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what they call “good work,” a potent mix of what people are excellent at, what engages them, and their ethics—what they believe matters.18 Those are more likely to be high-absorption callings: people love what they are doing. Full absorption in what we do feels good, and pleasure is the emotional marker for flow.
One key to more flow in life comes when we align what we do with what we enjoy, as is the case with those fortunate folks whose jobs give them great pleasure. High achievers in any field—the lucky ones, anyway—have hit on this combination.
Another entryway can come via doing what we are passionate about; motivation sometimes drives us into flow.
Workplace surveys, though, find large numbers of people are in a very different brain state: they daydream, waste hours cruising the Web or YouTube, and do the bare minimum required. Their attention scatters. Such disengagement and indifference are rampant, especially among repetitive, undemanding jobs. To get the disengaged workers any nearer the focused range demands upping their motivation and enthusiasm, evoking a sense of purpose, and adding a dollop of pressure.
On the other hand, another large group are stuck in the state neurobiologists call “frazzle,” where constant stress overloads their nervous system with floods of cortisol and adrenaline. Their attention fixates on their worries, not their job. This emotional exhaustion can lead to burnout. Full focus gives us a potential doorway into flow. But when we choose to focus on one thing and ignore the rest, we surface a constant tension—usually invisible—between a great neural divide, where the top of the brain tussles with the bottom.
Why the puzzle? Our brain has two semi-independent, largely separate mental systems. One has massive computing power and operates constantly, purring away in quiet to solve our problems, surprising us with a sudden solution to complex pondering. Since it operates beyond the horizon of conscious awareness we are blind to its workings.
The bottom-up mind is: • faster in brain time, which operates in milliseconds • involuntary and automatic: always on • intuitive, operating through networks of association • impulsive, driven by emotions • executor of our habitual routines and guide for our actions • manager for our mental models of the world By contrast, the top-down mind is: • slower • voluntary • effortful • the seat of self-control, which can (sometimes) overpower automatic routines and mute emotionally driven impulses • able to learn new models, make new plans, and take charge of our automatic repertoire—to an extent
When we choose to tune in to the beauty of a sunset, concentrate on what we’re reading, or have a deep talk with someone, it’s a top-down shift. Our mind’s eye plays out a continual dance between stimulus-driven attention capture and voluntarily directed focus.
Our top-down mind takes more time to deliberate on what it gets presented with, taking things one at a time and applying more thoughtful analysis.
Much (some say all) of what the top-down mind believes it has chosen to focus on, think about, and do is actually plans dictated bottom-up. If this were a movie, psychologist Daniel Kahneman wryly notes, the top-down mind would be a “supporting character who believes herself to be the hero.”
As we shift our attention from one task, plan, sensation or the like to another, the related brain circuitry lights up. Bring to mind a happy memory of dancing and the neurons for joy and movement spring to life. Recall the funeral of a loved one and the circuitry for sadness activates. Mentally rehearse a golf stroke and the axons and dendrites that orchestrate those moves wire together a bit more strongly.
The peak of automaticity can be seen when expertise pays off in effortless attention to high demand, whether a master-level chess match, a NASCAR race, or rendering an oil painting. If we haven’t practiced enough, all of these will take deliberate focus. But if we have mastered the requisite skills to a level that meets the demand, they will take no extra cognitive effort—freeing our attention for the extras seen only among those at top levels.
As world-class champions attest, at the topmost levels, where your opponents have practiced about as many thousands of hours as you have, any competition becomes a mental game: your mind state determines how well you can focus, and so how well you can do. The more you can relax and trust in bottom-up moves, the more you free your mind to be nimble.
Take, for example, star football quarterbacks who have what sports analysts call “great ability to see the field”: they can read the other team’s defensive formations to sense the opponent’s intentions to move, and once the play starts instantly adjust to those movements, gaining a priceless second or two to pick out an open receiver for a pass. Such “seeing” requires enorm...
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when she began to think about the details of her technique, instead of just leaving the job to the motor circuits that had practiced these moves to mastery, Jones had shifted from relying on her bottom-up system to interference from the top.
The motor cortex, which in a well-seasoned athlete has these moves deeply etched in its circuits from thousands of hours of practice, operates best when left alone. When the prefrontal cortex activates and we start thinking about how we’re doing, how to do what we’re doing—or, worse, what not to do—the brain gives over some control to circuits that know how to think and worry, but not how to deliver the move itself. Whether in the hundred meters, soccer, or baseball, it’s a universal recipe for tripping up.
Relaxation and making love go best when we just let them happen—not try to force them. The parasympathetic nervous system, which kicks in during these activities, ordinarily acts independently of our brain’s executive, which thinks about them.
Flubs, Wegner has found, escalate to the degree we are distracted, stressed, or otherwise mentally burdened. In those circumstances a cognitive control system that ordinarily monitors errors we might make (like don’t mention that topic) can inadvertently act as a mental prime, increasing the likelihood of that very mistake (like mentioning that topic).
Life immersed in digital distractions creates a near-constant cognitive overload. And that overload wears out self-control.
Forget that resolve to diet. Lost in the digital world we mindlessly reach for the Pringles.
And a third said that though he had studied “male sexual over-perception bias”—the misinterpretation of a woman’s friendliness as romantic interest—he still succumbs to the bias.
Most of this emotional transaction goes on out of awareness, leading people to avoid situations where they might get anxious.
But a mini-industry of brain studies in the service of marketing has led to tactics based on manipulating our unconscious mind. One such study found, for example, that if you show people luxury items or just have them think about luxury goods, they become more self-centered in their decisions.
