 Have you ever been so absorbed in a task that everything else is banished to the outer limits of your attention? When other stimuli fail to distract you? When you have no notion of the time that's passed? This state of full attention and deep engagement is termed flow. Coined by a Hungarian psychologist Mihai Csikszentmihalyi, flow is described as an experiential absorption in a task, a control of consciousness to the point that the sense of time is lost. It is the ultimate state of intrinsic motivation, where our minds are challenged to accomplish something difficult but which we consider worthwhile and achievable, and which leads to a feeling of enjoyment. Csikszentmihalyi suggests that those who have autotelic personalities are far more likely to experience flow. The term autotelic comes from the Greek words auto meaning self and telos meaning goal. Csikszentmihalyi has stated that the mark of an autotelic personality is the ability to manage a rewarding balance between the play of challenge finding and the work of skill building. These types of people have a disposition to actively seek challenges and flow experiences, but also have the ability to manage the balance between the enjoyment of undertaking a challenge and the work of skill building. Those with autotelic personalities are open to new information attracted by challenges and are achievement oriented. They view outcomes as dependent on effort and not on chance. In her study of the attitudes of autotelic personalities, Nicola Bauman suggests that such people tend to have family and school environments which simultaneously provide challenge and support, independence and cooperation, flexibility and cohesion, integration and differentiation. So we might ask if students who usually have difficulty focusing can experience a flow state. We might also ask if flow is only associated with deep learning or is it possible to experience flow at the surface level. We do know that there are some very strong connections between collaborative learning and flow, and that experiencing flow can lead to increased skill, challenge and complexity over time. People do get into a shared state of flow, they test out ideas, try things that work and find success, which leads towards spiral of self-efficacy and fulfillment and leads to improved concentration, increased intrinsic motivation, psychological well-being and enjoyment. We often think about people who engage in creative tasks as being those most likely to experience a flow state. Dr. Robert Davidson is a senior lecturer in composition at the University of Queensland. A prolific composer and bassist, he is also the founder and musical director of the Musical Ensemble Topology. Rob is involved in the creative process every day and this can involve a flow state. When I really get into it and get into what people do call a flow state and it's fantastic. It gets very emotional, you lose track of time, it's something you've got to make sure you don't get into too much if you've got appointments, because that's one of the big things. You have so much energy, you don't really know that you're not having energy and I find I get very emotional, I actually get quite sort of teary and just so absorbed into it, you're not really aware, you're just doing it and it feels great and you lose yourself really and I think that's where often some of the best ideas come from. I know that when I've had those ideas and they've come into music, that's when the audiences are the most emotionally engaged as well. So I've experienced flow like states with others, particularly with my group Topology, I'm in a quintet with four other musicians, play double bass and yes, we've been playing together a long time so sometimes we just know each other really well and we get this state where we are responding to each other really well. It feels quite euphoric, it's a bit different from the individual flow state I find but it's more just ideas are very quickly communicated and there's really strong awareness and things sort of come together and it's actually often you don't quite remember it and like I've seen it, we look back at videos and we've seen that and oh that's amazing that happened and then you get back into that feeling but often it's really quite hard to remember it so yes I think when you're in this communal flow state you are very much in the vibe, in the groove all these sort of ideas which means that you're really responding to each other, you're very synchronised, you're entrained, this is why it happens particularly well with music because you're in tune with each other, you're in time with each other, things are flowing, ideas are bouncing off each other and it feels really great, it's like a fantastic party. Well I've got to say it's something that I've consciously developed but I don't think I naturally necessarily have, I think maybe I did have it a little bit naturally but I would, I just messed myself up so much as a younger musician when I would have so much self-criticism and I had to find ways to put that at bay and the more I've been able to do that and just say it's okay to do anything it doesn't have to be good or bad you can sort that out later, the more I've been able to have flow states then the more I've been able to be able to find the music which I think is more uniquely me. My creative process I tend to have quite a clear conscious separation between acting and reflecting between I guess play and then scrutinising that play and what I find is really really crucial is to keep the critic under control that's actually the biggest problem I find is that the critical voice comes in a bit too early and messes up the creative flow. This is actually something Stephen Schwartz I noticed said in an interview where he's talking about the musical Wicked he said that he became a professional when he worked out how to be quite consciously aware when he was playing and reflecting those separate stages to not criticise too early. So I think in deep learning it's actually a very similar process that one has to silence your own inner critic at the beginning so you can simply explore in an unhindered way with flow. I think any sort of engagement with something in a deep way requires you to have your critic sort of under control and so I think yeah to explore something to simply play with it to find what it is almost to have a relationship with it. So with the composer I often find it's a little bit like a relationship with somebody you've got to allow the idea to be itself you don't really want to come in and judge the person and I think that's maybe something similar with learning. Flow can be a really cool thing but sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't. Actually we're not really sure how to make flow happen. What we do know about flow is that we need to identify a challenging task but there must be a balance between the challenge set and the perceived skill set of the individual to meet that task. If the gap is too great the learner will become anxious and if there is not sufficient challenge then the learner will find the task boring. So deep learning as exhibited in a flow state is less situational and more attitudinal. If a student exhibits deep learning traits such as being able to self-regulate thoughts behaviors and emotions they exhibit dispositions towards their learning that are fairly consistent across time. There are other factors relevant to deep learning here. Is the learning meaningful and relevant to personal goals? Is there safety in the learning environment within peer relationships within the student-teacher relationship and free of the fear of failure? Is there the necessary availability to resources to commit to the learning including if the student is emotionally socially culturally and physically ready to invest in the learning. It's interesting to note that you don't have to be a student who has the attitudes of deep learning in order to experience a flow state but there's a real crossover between those enduring traits of deep learning and the momentary episodes of the flow state and those attitudes are certainly helpful in promoting flow. So a self-regulating student will actively remove distractions from the learning environment and that's going to promote a flow state but what do we retain from achieving flow with regard to learning? It has been suggested that we can have something capture our attention and focus for long periods of time but we don't seem to learn or retain a lot. Recent research suggests that we actually need to put in some hard effort to grapple with concepts we don't understand in order to then achieve deep conceptual change. What we've learned is that it's actually the confused or puzzled state that we appear to be learning more. So does flow actually lead to learning? Hmm I'll leave this quandary with you. Good luck.