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When I used play soccer regularly, I'd occasionally experience being "in the zone". It's a blissful experience where my body is able to execute incredibly compl

When I used play soccer regularly, I'd occasionally experience being "in the zone". It's a blissful experience where my body is able to execute incredibly complex set of moves in perfect coordination as my mind enters a state of zen-like calm. The sensation is almost like a being spectator in my own body. My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task of managing the moment-to-moment decision. Instead I start noticing moves 3, 4 steps ahead as time slows to a crawl around me. I don't know if this type of experience is related in any way to the theory of consciousness, but it feels like the unconscious mind holds a lot of secrets that I'd love to see unlocked in my lifetime.

jffhn 4y ago
Reminds me of the soccer player Platini. A journalist asked him how come he was so good while not being so strong physically, he replied that he saw what was going to happen a few seconds before others.
ryanar 4y ago
I had the same experience when I was competing in eSports. I played a very fast paced and unique first person shooter that required complex and perfectly timed button sequences to dodge and attack at the same time. The game sent packets p2p so you had to predict where your opponent was about to be based on your ping to them, the shot was a hit based on where the character was when the packet was received. I played at the highest level and while I was normally not as good as my opponents, I would go into a zen state like what you described where time seemed to slow, I could predict my opponents movement easily and land shot after shot. I would either be the mvp of my team if I could get into the zone or be a non factor if I couldn’t. I never could figure out how that worked but I do feel like “flow” when coding is similar.
- ricv 4y ago
  curious to which fps this is? painkiller? ut? quake? reflex? diabotical?
  - eru 4y ago
    UT and Quake don't sound like they would require complex button presses. They are mechanically fairly simple.
    - beebeepka 4y ago
      Heh, some people's strafing in Quake is anything but simple to track. Good players don't just move left and right in consistent patterns. UT2003/4 fights can be very taxing mechanically
      - ricv 4y ago
        ah, you beat me to it. I linked some videos that highlight strafing in quake. Here's my favorite ut2k4 vid that would highlight what you're saying https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSoE44v1CTQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSoE44v1CTQ
        not1ofU 4y ago
        holy crap, that was exciting. so much to say, but would only spoil it for others.
    - ricv 4y ago
      strafe jumping in quake is far from trivial also various weapon aided jumps are required to play at the highest level, ut also has its own dodge jump mechanics and shield jumps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1MJPMl8B5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1MJPMl8B5Y the engine physics explanation is explained here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTsXO6Zicls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTsXO6Zicls being unable to execute this during a match like a duel means being at a massive disadvantage. example of good strafe jumping coupled with a plasma jump to secure map/item control and pressure the opponent on the back-foot. https://youtu.be/GFTmYD95-cQ?t=1592 https://youtu.be/GFTmYD95-cQ?t=1592
    - spookie 4y ago
      You should watch some quake 3 compilations, I'm sure no game today matches them. Even if they're more "complex".
- genocidicbunny 4y ago
  I think what you're describing with your eSports experience _is_ 'flow' -- the same as you get when coding. It's a state of focus and immersion you can get into with many different activities, not just coding.
  - unhammer 4y ago
    two types of flow. One is called absorbed flow and the other is called panoramic flow. Absorbed flow is when you're doing a task, like, minute tasks like taking apart a watch or something. And you're so focused that you enter the world, and then you look up and time has flown. All of a sudden, how did an hour go by? Martial arts has a little of both, but in some ways, to do it, you actually have to go into panoramic flow. You have to let go of your mind. You have to trust that the training, the implicit memories available of the actions, and the physical actions, and then you have to trust that there's this way of organizing information that's faster than thought. And by doing that, you enter into a flow. And that's being done from this awake consciousness. That's the functional feeling of that. And there in itself, just like Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote the book on flow, and gives these qualities of flow as that activity is in itself a pleasure, that there's a loss of a sense of ego or self, sense of timelessness, sense of connection to everything. And so that state, you're doing that activity to find something that I'm saying you can find anytime you want. […] Who, what level of mind is it that can do martial arts at that level? That you that does that, that's the awake consciousness. https://clearerthinkingpodcast.com/episode/093 https://clearerthinkingpodcast.com/episode/093
    - abudabi123 4y ago
      There is also the feeling of being ahead of the flow and showboating like a tourist taking pictures with many "third eyes" on your model of the world as experienced from every angle at once. Kind of like Usain Bolt at one of the Olympics when he broke the world record the first time. Kind of like a window manager with many viewports open on the model.
      - 4y ago
dr_dshiv 4y ago
Conscious experience involves will to action and sensation. It is highly hierarchical: for instance, humans can deliberately move individual fingers (low level) or play a sonata (high level). When we let go of low level control and pursue higher level intentions, our subconscious mind is freed to participate in a vast array of hierarchical loops of sensation and action. Symbolic verbal control is powerful, but only subconscious flow can yield the precision of high level skilled performance. It is more like an attunement of oscillators than an execution of a (symbolic) program.
donkeyd 4y ago
