Sakiro wrote:  (the state we call "the flow")
Some good (or at least decent) books about this?
Is this one a good start?
http://www.amazon.com/Flow-The-Psycholo … s=the+flow


...I haven't read this. It certainly sounds cool but I wouldn't like to order it over the phone :  )  (how do you pronounce that surname?) It's also quite old (2008) so may not have much in the way of MRI data etc.

I have read “Magical Parent, Magical Child”:
http://www.amazon.com/Magical-Parent-Ch … ical+child
which does have a lot to say about the Zone, but can get irritating as it uses a tight parochial view based on criticizing the faults in American society (which is full of things the rest of the world has never heard of, such as 'little league') and doesn't contain much scientific info. It does mention Csikzentmihalyi's (hereafter known as 'Mihaly C') book and includes a quote, it also mentions 'In The Zone' by Michael Murphy:
http://www.amazon.com/Zone-Transcendent … ael+Murphy
but I haven't read that either.

Funky article here:
http://www.aspetar.com/journal/viewarticle.aspx?id=40
which I have read, and which also mentions the Mihaly C book.

Also this:
http://brainworldmagazine.com/in-the-creative-zone/
from Charles Limb (the dude who puts musicians in MRI scanners)
Remember folks,you heard it first from Charlie  LOL  :  )

Re: neurotransmitters -nicely sussed  :  )  But there's more going on that just stretch-relax; this is one of our 'unity' modes and rewards us with not just serotonin but endorphins too  :  )
Best,
AR

Hi dude,
Re:  http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Ad … ne.0088665

This is in T12  :  ) 
...and if you want to keep going, ahead of time, follow up with:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHwXlcHc … _ggX8zfNWn

It's very cool when curiosity leads us in the same direction  :  )
Best,
AR

Hi dude,

Sakiro Wrote:
More about creativity anf flow Enjoy! Scott Barry Kaufman: Creative brains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpWLZntADdI

...Wow, watching this made me very aware of the rate of progress in research!  :  )
As far as I can tell this was made around a year ago (?) and at that time it would have been the hottest news on creativity research. Now, just a year later, it's already out of date. Three main reasons for that, plus a few small ones:

(1) Divergent thinking is no longer the predominant paradigm for measuring imagination. It is inadequate for various reasons, (not the least being creativity uses convergent as well as divergent thinking.)
(2) There are actually three (not two) pathways (he calls them networks; they are actually pathways between several networks, so a better title might be 'systems'); involved in the creative process. They are (a) the 'default' (imagination) pathway, (b) the 'exec. attention' (focus) pathway and (c) the 'Salience Network' pathway; which  constantly monitors both external events and the internal stream of consciousness and flexibly shifts the attention to whatever information is most salient to solving the task at hand. This pathway includes the dorsal anterior cingulate cortices [dACC] and anterior insular [AI] and is important for dynamic switching between networks. [refs http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/02/1113455109  ]
(3) A large part of his argument hinges ob the idea that 'creative people can operate both these systems at once. That's now known to be not true. When we use these three pathways we alternate between the first two with the assistance of the third. Because we can do that very very fast, it looks simultaneous; but it isn't. A bit like 'sync', it is almost but not quite exact (in order to avoid lockstep.)Indeed there is a mechanism that prevents the pathways functioning at exactly the same instant.

Another problem is the false separation of population into 'creative people' and 'the rest of us'. No such categories exist. Those who are creative have simply had more practice at being creative, so plasticity has produced more densely wired networks.

All this is covered in T12.
Best,
AR