Normally, whenever that was, I would go out for a run, zone out to my heartbeat, breath, or the sound of my feet falling on the pavement and have a storm of ideas come into my head as a shapeless mass and then leave fully formed. I could take these ideas and do something new as needed or go deeper into some problem that was already before me. Then normal changed, and as I mentioned in my last post things just wouldn’t come together. But I noticed that it was the day spent playing games that might have done something.
That got me wondering about the potential mechanism. With no assignment to understand this, I put together a string of searches and I think I have a working idea. Starting with music.
When I’m working, I’m the type to have a podcast or music going on in the background. I find that it helps linearize my thinking, but others wonder how or why. Well it seems that there is research on both sides of the debate as always, but I’ll choose my biased side. Time has a nice piece about this from a few years ago that mentions studies on each side. In the pro camp, a study suggested that the music helped to promote divergent thinking. If you take a look at what divergent thinking is, the Wikipedia article says that it promotes non linear thinking! I know! How does it help me linearize? I have no idea, but I think for me it puts my ideas in their natural state and ages of well meaning but poorly equipped teachers and profs have flipped my language on this. But regardless… Music helps ideas to start moving. Great. Games do have some pretty good music, and one of the missions I was working on was to find the source of some music (some Celtic/Indian fusion) coming from somewhere on the map. So maybe it was the music. But I do that all the time these days, why didn’t anything more happen?
I pointed out that I “zoned out and fried my brain on games”. It seems that may have been an important part of the unlocking mechanism as well. Inc. has a good piece about zoning out (complementary article in The Cut). The foil to mindfulness, mindlessness is also an important part of our mental balance it seems. Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener argue this in their book, The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self—Not Just Your “Good Self”—Drives Success and Fulfillment. This zone out is important to get those ideas growing. My runs were not doing it anymore, so this stimulation rich game may have been my ticket.
Games, the latest media villain in a chain reaching back to songs and stone tablets, have been studied many times and the first search result I found hit on this quick piece in Science Daily about games impacting attention. With all the stimulation, attention is key in games. And anyone who can’t see that, well might not be playing games. Like any other experience that creates a response, games can have a dark side, but this “hit” wasn’t bad for me and it’s not like it’s the only thing I’m doing. But in the game, I can tell you that I was indeed, “in the zone”. I was certainly experiencing Flow.
All these things seemed to come together for my post and this morning, out for my run (21k in drizzle), I was in my favourite zone (running is certainly my drug) and this entire post less the searching came to me and it has taken barely any time (especially compared to the last few that I have done or tried since March) to hammer out.
The second to last post about getting things started again once Not Zoom Normal spoke about starting new tasks. I think I might have been trying to get things worked out there, but just wasn’t hitting things just right – through no fault of RDR2, that game is as immersive as any
Thoughts?
PS – the rain washed the shoes up to almost new!
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