I have this experience sometimes when presenting for work. I do the presentation, interact with the audience, answer tough questions and at the end I don't really remember anything of it. I will have to ask others how I did, because it's mostly a blur.
kukkeliskuu 4y ago
I have very similar experiences from partnered improvized dancing, my main style being the Argentine tango. For at least last 10 years, my aim has been to find obstacles that prevent me from experiencing such a state, and experiencing such a state has become more common. I have used almost the same words to describe my experience: although I am the leader in the couple, and everything is improvized to the music, I feel like I am the spectator, and I feel the couple is moving like a single animal, one head and four legs.
erfgh 4y ago
Is it just the fact that you happened to be at the tail of your performance distribution? I used to play billiards regularly and on some days I would excel and surprise myself with how good I played. I then realized that the number of those days were roughly equal with the number of the days I surprised myself with how badly I played. Then I realized that my performance is a normal distribution and I stopped being surprised.
- nine_k 4y ago
  The interesting part here is that is about whole games, entire days if elevated performance, not just a few very lucky shots every game. This means it's a state of mind / brain / CNS that can be entered and sustained for many hours. An ability to do that on demand, or at least predictably, would be of a huge practical interest. The ability to avoid the opposite, low-performance state, equally so.
  - kukkeliskuu 4y ago
    My experience is that it is not possible enter such a flow state on demand. The state is beyond "my" control. There appears to be "a part" (not necessarily a physical part) of us that we think is "me" that wants to control, i.e. micromanage, and "on demand" means that this part would decide, i.e. able to control the flow state. However, the state seems to happen when this part lets go of the need to control things, and seems to disappear when this part tries to control things. The whole discussion is too long for here, but I recommend book Inner Game of Tennis for details.
- awb 4y ago
  I've played both billiards and soccer regularly and have experienced both sensations. With billiards, when I'm "in the zone", it feels like the early stages of an out of body experience where my mind starts to feel slightly decoupled from my body and I know that my body knows what to do to make the shot. I can then "tune out" and trust my body. With soccer, I'll be running at high speed and my mind knows I want to cut inside and nutmeg the defender (pass the ball throw a small gap in their legs and collect it on the other side). Then suddenly, it just happens. Something notices the tiny window of opportunity and just executes the move. The process of consciously analyzing the rapid feet movement, the speed of the ball, the field, the distance to the goal, the position of the other defenders, etc. is just too slow. This process feels faster and often I feel almost surprised that I just did it. After I collect the ball on the other side, things slow back down to normal speed and sometimes I'll laugh in disbelief. If I had to explain the process of either to someone else, I'd struggle because it seems like a deeper, innate physical knowledge rather than something I can formulate and explain at an intellectual level. In that sense, it feels similar to walking. You don't explain to someone how to walk, they just practice it over and over until they can do it without thinking. So, it's kind of like that but with more complex movements, plus the serotonin boost of accomplishing a goal.
maCDzP 4y ago
I had the experience you describe once when I was practicing diving. I was focusing on keeping my eyes open upon impact. It was truly a blissful experience I’ll never forget.
f1refly 4y ago
> My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task of managing the moment-to-moment decision. Instead I start noticing moves 3, 4 steps ahead as time slows to a crawl around me. I think this is a common sensation to many who have trained playing an instrument enough. I get into that state every now and then when playing something on my guitar, it's like I can curiously observe my fingers pick out the melody I want to play, without thinking about or taking much conscious action in it.
- peteridah 4y ago
  this 100%. I have experienced flow as I watch with awe as my fingers move on the keyboard to play chords/keys that my conscious mind could not have conjoured up. I later stop and use my conscious mind to learn the new thing that `I` just played.
dirtyid 4y ago
> "in the zone" It's curious to me why "the zone" or "flow" is always associated with particular expertise in skills like athletics or music or even programming when it could just as well be in walking, something 99.99% of the population are experts in. Maybe there was a point in forgotten infant/toddler memory overjoyed with being able to move from point to point subconciously, but now the bliss is replaced by sheer repetitve routine.
- Nition 4y ago
  You might have a point about flow state from simple routine. It's relatively hard to get into a flow while programming but it's easy while in the shower.
- austinjp 4y ago
  I suspect "flow" necessarily demands intense focus, so mundane tasks can't lead to a flow state. Focus is probably the wrong word since that suggests conscious control, whereas most flow seems to relegate consciousness to the role of observer. Two things seem to occur: intensity of subconscious processing, with an absence/minimisation of conscious processing. The task itself is important too, it has to be "important", typically something that requires a lot of practice with the goal of improved performance.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  Little kids absolutely love learning to walk, you can see it in their faces and their behavior. When they start walking, they are so excited and happy to do it. After a certain point, performing a complex task subconsciously becomes routine and one needs to sort of “level up” to a more difficult version to notice the flow state. The subjective experience is that the activity “slows down” and feels easier, allowing your conscious mind to wander. You see this even within sports, where the best athletes need the biggest races / competitions / events in order to feel the same way they did when they were younger learning the sport. The best surfers seek out the biggest waves, or the hardest moves, or both.
