Mushin no Shin: No-mindedness and the state of flow.

Consider for a second when you’ve been performing at your absolute best, in whatever arena it might be. It might be your job, at school, in sports, or in an actual life threatening situation. Can you remember what was happening? How one specific event led to the next? Did time seem to decompress so that milliseconds turned to seconds?

Frequently, when human experts or even novices are performing at the highest levels of their ability they cannot recall specific instances of what happened, events from memory seem to all blur together, and time decompress and people report feeling as if things were moving in slow motion. I have personal experience with this from competitive Judo; I literally don’t remember some of my best matches. Sure, I can piece together a memory from what people have told me happened and on some intellectual level I can tell you what throw I made or how the match was won, but when I walked off the mat after those matches and people asked me, “Hey, what throw was that?” or, “What did he do that gave you the opening?” and my answer would be “Umm, I’m not sure… it just sort of happened.”

These traits are characteristic of what is referred to in psychology as an autotelic experience (autotelic comes from the Greek words auto, meaning “self”, and telos, meaning “purpose” or “goal”). Autotelic experiences are those moments of performance when the self is the purpose and the purpose is the self. Which is to say, in an autotelic experience with judo I am not thinking about how I am throwing, or how I should be throwing, or what will happen when I am done throw, I simply and purely am throwing. In these situations, the performer is in a state of flow, as the positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi would say. (By the way, the pronunciation on that is: Muh-High Tshik-sent-muh-high-i).

During a state of flow, a person is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. As with the autotelic experience, the flow state is characterized by a sense of timelessness and by an almost effortless proficiency. These are strange distortions of perception, clearly time is not really slowing down and even though it might feel effortless, clearly a lot of effort is being expended when we are working at our best. In this post, I am going to explore this notion of flow from several different angles: first I will delve into Zen philosophy and the concept of no-mindedness. Second, I will talk about how experimental psychology has approached the problem flow. Third, I will talk about the neurophysiology that might underlie this autotelic states.

Mushin no Shin

In Zen philosophy there is something equivalent to autotelic experiences and that is the state of Mushin no Shin (…or just mushin for short…). Mushin is the psychological state that highly trained individuals enter when they are in their element. In particular, the term is associated with martial artists, and mushin is the desired mental state to be in during combat. In truth, anyone can experience mushin in their discipline whether you are a painter, writer, a chef, or a surgeon. What characterizes mushin is not the task at hand, but detachment of the conscious self. Across these different disciplines, mushin is achieved when the mind is free from thoughts of desire, fear, anger, or ego. That is, with a mushin state of mind you do not use intellection to think of what the next move should be, you use intuition to feel what the next move should be, relying on finely tuned natural reactions to control your movement.

At this point it is important to distinguish mushin from a lack of effort or intensity. Paradoxically, mushin is at once effortful and effortless. It is effortful because the mind and body are working together and processing information from the environment very quickly in order to produce the appropriate response, but it is also effortless because the mind is not consciously intervening in the process, and the mind allows lower-level implicit mechanisms to guide action. This is also part of the reason why the mushin mindset emerges as a function of expertise, years of practice and the tuning of responses allow the expert to implicitly and efficiently respond to their environment, whereas novices do not possess the same robust reflexes and rely on greater conscious control of their actions.

A common Zen analogy is to describe the mushin mind as a still pond. A still pond reflects the world as it is, with minimal distortion. Conscious thoughts are like ripples on the surface of the pond; the greater the conscious effort the more the image of the real world is distorted. So, just as ripples in the pond distort our perceptions of reality, conscious thoughts disrupt our ability to perceive our environment in its “purest” form. One analogy I like better comes from Eugene Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery, in which he describes a conversion he had with a Kyudo master (…Kyudo is Japanese school of archery that has been heavily influence by Zen Buddhism). The master is describing the state of mind required to shoot an arrow correctly and says that the archer cannot shoot the arrow; the arrow has to shoot itself. To illustrate his meaning the master explains that the archer and the arrow must be like a leaf in the winter.

