequences discovered—all results that help increase the complexity of consciousness. And, of course, when used with skill, daydreaming can be very enjoyable.
In reviewing the conditions that help establish order in the mind, we shall first look at the extremely important role of memory, then at how words can be used to produce flow experiences. Next we shall consider three symbolic systems that are very enjoyable if one comes to know their rules: history, science, and philosophy. Many more fields of study could have been mentioned, but these three can serve as examples for the others. Each one of these mental “games” is accessible to anyone who wants to play them.
THE MOTHER OF SCIENCE
The Greeks personified memory as lady Mnemosyne. Mother of the nine Muses, she was believed to have given birth to all the arts and sciences. It is valid to consider memory the oldest mental skill, from which all others derive, for, if we weren’t able to remember, we couldn’t follow the rules that make other mental operations possible. Neither logic nor poetry could exist, and the rudiments of science would have to be rediscovered with each new generation. The primacy of memory is true first of all in terms of the history of the species. Before written notation systems were developed, all learned information had to be transmitted from the memory of one person to that of another. And it is true also in terms of the history of each individual human being. A person who cannot remember is cut off from the knowledge of prior experiences, unable to build patterns of consciousness that bring order to the mind. As Buñuel has said, “Life without memory is no life at all…. our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.”
All forms of mental flow depend on memory, either directly or indirectly. History suggests that the oldest way