- ancientworldnow 4y ago
  I'm a street photographer and absolutely get into a flow state when I'm out on a long photo walk. Even if I'm not finding the light I need and barely talking pictures I reach a state where I notice everything effortlessly and time slows just walking down the street. You become part of the rhythm of the city.
athul7744 4y ago
I think it's called a flow state
- implements 4y ago
  Yep - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) “… is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”
sabujp 4y ago
I tried this a few months ago, my brain moved faster than my body would and i messed up my knee for a few weeks , getting old sucks
- machiaweliczny 4y ago
  This isn’t flow. I have it all the time when I think about some physical activity. My brain plans ahead and sends signals too early and messes up. This is oposite of flow. As Bruce Lee said in the movie: „Do not think, feel”
- solumunus 4y ago
  If your brain and body aren't in tune then you're not in flow.
gerash 4y ago
Interesting. This sounds like how our brain relegates tasks it has "learned" to the subconscious. Same thing happens with riding a bicycle or driving a car. At first you need to really focus but over time you don't need to think about it
celdon25 4y ago
> but it feels like the unconscious mind holds a lot of secrets that I'd love to see unlocked in my lifetime. As in, through a peer-reviewed research paper? Probably not the shortest path to learning to communicate with the subconscious. You mentioned Zen, maybe start there?
rocgf 4y ago
I used to play sports professionally at junior level and I experienced what you described quite a few times. At that time, I did not understand it in any way, but it was clear to me that some sort of "trance" was happening under certain conditions, and I would basically fully focused on the game as if nothing else mattered or even existed. The things that helped me reach that state were motivation, being under slept or slightly tired, being sick. I didn't have the concept of "flow" at that time, but I remember noticing that flow in important games without having the concept of it. It almost feels like you have to reduce your active conscious thoughts in order to get there, and just allow your instincts to take over.
- osrec 4y ago
  For me, it tends to happen more when I'm fully rested. My body feels like a well oiled machine, and my emotions seem fairly muted. It's a state of just "doing", with a sense of peace (neither especially happy, nor sad). Replicating it tends to involve just getting on with the task at hand, without too much thinking about the end goal.
- bena 4y ago
  Other people have mentioned various other games, musical instruments, typing, etc. Anything you've practiced sufficiently becomes like breathing or walking. You don't consciously think about these things, you've done them for so long they just happen. The memory of them is so embedded in you that you don't really have to actively work to recall it. What we call "muscle memory". You've done some actions so often that the action stops being "Put a finger on this fret, pick this string, wait this long, now lift the fretting finger, ..." and becomes "play this song/scale/technique". The whole performance becomes a single action in your mind. It stops being "hit the keys W O R D" and becomes "type 'word'". And then when you focus on it again, you start noticing the individual actions and you again have to think about every piece of the activity. I think with you, it sounds like you needed something to lower your inhibitions a bit. Just enough to trust that you're going to do the thing. And normally, you don't trust yourself, so you focus on the steps of the action. It's why people say they perform better after getting slightly inebriated. They're no longer hindered by their inhibitions.
InCityDreams 4y ago
I cannot find it...a great article on how elite athletes, actors, racing car drivers, have an a bility 'slow down time', in order to foresee, calculate and perform complex tasks. Your comment confirms 'it exists'. I think i get it a bit when I'm on my bike in dense town centre traffic (europe) and having to cross lanes/ roundabouts in front of cars.
incompatible 4y ago
"My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task ..." Obviously an illusion, since your brain is doing the task. The "conscious" part of the brain is apparently unaware of most of what the brain is doing. I feel that way most of the time, actually, that I don't need to consciously micromanage everything that I'm doing, since the brain still gets it done in any case. I feel that way now while writing this sentence, I'm consciously just watching the words as they appear.
- jbjbjbjb 4y ago
  The thing I find fascinating about meditation is “observing” the consciousness. When I meditate and my mind is clear I can notice the moment a thought appears and that it arrived spontaneously without conscious effort. Like it was on a background thread or something. Writing about those atypical experiences is quite difficult. It seems our language heavily assumes the default unmindful experience so doesn’t have precise ways to express the opposite.
- electrondood 4y ago
  In eastern traditions, this is called "wu wei," or non-doing. If you watch, your entire life lives itself without your involvement. The correct action emerges on its own. To the ego it can be unsettling at first. In the west we call this "flow." According to Advaita, there is no separate self/person, except as an abstraction made out of identification with various phenomena that arise in the field of consciousness. Once you see this (LSD helps), it is immediately self-evident that this has always been the case. Think Decker at the end of Blade Runner realizing he's a replicant. The person ("you") realizes they have never been anything more than a collection of phenomena. Accepting this enables one to sit back and rest as consciousness, observing without involvement as the person's life lives itself in a perpetual flow state.
CTDOCodebases 4y ago
