Flow: Where Science Meets Zen

If you’ve ever played a sport, you’ve probably heard a coach yell, “Get your head in the game!” This is because it is universally understood in the sports world that the fewer extraneous thoughts you have, the better you’ll perform. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term “Flow” to describe the experience — common to elite athletes and artists — of focusing so completely on one thing that the brain completely stops processing data related to anything else. In this TED talk, Csikszentmihalyi describes Flow as, “An almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness,” and states that the human brain is capable of processing about 110 bits of information per second. Although that measurement is open to debate, the point is that, when fully focused on a task, the mind literally has no capacity to generate thoughts or data related to anything else. This is why an artist, for example, can paint for hours without realizing that he is hungry, thirsty and tired; his nervous system simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to process any more data.

At this point, neuroscience starts to blend into Zen Buddhism. In “The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind,” Zen master D.T. Suzuki explains that in “Mushin” (“no-mindedness”), “No thoughts, no consciousness, interfere with the functioning of the…