Imagine a leaf covered in snow. The snow builds and the leaf starts to droop. As more snow builds eventually the leaf buckles under the weight, dropping the snow to the ground, and bouncing back to its original height. The leaf doesn’t decide when to release the snow; the timing is governed by a passive interaction between the leaf and the environment. So to must the archer not decide when to shoot the arrow, but the archer must lose himself in the environment, blurring the distinction between himself and the arrow, and the arrow and the target. Then, when the moment is right the archer should almost be bemused to find he has already loosed the arrow from the bow and struck the target.

Effortless Attention

The MIT Press recently published an excellent volume edited by Brian Bruya that explains research on a wide range of topics related to attention and the conscious control of behavior. The interesting commonality to all of the chapters is the challenge to the assumption that paying more attention leads to doing better. Strangely, there are a wide range of situations in which humans subjectively feel they are paying less attention but this lack of conscious attention actually improves their performance. An interesting example of this is in mental arithmetic. In a task called the Water Jug Problem (Luchins, 1942) subjects are shown three jugs of varying sizes on a computer screen (labeled Jug A, B, and C) and ask to produce a specific volume of water using the three sizes of jugs available. Now, the volume on each jug changes on each particular trial but the first few trials can all be solved by using the algorithm: A – B – 2C. After a few trials the structure of the task switches so that A – B – 2C still works to produce the correct answer, but the problem can also be solved by the simpler algorithms A – C or A + C. The fascinating finding is that those subjects with high working memory (i.e., subjects with a greater capacity for consciously attending to and manipulating information ) will persist in using the more complex algorithm rather than switching to the simple A – C or A + C algorithms. Low working memory individuals (on the other hand) were significantly more likely to switch to the simpler solution when it became available. Thus, individuals who have developed a greater reliance on cognitive control (such as high working memory subjects)can limit their own discovery of new problem solving approaches but can also engage attention-dependent learning strategies that override a more optimal implicit-associative strategy.

This effortless attention can be applied to motoric tasks as well as to cognitive tasks. Lots of work has been done by Dr. Gabriele Wulf at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas on the focus of attention and how it affects motor skill learning and performance. Specifically, if attention is directed to the performer’s body movements (i.e., inducing an internal focus of attention), motor learning is generally hampered compared to attention directed at the movement effect (i.e., inducing an external focus). These empirical results harmonize quite well the qualitative studies of autotelic states and the philosophical concept of mushin. These data suggest that there are very real, very reliable physiological mechanisms that explain why attending to the outcome or effect of an action yields superior results compared to focusing on one’s own body or mechanics. For instance, recent studies of swimming have found that giving swimmers external focus instructions related to the arm stroke in crawl swimming (e.g., “pushing the water back”) was more effective than internal focus instructions that directed attention towards the swimmer’s arms (e.g., “pulling your hands back”). Amazingly, this effect was demonstrated in both intermediate swimmers (Freudenheim, Wulf, Madureira, Corrêa, Araras, & Corrêa, in press) and experts (Stoate & Wulf, in press). These findings have obvious practical implications. For instance, in elite junior swimmers, an external focus of attention increased swim speed (i.e., reduced swim time) by an average of .18 s in a 25-yard crawl. Considering that in the 2008 Olympics, the difference between 1st place and 2nd place in the men’s 50 m crawl was only .15 s, and .11 s in the women’s 50 m crawl, this means that a swimmer’s focus of attention could potentially determine a swimmer’s place on the medal stand!!!