It could just be that our unconscious minds minds are a lot more capable than we care to believe. It’s only when we let go and have faith in the unconscious mind do we see it. I notice this with typing. I have no idea which finger hits which key on my keyboard. If I make a mistake and then consciously focus on the characters instead of the words my typing slows down and lacks fluidity. If you believe in determinism then we are essentially just spectators of our own life. We just don’t realise it. We think that because we have made choices it was a possibility that other outcomes could have arisen. We don’t acknowledge that everything was always going to converge at this single point i.e everything was always going to be as it is now.
- snikeris 4y ago
  I'd go even further: our conscious minds are a lot less capable than we care to believe. The vast majority of our actions are unconscious. Think of all the unconscious things that we are doing moment to moment, heart beating, breathing, thinking. Have you ever found yourself using the bathroom w/out having consciously decided to do so? How much of the day is stimulus->response w/out any conscious course correction?
  - brookst 4y ago
    Can I take it further? The line between unconscious and conscious is not black and white, it’s a gradient. “We” live way up in the narrative-making world, but there is plenty of conscious activity going on below that. Still tons of reasoning, logic, planning, just no (or less) self-reflection and story telling. That’s why practicing a sport leads to improvement — those lower-level aspects of our consciousness get to practice and then the analytical mind gives feedback and direction, but when it comes time to really perform it is always better to stop the narrator and let those (still very conscious!) aspects do their thing.
    - Symmetry 4y ago
      In terms of actions I'd agree that the line between conscious volition and instinctual seems pretty blurry. But in terms of experience it seems like there's a pretty sharp line between conscious experiences and subliminal ones with stimuli just below a threshold acting very differently from stimuli crossing it. As an example, people with Blindsight lose the ability to consciously access what they see but they don't lose the ability to see. They can still reach out and grab something in front of them but they can't tell you verbally it's there. And if they close their eyes they can't remember where it was and grab it based on that like most people can, information that doesn't reach the level of consciousness fades from the brain almost immediately but information that enters your consciousness can persist over time.
m12k 4y ago
I've started reading books out loud in recent years. After a while I realized I could "read ahead", meaning my eyes didn't need to be on the word I was currently saying, but they could skip ahead several words, up to half a sentence. It felt like the act of actually speaking had been relegated to a background task that was processing words from a queue, so my eyes and consciousness could operate further ahead in the text, while adding to that queue. It is actually really handy, to get a better flow and intonation, to have a bit of "lookahead" in the text. I even realized I could start to think about the text I was reading, or even get distracted and think about other things (like I sometimes do if I'm reading silently) all the while continuing to read out loud. It's really interesting when you explicitly notice a task being moved from the conscious to unconscious part of your brain.
- awb 4y ago
  > even get distracted and think about other things (like I sometimes do if I'm reading silently) all the while continuing to read out loud I used to read the Harry Potter series to my kids at night and definitely experienced this. The kids would ask a question and I'd realize that I needed to re-read the part I just read aloud because I was thinking about something else and couldn't remember what I had just read.
adamhp 4y ago
You may already be familiar, but you might find Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" an interesting read. He studies this exact phenomenon.
PaulWaldman 4y ago
A much less impressive example is human speaking. Largely our conscious mind constructs ideas and the unconscious mind compiles them into words.
- dirtball_ 4y ago
  I definitely know some people who are able to speak at length without conscious thought.
dsego 4y ago
Had noticed something similar in a couple of car crashes, time slows to a crawl, I was hyper aware, I could observe things happening, dreading the outcome, but I didn't have control to act quickly enough to avert it.
fatnoah 4y ago
I used to play basketball, and I remember having similar "zone" experiences. It was like a combination of time slowing down, and me knowing with absolute certainty what move I was going to make and that whatever shot I would take was going to fall. The observing myself from the outside feeling was very real.
- nervousvarun 4y ago
  An interesting deal with this from my personal experience (which matches yours)...it was often "contagious"...at least with shooting. If one guy was cold sometimes everyone was, and obviously the opposite if he's hot. Momentum is a fascinating concept in sports. Now I watch team sports on television instead of playing them. Announcers will talk about momentum as if it's a law of physics. It's universally accepted to be "a thing"...but what is that thing? What's interesting is sometimes it's also not "contagious". And how much of that is placebo? All of it? Probably but any actual thinking about it is usually only at the sub-conscious level. Except sometimes the coach or bench brings it up and then it's not. The psychology of sports is endlessly fascinating.
SomeHacker44 4y ago
I get this situation, not in sports, but in emergency situations, like data center outages or the actually should have been scary but wasn't in-air emergencies (like engine failures - while I am the pilot). I always explain it like, time just slows down, and you know exactly what to do, like a yellow brick road leading you the right way. Neat to hear that others experience it too.
Supermancho 4y ago
Many people experience this when in an altered state (high or drunk). I can remember effortlessly performing inhuman acts of precision when in an altered state that amazed bystanders. It did not last very long. I'm pretty sure consciousness is multi-layer and not just memory.
mrich 4y ago
There's a great book describing how to get into that state, and explaining how that state is the key to success. Just read it last week and can recommend. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/905.The_Inner_Game_of_Tennis https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/905.The_Inner_Game_of_Te...

