Episode 2 - Flow State, Metaphor and the Axial Revolution
Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
The first episode introduced the idea that there are fundamental connections between our cognition, meaning making and states of consciousness. It focused on the upper palaeolithic era and the dawn of shamanism. This episode transports us from the upper palaeolithic era to the Bronze Age. More specifically, we’re taken to the start of the Axial Revolution during the Bronze Age and the birth of the mythologies we find most relevant today (e.g. Christianity, Buddhism, etc).
The last episode left off talking about how shamanism can be conceptualised as a set of psycho-technologies to change the way we parse the world. John Vervake proposes that part of what the shaman is doing when enacting these practices is attempting to enter into a feedback loop between the flow state and their machinery for implicit learning. That’s quite a mouthful. Let’s unpack that one by one.
The flow state
The flow state is extensively discussed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
This idea has been discussed quite a lot in popular culture. The flow state is a state of consciousness where you’ve reached a “perfect” fittedness with your immediate environment. As you can see from the diagram above, it’s a zone where the difficulty of a task is just above the threshold of one’s current level of skill. To succeed at the task, the individual has to become completely absorbed in the task and allow their brain to exapt new skills to solve the task. You need to be under specific environmental conditions to encourage your brain to enter the flow state. If the task is too hard, you’ll feel anxiety and won’t reach total absorption. And conversely, you’ll get bored if the task is too easy.
The flow state is deeply positive for people. When you’re in the flow state, your perception of time changes. Your sense of self is altered. Suddenly, the chatter in your mind seems to disappear and your body is free to create. People that regularly experience this state report that their lives are more meaningful. Note that the meaning people find in engaging in the flow state isn’t the same as pleasure. In fact, many people do things that seem superficially unpleasant (e.g. rock climbing, martial arts), that involve substantial physical risk because these activities allow them to enter a state of flow.
Being in this state feels “effortless”, even if it’s extremely metabolically costly. For example, if you’re a martial artist in the ring, or a shaman chanting and dancing for hours, your body is consuming a lot of resources to fuel this movement. But your subjective experience is softened with a feeling of “effortlessness”. People do some of their best work in this state.
This flow state seems to be universal to the human experience. It’s been documented across cultures, ages, gender, etc. In fact, most people I personally know have entered this state at least once in their lives. These sorts of universalities are fascinating, because they suggest that we’ve uncovered a fundamental piece about how our minds work.
There seem to be three crucial environmental factors that influence the likelihood of an individual entering the flow state:
The environment proportionally increases the challenges it confronts you with, as your skill improves.
There’s a very tight feedback loop between your actions and the environment.
Failure matters, at least symbolically.
The flow state is an extremely powerful engine for generating insight into the environment. Imagine a rock climber trying to scale a cliff whose difficulty is just above their threshold of ability. As they make a bit of progress, perhaps they become physically stuck. They then have to re-evaluate their approach, generate insight on this new problem and proceed until they hit their next obstacle. Imagine the “aha” moment you get after experiencing a flash of insight that allows you to solve a hard problem. The flow state is that feeling, but stretched out over time.
Implicit learning
The idea of “implicit learning” goes back to the 1960s with work done by Arthur Reber. It’s your capacity to have an “intuitive” sense of finding patterns in the world, even if you can’t consciously articulate what they might be.
Reber was trying to understand how humans learn language. He designed an experiment where long strings of numbers and letters were generated using a set of arbitrary rules. For example, one rule could be that you can’t have more than two vowels in the same string of random letters. Or that you must have at least two digits in the string. These rules were used to construct a big collection of strings, ensuring that each string was too long to fit in an individual’s working memory. Let’s call this collection A. Another collection of strings, which we’ll call collection B, was generated that didn’t fit the patterns used to generate A. Strings were randomly sampled from A or B, and participants were asked to guess which collection the strings came from. After each guess, the participant was told the correct answer. Shockingly, the participants eventually learned to do much better than random chance! The participants seemed to have learned patterns evident in the strings. But if you asked them to articulate why they guessed a certain way, they either said they didn’t know, or came up with a totally incorrect rule. There’s been more work that’s consistent with these findings. It seems that humans have an ability to unconsciously learn patterns in the environment that they can’t consciously articulate.
There was another experiment where the participants were blindfolded in a room, and their ears were muffled. They then randomly had someone come and quietly stare at the participants, and were subsequently asked if someone was staring at them. The participants were able to predict the answer better than random chance! It turns out that there’s nothing psychic here. This experiment failed to replicate if the experimenters didn’t tell the participants what the right answer was after every guess. That caused their performance to drop down to random chance. As any statistician knows, it’s extremely difficult to generate a truly “random” sequence of numbers. What the participants were doing was latching onto some complex pattern that the experimenters were unconsciously using to generate the sequence of whether a participant was going to be stared at or not.