Research on the focus of attention continues to demonstrate that even subtle differences in the wording of instructions or feedback that a participant is given can have profound effects on behavior and the underlying physiology. Instructors, coaches, therapists, and performers themselves need to be aware of how these differences affect performance and should develop effective strategies to keep the performer’s attention focused externally on the intended effects of their movements. Internally focusing on one’s own movements constrains the motor system and leads to movements that are not only less accurate, but also less efficient at the neuromuscular level. (For a review of how attention affects not only the outcome of movement but the efficiency of movement, pick up a copy of Skill Acquisition in Sport: Research, Theory, and Practice – 2^nd edition, edited by Nicola Hodges and Mark Williams... this volume should be published in early 2011 and will contain a chapter by Keith Lohse, Gabriele Wulf, and Rebecca Lewthwaite entitled Attentional focus affects movement efficiency).

Hypofrontality

Another interesting neuropsychological concept that relates very directly to the philosophical concept of no-mindedness is transient hypofrontality (THT), which means a temporary depression in activity of the frontal cortex. The logic behind THT is based on functional neuroanatomy and theories about consciousness being the confluence of other independent cognitive functions such as self-reflection, attention, memory, perception, and arousal. Such an inclusive definition of consciousness clearly implicates the whole brain in creating conscious experience, but it also places the frontal cortex in a unique position at the top of the consciousness hierarchy.

Essentially this theory argues that as you move from the lower neural structures, which are highly specialized, into higher neural structures like the thalamus and cortex, information becomes more integrated/abstracted from the multiple lower level structures, and as you move further forward in this imaginary brain-space, information continues to be aggregated and fed into fewer and fewer brain structures until it arrives in the frontal cortex where cognition takes place at its most integrated and abstract. Because the prefrontal cortex is the neural substrate of these topmost layers of processing, any change to conscious experience should affect the prefrontal cortex followed by a progression of changes to downstream brain areas that contribute more basic cognitive functions.

Interestingly, altered states of consciousness are characterized by a severe degree of hypofrontality. That is, if you take a drug such LSD or PCP you are inducing THT that suppresses activity in the frontal cortex, and this suppression of activity can lead to things as bizarre as hallucinations and delusions. Even more interestingly, is that mild hypofrontality is characteristic of brain activity during fatigue, long distance running, and meditation. How then, can something that is induced by taking dangerous drugs also be induced (albeit in a milder form) by the rhythmic motion of running?

Well, the first to thing to understand is that, from a computational perspective, running is incredibly complex. Sensory integration by itself requires an astronomical amount of data processing (and during running this processing must be done in real time!), which translates into the use of a lot of neural real estate. For example, the motor system (ignoring the equally involved sensory system) consists of the primary motor cortex, the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor cortex, the basal ganglia, parts of the thalamus, the cerebellum, the red nucleus, the substantia nigra, the pathway systems, and both α and γ-motor neurons running along the spinal cord. (The cerebellum by itself has more neurons than the rest of the cerebral cortex!). And if you still are not convinced that motor control is such a difficult problem, consider the fact that artificial intelligences can beat human beings in chess, analyze complex data sets in minutes that would take human agents days, but yet cannot manage walking on two feet (…although in that case the problem isn’t so much the actual motion of the limbs, but the maintenance of balance…).

This means that if we’re engaged in complex motor control process like running (or even walking) the brain has reallocate a lot of its metabolic resources. Thus, physical exercise, and skilled movement in particular, requires massive and sustained activation of various structures throughout the brain, and yet during exercise global blood flow to the brain and cerebral uptake of oxygen remain constant. This means that the brain has to make choices about how to allocate its finite metabolic resources and thus some resources are diverted away from the frontal cortex, leading to THT. As a result, sustained physical activity might be a particularly useful way to induce autotelic states because THT diminishes our self-reflection and ego as more neural resources are devoted to the action itself. In summary, modern neuroscience has found a candidate mechanism that might underlie the Zen concept of mushin, and this powerful physiological mechanism might help keep irrelevant distractions out, while reducing the ability of the conscious mind to intervene in the implicit processing of the motor system.

"Mental Links to Excellence"

The original paper Mental Links to Excellence was written by Terry Orlick and John Partington and published in The Sport Psychologist in 1988. It is a really fascinating paper in which the authors surveyed 75 Canadian Olympic athletes about their mental readiness and mental control before and during competition. There is so much information in the study that the only way to do it justice is to go read it (...go now, shoo!), but I'll also take a crack at summarizing it here, adding some of my own thoughts, commentary, and anecdotes.