jffhn 4y ago

Reminds me of the soccer player Platini. A journalist asked him how come he was so good while not being so strong physically, he replied that he saw what was going to happen a few seconds before others.

ryanar 4y ago

I had the same experience when I was competing in eSports. I played a very fast paced and unique first person shooter that required complex and perfectly timed button sequences to dodge and attack at the same time. The game sent packets p2p so you had to predict where your opponent was about to be based on your ping to them, the shot was a hit based on where the character was when the packet was received. I played at the highest level and while I was normally not as good as my opponents, I would go into a zen state like what you described where time seemed to slow, I could predict my opponents movement easily and land shot after shot. I would either be the mvp of my team if I could get into the zone or be a non factor if I couldn’t. I never could figure out how that worked but I do feel like “flow” when coding is similar.

ricv 4y ago
curious to which fps this is? painkiller? ut? quake? reflex? diabotical?
- eru 4y ago
  UT and Quake don't sound like they would require complex button presses. They are mechanically fairly simple.
  - beebeepka 4y ago
    Heh, some people's strafing in Quake is anything but simple to track. Good players don't just move left and right in consistent patterns. UT2003/4 fights can be very taxing mechanically
    - ricv 4y ago
      ah, you beat me to it. I linked some videos that highlight strafing in quake. Here's my favorite ut2k4 vid that would highlight what you're saying https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSoE44v1CTQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSoE44v1CTQ
      - not1ofU 4y ago
        holy crap, that was exciting. so much to say, but would only spoil it for others.
  - ricv 4y ago
    strafe jumping in quake is far from trivial also various weapon aided jumps are required to play at the highest level, ut also has its own dodge jump mechanics and shield jumps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1MJPMl8B5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1MJPMl8B5Y the engine physics explanation is explained here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTsXO6Zicls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTsXO6Zicls being unable to execute this during a match like a duel means being at a massive disadvantage. example of good strafe jumping coupled with a plasma jump to secure map/item control and pressure the opponent on the back-foot. https://youtu.be/GFTmYD95-cQ?t=1592 https://youtu.be/GFTmYD95-cQ?t=1592
  - spookie 4y ago
    You should watch some quake 3 compilations, I'm sure no game today matches them. Even if they're more "complex".
genocidicbunny 4y ago
I think what you're describing with your eSports experience _is_ 'flow' -- the same as you get when coding. It's a state of focus and immersion you can get into with many different activities, not just coding.
- unhammer 4y ago
  two types of flow. One is called absorbed flow and the other is called panoramic flow. Absorbed flow is when you're doing a task, like, minute tasks like taking apart a watch or something. And you're so focused that you enter the world, and then you look up and time has flown. All of a sudden, how did an hour go by? Martial arts has a little of both, but in some ways, to do it, you actually have to go into panoramic flow. You have to let go of your mind. You have to trust that the training, the implicit memories available of the actions, and the physical actions, and then you have to trust that there's this way of organizing information that's faster than thought. And by doing that, you enter into a flow. And that's being done from this awake consciousness. That's the functional feeling of that. And there in itself, just like Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote the book on flow, and gives these qualities of flow as that activity is in itself a pleasure, that there's a loss of a sense of ego or self, sense of timelessness, sense of connection to everything. And so that state, you're doing that activity to find something that I'm saying you can find anytime you want. […] Who, what level of mind is it that can do martial arts at that level? That you that does that, that's the awake consciousness. https://clearerthinkingpodcast.com/episode/093 https://clearerthinkingpodcast.com/episode/093
  - abudabi123 4y ago
    There is also the feeling of being ahead of the flow and showboating like a tourist taking pictures with many "third eyes" on your model of the world as experienced from every angle at once. Kind of like Usain Bolt at one of the Olympics when he broke the world record the first time. Kind of like a window manager with many viewports open on the model.
    - 4y ago

dr_dshiv 4y ago

Conscious experience involves will to action and sensation. It is highly hierarchical: for instance, humans can deliberately move individual fingers (low level) or play a sonata (high level). When we let go of low level control and pursue higher level intentions, our subconscious mind is freed to participate in a vast array of hierarchical loops of sensation and action. Symbolic verbal control is powerful, but only subconscious flow can yield the precision of high level skilled performance. It is more like an attunement of oscillators than an execution of a (symbolic) program.

donkeyd 4y ago

I have this experience sometimes when presenting for work. I do the presentation, interact with the audience, answer tough questions and at the end I don't really remember anything of it. I will have to ask others how I did, because it's mostly a blur.

