The Centring of Attention

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The merging of action and awareness is made possible by a centring of attention on a limited stimulus field. To insure that people concentrate on their actions, potentially intruding stimuli must be kept out of attention. Some writers have called this processing a narrowing of consciousness, a giving up the past and the future. But memento guy doesn't have that constant insertion of the questions like, why am i doing this? Yess, a constant flostate.

David and Tamler lose themselves in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (pr. ‘chick sent me high’) classic paper on the concept of flow. We talk about the features of flow activities – loss of ego, the merging of your awareness with the activity, and autotelic (not what you think) enjoyment. What makes flow activities so rewarding? Do you need to develop skills over many years to experience them? Do easy and natural social interactions count as flow?

Plus as men of pure virtue, we call an audible and choose not to make fun of a recent paper (with a student as lead author). Instead we pilot a not fully formed idea: “Substack Starters." Now that the economy is tanking, do we have any heterodox beliefs that might lead to profitable Substacks?