All of the data presented was based on qualitative analysis of interviews with Olympic Gold or Silver medalists, or world champions, representing both summer and winter sports. The transcripts were read several times by each investigator with goal of uncovering the underlying success elements that were common among the most successful athletes. I'll detail these success elements below, but in general these phenomenally talented and dedicated individuals explained commitment, quality training, clear daily goals, simulation training, and mental preparation as common keys to their success.

Commitment:
Not surprisingly, one of the most common elements that emerge in all of these interviews was the incredible level of commitment displayed by these athletes. Commitment wasn't unfaltering, nor was it myopic, but for a significant period of time before the Olympic Games, everything in their life revolved around training and competing. Prior to the Games, athletes focused on many of things that most of us would focus on (e.g., families, jobs, relationships, etc.), but in the period leading up to the games their athletic goals became the most important goals in their lives.

"Everything I do, whether it is weight, running, or the normal training things, or leisure activities I do, it is all geared toward how it is going to affect my paddling. Everything is opportunity/cost. If I go out to a movie instead of going hiking as my leisure activity, what is the cost of that? If I go to the movie instead of on a hike, does that help or hurt my paddling. [...] Ever since I saw John Wood win a silver medal, I have wondered, does he dream all the time about being the best in the world? I have always dreamed about doing that. Maybe that's different from other people (highly successful Olympian - canoeing)."

Quality Training
A lot of research on expertise and skill acquisition talks about the quantity or hours spent in training (...the magic number 10,000 hours...), which is important to be sure, but it is equally important, if not more important to consider the quality of training. The best athletes interviewed had discovered that the key to establishing dominance in their sport was to train with the highest degree of quality. Part of developing quality training was to focus on short-term training goals and imagine how they were going to accomplish these goals the night before, the morning of, and on the way to training.

"When I've done my best and worked my hardest, I feel good about that. If I'm going to be second or third, it's going to be because someone else has superior ability. I have accepted that too, but I am not going to question my training. That's the last thing I want to question. Knowing how to focus gives you a little extra push in the everyday sessions. As much as I feel flat getting into the workout, and I may be flat for part of it, I'll recognize the fact that I can do it. I ask myself in the positive sense, why am I here? At that point it becomes a mind game. I am here because I want to be the best I can be (highly successful Olympian - kayak)."

"To prepare myself for quality runs in training, I make sure I am in good physical shape, and I make sure when I do my free skiing that I try to make good turns. When I get to the starting gate, it is almost a race run. I have thought about the course, I have prepared mentally for the run, my boots are done up the way they should be, I'm concentrating, and I make a good run. I don't screw around because I only get a few runs a day. That's it. Plus, if you're not concentrating when you're going downhill, you don't just bump your head on the end of the pool right?... You have to be continually aware (highly successful World Cup skier - alpine)."

Clear Daily Goals
Another characteristic that all of these highly successful athletes had in common was their use of short-term goals, whether is was a goal for a particular day, workout, or interval. Athletes reported being determined to accomplish these goals, and being fully focused on doing so.

"My coach wrote up every single one of my dives on a piece of paper, all the bad things about my dive and all of the good things about my dive. I read his corrections everyday, before every workout. I set a goal to change something on that piece of paper every day. Even if part of the dive was bad, I knew something was better. That's why it wasn't boring for me to do the same dive 100 times, because each time I looked at it in a different way. [...] For me the dive is good, but there is always something to improve (highly successful Olympian - springboard diving)."

Imagery Training
The best athletes had very well developed and practice imagery skills. Athletes reported using imagery to get what they wanted out of training, to perfect skills within training sessions, to make technical corrections, to see themselves being successful in competition, or achieving their ultimate goal.