kukkeliskuu 4y ago

I have very similar experiences from partnered improvized dancing, my main style being the Argentine tango. For at least last 10 years, my aim has been to find obstacles that prevent me from experiencing such a state, and experiencing such a state has become more common. I have used almost the same words to describe my experience: although I am the leader in the couple, and everything is improvized to the music, I feel like I am the spectator, and I feel the couple is moving like a single animal, one head and four legs.

erfgh 4y ago

Is it just the fact that you happened to be at the tail of your performance distribution? I used to play billiards regularly and on some days I would excel and surprise myself with how good I played. I then realized that the number of those days were roughly equal with the number of the days I surprised myself with how badly I played. Then I realized that my performance is a normal distribution and I stopped being surprised.

nine_k 4y ago
The interesting part here is that is about whole games, entire days if elevated performance, not just a few very lucky shots every game. This means it's a state of mind / brain / CNS that can be entered and sustained for many hours. An ability to do that on demand, or at least predictably, would be of a huge practical interest. The ability to avoid the opposite, low-performance state, equally so.
- kukkeliskuu 4y ago
  My experience is that it is not possible enter such a flow state on demand. The state is beyond "my" control. There appears to be "a part" (not necessarily a physical part) of us that we think is "me" that wants to control, i.e. micromanage, and "on demand" means that this part would decide, i.e. able to control the flow state. However, the state seems to happen when this part lets go of the need to control things, and seems to disappear when this part tries to control things. The whole discussion is too long for here, but I recommend book Inner Game of Tennis for details.
awb 4y ago
I've played both billiards and soccer regularly and have experienced both sensations. With billiards, when I'm "in the zone", it feels like the early stages of an out of body experience where my mind starts to feel slightly decoupled from my body and I know that my body knows what to do to make the shot. I can then "tune out" and trust my body. With soccer, I'll be running at high speed and my mind knows I want to cut inside and nutmeg the defender (pass the ball throw a small gap in their legs and collect it on the other side). Then suddenly, it just happens. Something notices the tiny window of opportunity and just executes the move. The process of consciously analyzing the rapid feet movement, the speed of the ball, the field, the distance to the goal, the position of the other defenders, etc. is just too slow. This process feels faster and often I feel almost surprised that I just did it. After I collect the ball on the other side, things slow back down to normal speed and sometimes I'll laugh in disbelief. If I had to explain the process of either to someone else, I'd struggle because it seems like a deeper, innate physical knowledge rather than something I can formulate and explain at an intellectual level. In that sense, it feels similar to walking. You don't explain to someone how to walk, they just practice it over and over until they can do it without thinking. So, it's kind of like that but with more complex movements, plus the serotonin boost of accomplishing a goal.

maCDzP 4y ago

I had the experience you describe once when I was practicing diving. I was focusing on keeping my eyes open upon impact. It was truly a blissful experience I’ll never forget.

f1refly 4y ago

> My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task of managing the moment-to-moment decision. Instead I start noticing moves 3, 4 steps ahead as time slows to a crawl around me. I think this is a common sensation to many who have trained playing an instrument enough. I get into that state every now and then when playing something on my guitar, it's like I can curiously observe my fingers pick out the melody I want to play, without thinking about or taking much conscious action in it.

peteridah 4y ago
this 100%. I have experienced flow as I watch with awe as my fingers move on the keyboard to play chords/keys that my conscious mind could not have conjoured up. I later stop and use my conscious mind to learn the new thing that `I` just played.

dirtyid 4y ago

> "in the zone" It's curious to me why "the zone" or "flow" is always associated with particular expertise in skills like athletics or music or even programming when it could just as well be in walking, something 99.99% of the population are experts in. Maybe there was a point in forgotten infant/toddler memory overjoyed with being able to move from point to point subconciously, but now the bliss is replaced by sheer repetitve routine.

Nition 4y ago
You might have a point about flow state from simple routine. It's relatively hard to get into a flow while programming but it's easy while in the shower.
austinjp 4y ago
I suspect "flow" necessarily demands intense focus, so mundane tasks can't lead to a flow state. Focus is probably the wrong word since that suggests conscious control, whereas most flow seems to relegate consciousness to the role of observer. Two things seem to occur: intensity of subconscious processing, with an absence/minimisation of conscious processing. The task itself is important too, it has to be "important", typically something that requires a lot of practice with the goal of improved performance.
snowwrestler 4y ago
Little kids absolutely love learning to walk, you can see it in their faces and their behavior. When they start walking, they are so excited and happy to do it. After a certain point, performing a complex task subconsciously becomes routine and one needs to sort of “level up” to a more difficult version to notice the flow state. The subjective experience is that the activity “slows down” and feels easier, allowing your conscious mind to wander. You see this even within sports, where the best athletes need the biggest races / competitions / events in order to feel the same way they did when they were younger learning the sport. The best surfers seek out the biggest waves, or the hardest moves, or both.
ancientworldnow 4y ago
I'm a street photographer and absolutely get into a flow state when I'm out on a long photo walk. Even if I'm not finding the light I need and barely talking pictures I reach a state where I notice everything effortlessly and time slows just walking down the street. You become part of the rhythm of the city.

