Infinity Interrupted

Out of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi a passage describing the blockages.

It is interesting to note that the these two societal obstacles to flow, anomie and alienation, are functionally equivalent to the two personal pathologies, attentional disorders and self-centredness. At both levels, the individual and the collective, what prevents flow from occurring is either the fragmentation of attentional processes (as in anomie and attentional disorders), or their excessive rigidity (as in alienation and self-centredness). At the individual level anomie corresponds to anxiety, while alienation corresponds to boredom.

And a few pages later we are presented with a potential antidote

Music, which is organized auditory information, helps organize the mind that attends to it, and therefore reduces psychic entropy, or the disorder we experience when random information interferes with goals. Listening to music wards off boredom and anxiety, and when seriously attended to, it can induce flow experiences.

Cue Metal Machine Music and a locked groove.

And so for day 1296
01.07.2010