"I can feel the initial pressure of the trigger, and then I'm looking at the sight, and then shot goes off itself. The shot has to break by itself because if you think about it going, you are going to disturb the gun. You have trained your reflexes to come back through the trigger positively. When I do mental imagery I see the rear sight as two light bars, and the front sight is really sharp. I usually look at the center, or a little bit to the left of the center, of the top of the front sight. Then I can see the target as a fuzzy gray blob. I'm not conscious of my hand, I'm just concentrating on that small part of the sight (highly successful Olympian - pistol shooting)."

Mental imagery is an interesting phenomenon for a lot of psychological reasons, but like any other athletic skill it is a skill that needs to be practiced to maximize its benefits. Even elite athletes, who have dedicate years of their life to mastering their sport, have to work hard at developing their imagery, but once you do, imagery is unique tool that allows to practice the cognitive-affective aspects of your sport. This is why imagery training is emphasized at the highest levels.

"It took me a long time to control my images and perfect my imagery, maybe a year, doing it everyday. At first I couldn't see myself, I always saw everyone else, or I would see my dives wrong all the time. [...] I worked at it so much it got to the point that I could do all of my dives easily. Sometimes I would even be in a conversation with someone and I would think of one of my dives and "see" it (highly successful Olympian - springboard diving)."

Simulation Training
In experimental psychology there are a lot of principles which suggest that training should match the performance setting as closely possible to maximize the transfer from training to performance (see Identical Elements Theory, the Specificity Principle, and the Principle of Procedural Reinstatement). Elite athletes and coaches seem to support this view point and try to simulate the competitive environment during training. Simulating the competitive environment is important for both mechanical and affective reasons. For instance, you wouldn't want to train for football in one pair of boots and suddenly which to a different pair on match day (mechanical), and you wouldn't want to always train doing runs by yourself to suddenly be surrounded by screaming fans and tenacious competitors on race day (affective).

"We didn't believe in the quantity idea: the more you do the better you get. Instead of coming in and saying, we're going to do three short programs, or we're going to do two longs, which gets you into the mind set of, 'I've just got to get through it,' we said, 'We're going to do one of each, and they're going to be good,' because that's all you've do at the competition. You've only got one whack at it and you'd better do it (highly successful Olympian - pairs figure skating)."

Mental Preparation for Competition
Athletes engaged in substantial mental preparation to have quality training (... think about how hard is would be keep the right mind set to do every rep, interval, run, or workout to the best of your ability...), but the best athletes also had systematic strategies for focusing and drawing out their abilities in important competition.

1. The pre-competition focusing strategy: "We have a set warm-up, we know exactly how much time it takes and exactly what things we're going to do. Immediately before the race I was thinking about trying to stay on that edge, just letting myself relax, and doing a lot of positive self talk about what I was going to do. I just felt like we couldn't do anything wrong. It was just up to us. I said, 'There's nothing that's affecting us in a negative way, the only thing now is to do it, and we can do it... I just have to try my best' (highly successful Olympian - canoeing)."
   
2. The competition focusing strategy: "My focus was very concentrated throughout the race. We have a start plan, and in it I concentrate only on the first few strokes. I've found that if I concentrate beyond that, those first strokes wont be strong enough. Then I concentrate on the next little bit of the race. [...] I look down the lane. The last 100m is marked with red buoys and I know how many buoys I had ahead of that to start our finish, because we had practiced for the course. When it was time for the very last part of the finish, we just go all-out power, forgetting style and everything else. Crossing the line, the thing I remember was just letting the emotion go, and being able to say, "That's it, it's over!" I just knew that we'd gone our very hardest (highly successful Olympian - pairs kayak).
3. Competition evaluation: "In the last three years it has become important to identify as closely as possible where I screwed up, and then to work on that in practice to make sure that it doesn't happen again. [...] I'll sit back now after a race and I'll analyze it with a fine tooth comb, whereas before I might have just said, "Damn it, I lost!" I would just figured that I softened up at the middle and I'd say, "Well next time I'm not going to soften up." But now [...] I can pick a stroke here and there that might have affected the outcome of the race. When I do that, and I find out that I missed the 5th stroke off the line, or the stroke was still short and it should be long, or my transition wasn't as good as it could be, I can go back and work on that phase of my race and get the kinks out. The idea is you try and recall exactly what happened in the race and gain from it (highly successful Olympian - canoeing)."
   