athul7744 4y ago

I think it's called a flow state

implements 4y ago
Yep - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) “… is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.”

sabujp 4y ago

I tried this a few months ago, my brain moved faster than my body would and i messed up my knee for a few weeks , getting old sucks

machiaweliczny 4y ago
This isn’t flow. I have it all the time when I think about some physical activity. My brain plans ahead and sends signals too early and messes up. This is oposite of flow. As Bruce Lee said in the movie: „Do not think, feel”
solumunus 4y ago
If your brain and body aren't in tune then you're not in flow.

gerash 4y ago

Interesting. This sounds like how our brain relegates tasks it has "learned" to the subconscious. Same thing happens with riding a bicycle or driving a car. At first you need to really focus but over time you don't need to think about it

celdon25 4y ago

> but it feels like the unconscious mind holds a lot of secrets that I'd love to see unlocked in my lifetime. As in, through a peer-reviewed research paper? Probably not the shortest path to learning to communicate with the subconscious. You mentioned Zen, maybe start there?

rocgf 4y ago

I used to play sports professionally at junior level and I experienced what you described quite a few times. At that time, I did not understand it in any way, but it was clear to me that some sort of "trance" was happening under certain conditions, and I would basically fully focused on the game as if nothing else mattered or even existed. The things that helped me reach that state were motivation, being under slept or slightly tired, being sick. I didn't have the concept of "flow" at that time, but I remember noticing that flow in important games without having the concept of it. It almost feels like you have to reduce your active conscious thoughts in order to get there, and just allow your instincts to take over.

osrec 4y ago
For me, it tends to happen more when I'm fully rested. My body feels like a well oiled machine, and my emotions seem fairly muted. It's a state of just "doing", with a sense of peace (neither especially happy, nor sad). Replicating it tends to involve just getting on with the task at hand, without too much thinking about the end goal.
bena 4y ago
Other people have mentioned various other games, musical instruments, typing, etc. Anything you've practiced sufficiently becomes like breathing or walking. You don't consciously think about these things, you've done them for so long they just happen. The memory of them is so embedded in you that you don't really have to actively work to recall it. What we call "muscle memory". You've done some actions so often that the action stops being "Put a finger on this fret, pick this string, wait this long, now lift the fretting finger, ..." and becomes "play this song/scale/technique". The whole performance becomes a single action in your mind. It stops being "hit the keys W O R D" and becomes "type 'word'". And then when you focus on it again, you start noticing the individual actions and you again have to think about every piece of the activity. I think with you, it sounds like you needed something to lower your inhibitions a bit. Just enough to trust that you're going to do the thing. And normally, you don't trust yourself, so you focus on the steps of the action. It's why people say they perform better after getting slightly inebriated. They're no longer hindered by their inhibitions.

InCityDreams 4y ago

I cannot find it...a great article on how elite athletes, actors, racing car drivers, have an a bility 'slow down time', in order to foresee, calculate and perform complex tasks. Your comment confirms 'it exists'. I think i get it a bit when I'm on my bike in dense town centre traffic (europe) and having to cross lanes/ roundabouts in front of cars.

incompatible 4y ago

"My brain feels like it's been relieved of the task ..." Obviously an illusion, since your brain is doing the task. The "conscious" part of the brain is apparently unaware of most of what the brain is doing. I feel that way most of the time, actually, that I don't need to consciously micromanage everything that I'm doing, since the brain still gets it done in any case. I feel that way now while writing this sentence, I'm consciously just watching the words as they appear.

jbjbjbjb 4y ago
The thing I find fascinating about meditation is “observing” the consciousness. When I meditate and my mind is clear I can notice the moment a thought appears and that it arrived spontaneously without conscious effort. Like it was on a background thread or something. Writing about those atypical experiences is quite difficult. It seems our language heavily assumes the default unmindful experience so doesn’t have precise ways to express the opposite.
electrondood 4y ago
In eastern traditions, this is called "wu wei," or non-doing. If you watch, your entire life lives itself without your involvement. The correct action emerges on its own. To the ego it can be unsettling at first. In the west we call this "flow." According to Advaita, there is no separate self/person, except as an abstraction made out of identification with various phenomena that arise in the field of consciousness. Once you see this (LSD helps), it is immediately self-evident that this has always been the case. Think Decker at the end of Blade Runner realizing he's a replicant. The person ("you") realizes they have never been anything more than a collection of phenomena. Accepting this enables one to sit back and rest as consciousness, observing without involvement as the person's life lives itself in a perpetual flow state.

