How to Measure the Psychological “Flow”? A Neuroscience Perspective

The term “flow” as conceptualized by Csikszentmihalyi (1975) describes the optimal experiences that are most enjoyable in human life while fully engaging in an activity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1978, 1990, 1998). Within athletic, artistic and occupational behaviors, the flow emerges from an action that requires specific skills and challenges (Marin and Bhattacharya, 2013). It also expands self-esteem and the individual’s capabilities through learning new optimizations that increase the feelings of continuity and fluidity in attention and action. The flow does not occur for all types of behavior. It requires clear goals, unambiguous and immediate feedback, assuming a perfect match between skills and challenge (Mao et al., 2016). In contrast to its behavioral counterpart, commonly expressed by the term “stress,” the flow may be viewed as a convergent physiological entity supported by the emergence of a unique brain state. Since flow requires challenges, it must be supported by short-term stress (the good one) that assumes physiological protection (e.g., enhancement of immunoprotection) to deal with challenges. On the contrary, long-term stress (chronic) impinges on reaching the flow state and disrupts the immunoprotective effects on various physiological functions (Dhabhar, 2014). Because of the conjunction of action skill, challenge and emotion in a single flow-state, the scientific community remains confronted with the complex question of identifying its neurophysiological outcomes. This challenge is in line with the unresolved questions relating neurometric-psychometric comparisons in an attempt to identify neurophysiological activities and sensations (Stüttgen et al., 2011) that occur during the flow. In this Grand Challenges monograph, my intent is to trace experimental perspectives applying tools of movement neuroscience (Cheron, 2015; Cheron et al., 2016) in order to characterize the physiological aspects of the brain state during flow in sports.