4. Distraction control: "I started to shift away from the scoreboard a year and half before the Olympics because I knew that every time I looked at the scoreboard, my heart went crazy. I couldn't control it. I knew that I dove better if I concentrated on my diving then concentrating on everyone else (highly successful Olympian - springboard diving).

"Once I push out at the start, I am focused on where I am at the time. A lot of it is "line" in downhill. You don't go right at the gate, you've got the line that you have been running all week and you just say, "Okay, I've got to stay high here, I have to go direct here, I have to jump this jump," just so I am thinking of each obstacle as is comes. If I make a small mistake, often it doesn't even register for me until the end, when I am at the bottom. At the time you are still thinking, "forward, speed, momentum." You don't carry a mistake down the hill. It is shelved until later while you try and compensate. Often those mistakes will mean just running them out, and it really wont cost you that much time if you don't panic, if you just let it turn out and get back on track (highly successful Olympic skier - alpine)."

Pre-competition focus, competition focus, evaluation, and distraction control are all mental aspects of the sport that have to be honed and developed between athletes and coaches. A large part of this can be the verbal cues that coaches learn with their athletes and the cognitive strategies that athletes develop as a result. These strategies can have significant impacts on the athlete's performance. Even for an athlete who isn't at such an elite level it is important to consider these 4 mental techniques for enhancing your performance.

Do you have a pre-competition focus? It is important to control arousal before the competition even begins, and the ideal focus will allow you to be at the optimal level of arousal prior to the start of the race, match, fight, etc. A good example of this is distance runners versus sprinters in track and field. If you watch sprinters in the blocks, clearly a lot of "psyching up" has taken place in addition to all of the dynamic stretching and explosive drills they've been doing to get ready. This is because sprinters need a high level of arousal very quickly; they need maximal power production from the time the gun goes off because their race might only be lasting 10-20 seconds, so time is precious. Distance runners, on the other hand, are not nearly so energetic at the starting line. Part of this is because there is a larger cognitive component to a distance race (e.g., Do I start my kick now? No, not unless so-and-so started his kick..., Do I need to accelerate here to avoid getting boxed in? etc.), but also because distance runners have a considerably longer time to build to their highest level of arousal and only worry about max force at the end of the race.

Do you have a competition focus? Is it effective at eliminating distractions? The focus you adopt during competition is critical. Research on choking, for instance, suggests that the optimal thing to do is try to stay focused on the outcome that you are trying to achieve (e.g., riding your line down the hill in alpine skiing) because if your self-awareness increases and you start focusing on your body or your mechanics (e.g., maintaining the correct leg position in a turn) you increase your chances of failing. This is similar to the mu shin ("no-mind") concept in Zen (see my post on mu shin and the concept of flow), which suggests that the athlete should be as unconscious as possible in their movements; instinct and reaction should govern you movements. If you stop and think, however briefly, you disrupt the harmony (read as efficiency) of your movements.

And finally there is evaluation. I think this is one dimension that is highly under-appreciated at lower levels of sport, although it justly recognized as invaluable at higher levels. For evaluation, I am a major proponent of video analysis. From experience I know how important it can be to view yourself from the cameras perspective. In learning to throw the javelin for instance, I struggled to meagerly toss the jav for less distance than people with half of my size or strength. This probably doesn't surprise people who throw the javelin and understand that it is more about technique then strength, but the point is that even with very good coaching my javelin throw didn't really improve until I was able to watch myself and see just were my mechanics were going wrong (...it's amazing how something that can feel so right to your arm can be so apparently wrong to your eyes).