CTDOCodebases 4y ago

It could just be that our unconscious minds minds are a lot more capable than we care to believe. It’s only when we let go and have faith in the unconscious mind do we see it. I notice this with typing. I have no idea which finger hits which key on my keyboard. If I make a mistake and then consciously focus on the characters instead of the words my typing slows down and lacks fluidity. If you believe in determinism then we are essentially just spectators of our own life. We just don’t realise it. We think that because we have made choices it was a possibility that other outcomes could have arisen. We don’t acknowledge that everything was always going to converge at this single point i.e everything was always going to be as it is now.

snikeris 4y ago
I'd go even further: our conscious minds are a lot less capable than we care to believe. The vast majority of our actions are unconscious. Think of all the unconscious things that we are doing moment to moment, heart beating, breathing, thinking. Have you ever found yourself using the bathroom w/out having consciously decided to do so? How much of the day is stimulus->response w/out any conscious course correction?
- brookst 4y ago
  Can I take it further? The line between unconscious and conscious is not black and white, it’s a gradient. “We” live way up in the narrative-making world, but there is plenty of conscious activity going on below that. Still tons of reasoning, logic, planning, just no (or less) self-reflection and story telling. That’s why practicing a sport leads to improvement — those lower-level aspects of our consciousness get to practice and then the analytical mind gives feedback and direction, but when it comes time to really perform it is always better to stop the narrator and let those (still very conscious!) aspects do their thing.
  - Symmetry 4y ago
    In terms of actions I'd agree that the line between conscious volition and instinctual seems pretty blurry. But in terms of experience it seems like there's a pretty sharp line between conscious experiences and subliminal ones with stimuli just below a threshold acting very differently from stimuli crossing it. As an example, people with Blindsight lose the ability to consciously access what they see but they don't lose the ability to see. They can still reach out and grab something in front of them but they can't tell you verbally it's there. And if they close their eyes they can't remember where it was and grab it based on that like most people can, information that doesn't reach the level of consciousness fades from the brain almost immediately but information that enters your consciousness can persist over time.

m12k 4y ago

I've started reading books out loud in recent years. After a while I realized I could "read ahead", meaning my eyes didn't need to be on the word I was currently saying, but they could skip ahead several words, up to half a sentence. It felt like the act of actually speaking had been relegated to a background task that was processing words from a queue, so my eyes and consciousness could operate further ahead in the text, while adding to that queue. It is actually really handy, to get a better flow and intonation, to have a bit of "lookahead" in the text. I even realized I could start to think about the text I was reading, or even get distracted and think about other things (like I sometimes do if I'm reading silently) all the while continuing to read out loud. It's really interesting when you explicitly notice a task being moved from the conscious to unconscious part of your brain.

awb 4y ago
> even get distracted and think about other things (like I sometimes do if I'm reading silently) all the while continuing to read out loud I used to read the Harry Potter series to my kids at night and definitely experienced this. The kids would ask a question and I'd realize that I needed to re-read the part I just read aloud because I was thinking about something else and couldn't remember what I had just read.

adamhp 4y ago

You may already be familiar, but you might find Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" an interesting read. He studies this exact phenomenon.

PaulWaldman 4y ago

A much less impressive example is human speaking. Largely our conscious mind constructs ideas and the unconscious mind compiles them into words.

dirtball_ 4y ago
I definitely know some people who are able to speak at length without conscious thought.

dsego 4y ago

Had noticed something similar in a couple of car crashes, time slows to a crawl, I was hyper aware, I could observe things happening, dreading the outcome, but I didn't have control to act quickly enough to avert it.

fatnoah 4y ago

I used to play basketball, and I remember having similar "zone" experiences. It was like a combination of time slowing down, and me knowing with absolute certainty what move I was going to make and that whatever shot I would take was going to fall. The observing myself from the outside feeling was very real.

nervousvarun 4y ago
An interesting deal with this from my personal experience (which matches yours)...it was often "contagious"...at least with shooting. If one guy was cold sometimes everyone was, and obviously the opposite if he's hot. Momentum is a fascinating concept in sports. Now I watch team sports on television instead of playing them. Announcers will talk about momentum as if it's a law of physics. It's universally accepted to be "a thing"...but what is that thing? What's interesting is sometimes it's also not "contagious". And how much of that is placebo? All of it? Probably but any actual thinking about it is usually only at the sub-conscious level. Except sometimes the coach or bench brings it up and then it's not. The psychology of sports is endlessly fascinating.

SomeHacker44 4y ago

I get this situation, not in sports, but in emergency situations, like data center outages or the actually should have been scary but wasn't in-air emergencies (like engine failures - while I am the pilot). I always explain it like, time just slows down, and you know exactly what to do, like a yellow brick road leading you the right way. Neat to hear that others experience it too.

Supermancho 4y ago

Many people experience this when in an altered state (high or drunk). I can remember effortlessly performing inhuman acts of precision when in an altered state that amazed bystanders. It did not last very long. I'm pretty sure consciousness is multi-layer and not just memory.

mrich 4y ago

There's a great book describing how to get into that state, and explaining how that state is the key to success. Just read it last week and can recommend. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/905.The_Inner_Game_of_Tennis https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/905.The_Inner_Game_of_Te...