elisabeth's blog

Flow

Kathy Sierra's post on Creating Passionate Users, Fitness hacks for geeks, got me thinking, and I realized I have my own fitness hack: digital photography. With the explosion of digital cameras that happened in 2004 and is expected to continue, I'm guessing most geeks have a digital camera by now, or will soon. You're probably asking, "How is digital photography a fitness hack?" When you've got a cool digital camera and a big memory card to fill up (how about a 2GB??) you might as well go out and take tons of photos (after all, you can throw away the ones that suck before anyone sees them). And what's the best way to get out and take photos? Personally, I find going for a long walk, taking a hike or going on a bike ride to be the best ways to find interesting things to take pictures of. When you're walking, hiking and biking, you're outside, seeing new things and you're moving. You're moving at a slower pace so you're more likely to see things than when you're in a car. Who can see interesting things by the side of the road when you're flying by at 55 miles per hour? Forget it. Go for a walk and take your camera with you. I find when I take my camera on a walk, I rarely think about how far I've walked or how much time it's taken; I get into the zone that we call flow.

Flow is a concept discussed at length in one of my favorite books, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (just you try and pronounce his last name... :-)). When you are having an optimal experience, you are unaware of time passing; you are completely focused on the task at hand and you are in the "flow." Obviously, you need to enjoy what you're doing to get into a state of flow; if you don't like what you're doing, you won't get there. If you enjoy taking photographs like I do, then that state of flow will keep your attention focused on taking photographs, and not on the fact that you are moving and getting exercise at the same time.

Flow is a key concept in creating passionate users. Whenever you can create an experience so absorbing, so interesting, so enjoyable that your users lose track of time because they're just having too much fun, then you've got a passionate user on your hands. Our goal is to create a sense of flow for our readers while reading Head First (we aim to keep the reader involved, interested and ready to find out what happens next). This is something that traditionally happens in page-turner novels, not technical books. It's part of the reason we include "cliff-hangers" as Kathy calls them, why we include characters that recur through the book, and why we include stories. If all you're thinking while you're reading is, "I gotta try to stay awake..." then you'll never get into the flow state, because you really don't care what happens next. That "what happens next" challenge is really what creates geeks. Most programmers are well aware of the flow state that's possible while programming — when you're deep into a program and you're making some progress but you're not quite there yet, you can lose hours (days!) trying to get it just right. We also call this the "I'm just one compile away..." state, but it's really just flow. Your significant others, however, just think you're a complete geek because you spend days in front of the computer without moving.

Flow doesn't just create an optimal experience from the fun perspective; it's also a great state to be in for learning. The flow state is a state of peak concentration: when you are in this state, your brain is generating beta waves. This is the state you need to be in to get your brain to "pay attention." Steven Johnson discusses the science of attention in his book Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life. He describes his experiments with several neurofeedback systems designed to help you learn how to focus (thus reducing your brain's theta waves and increasing your beta waves), and how people are using these systems to help young people with attention deficit disorder (ADD), help improve athletic performance, and even help a monk who had lost his ability to achieve deep meditation.

Ok, back to photography. This hobby isn't one that's usually associated with fitness, but if you truly enjoy it and you combine it with something that gets you moving, then you're well on your way to being a fit photographer. I take my little Canon Elph digital camera with me on bike rides, and my bike ride becomes an exploration for interesting pictures, rather than simply a way to exercise.

Labels: brain, flow, learning, photography