In Educating Intuition, Robin M. Hogarth argues that our intuition is really our ability to access this implicit knowledge that we’ve learned from the world. We use this knowledge all the time to catch social cues and to orient ourselves in the world. Unfortunately, like any predictive system, this machinery can go astray by fitting onto incorrect patterns. For example, the bigot has intuitions about race that have gone wrong. Essentially, a bigot’s machinery is getting confused in discriminating between causal patterns and correlatory patterns.
What’s fascinating is that you can’t explicitly teach people to learn implicitly. There’s experiments showing that if you do, their performance gets a lot worse on these implicit learning tasks. However, you can instead construct an environment that allows people to efficiently learn things implicitly.
Feedback loop between insight from flow and implicit learning
It turns out that the criteria for constructing an environment that’s amenable for good implicit learning is very close to what you need to enter a state of flow. That is, you need a proportionate progression of difficulty, a tight feedback loop between agent and arena and failure needs to have some consequence.
Let’s come back to the shaman. Essentially, they exploit a natural feedback loop that can exist between being in the flow state and one’s capacity for implicit learning. Being in flow allows one to experience flashes of insight. This insight allows one to implicitly learn new patterns in the world. These patterns allow the practitioner to re-orient themselves in the world, priming the next burst of insight from the flow state. Getting into this feedback loop deeply enhanced the shaman’s problem solving capacity. Note that the shamans had no idea why this was happening, because it was all taking place implicitly. That probably caused them to perceive it as a deeply mystical experience.
Link between cognitive capacity and metaphor
The tight feedback loop described above encourages the brain to connect disparate areas that don’t normally talk to each other. This ability is so ubiquitous today that we totally take it for granted. It’s the human capacity for metaphor. The word “metaphor” is literally a metaphor. It means to “bridge” or to “carry over” and to connect things that are normally not connected. For example, do you “see” what I’m saying? I used “see” here despite the fact that you can’t visually observe me. Do you get my “point”? Although I don’t have a physical point to show you. Our language and therefore our modern cognition is totally reliant upon our ability to engage in metaphor.
The tight feedback loop described above also enhanced a shaman’s capacity for metaphor. It allowed them to parse the world in a totally different, but more adaptive way, and communicate to their tribe the forms of thought necessary to parse reality in that way. Isn’t this what a good teacher or a therapist does for us? They help us see the world through a new lens that we couldn’t before, often building on some existing concepts that we already possessed.
If a hunter-gatherer group had a shaman, they likely out-competed a group that didn’t. It allowed them to implicitly learn new patterns in the world that their group had no way to perceive before. This is likely how carvings on a bone allowed a shaman to predict the weather, or wearing a mask and enacting the deer improved their ability to hunt. We’ll take a deeper dive into this idea in next week’s lecture that dives into the Axial Revolution.
The beginnings of the Axial Revolution
Let’s fast-forward by a few thousand years. Humanity has discovered agriculture and is forming much more complex societies. Humans are still engaging in rituals that allow them to experience altered states of consciousness, and now have the capacity to peaceably live with larger groups of strangers. It’s led to the formation of large civilizations like Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, etc.
Unfortunately, sometime around 2000 BCE to 800 BCE, humanity experienced a substantial civilization collapse. The detailed causes of the collapse are not fully known, but it’s been studied by people like Eric Cline in 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. This the greatest collapse that humanity has ever known, and it’s the closest we’ve ever come to an apocalypse. However, similar to the apocalyptic events of the upper palaeolithic period, it pushed humanity through another bottleneck for survival. In order to survive, humanity was forced to drastically update the prevalent psycho-technologies of the time.
It led to the creation of alphabetic literacy as we understand it today. Unlike hieroglyphs or cuneiforms, an alphabet standardised the way language was spoken and written. In such a language, there’s always only one direction to read in, and a fixed set of letters that can be composed into words and sentences. The standardisation and simplicity afforded by the alphabet substantially expanded the range of people that could learn to read.
The expansion of literacy had a profound effect on the broader population’s sense of self. Writing things down allows us to expand our memory, and enhances our capacity to critically reflect on the movements of our own mind. This is essentially what Robert Bellah calls second-order thinking in The Axial Age and its Consequences. That is, our thinking about our thinking.
This was also around the same time that coinage was invented. Money taught people to think in an abstract symbolic system and taught the broader population numeracy. It gave humans practice in abstract logical thought.
At some point, humanity seemed to exapt these abilities of second-order and logical thinking to have a better sense for correcting flaws in their own cognition (i.e. self-transcendence). It also gave humans a much clearer understanding of their own capacity for self-deception. These abilities allowed humans to internalise a more personal sense of responsibility. It started to change the way humans saw morality, since they realised that they’re agents for their own damnation or salvation.
All of this set the state for the Axial Revolution, which is what the next episode is about.