"In the zone" - is it a real phenomenon?

Factual Questions
21

I’ll just toss in some more anecdotal evidance for the phenomena. I’ve noticed it while skiing. Now, I’m hardly a good skier (I’m quite happy on my blue slopes, thankyouverymuch) but every now and then I will have a run or series of runs where everything just comes together; perfect line, perfect carved turns, an absolutely exhilirating run. The next day, I’ll fall getting off the lift.

This is different from random chance; this isn’t a “hey, I didn’t fall that time”. Everything just comes together naturally and suddenly it’s as natural and easy as breathing. It’s hard to really describe; all I can say is that when it happens you know.

It’s like UncleBill described; it’s almost like your mind is detatched from what is happening. You suddenly aren’t thinking about what is happening anymore and are just doing the right things at the right time. It is almost a zen-like thing. Really cool when it happens.

Of course, it doesn’t happen enough for me to keep me from breaking my wrist the last time I was at Tahoe, but still…

22

Yep, sounds like flow to me. Csikszentmihalyi studied it in relation to happiness rather than performance, but they seem to be inextricably entwined in the experience (although “happiness” might be a misleading term if one thinks of a shallow, smiley kind of thing. It’s more like a deep satisfaction based on focused involvement). Anyhow, I’ll add another datapoint for active creative flow as a painter. I’ve been so involved in what I’m getting down on canvas that I’ve stepped away ten hours later, unaware of the time that’s passed, and thought “My god, did I paint that?”

I agree that it has little to do with statistics and I would love to see some neurological studies on the state. Here’s another link on Flow if anybody’s interested.

23

I’ve been in the zone a few precious times in a life of basketball. One time, after hitting several three-pointers in a row, the other team assigned their big man to guard me. As he rushed out to contest my next three, time slowed and I arced my shot higher to avoid his block, absolutely certain that it would go in. High arced shots are relatively common on short jumpers, but rare on threes. Somehow it worked.

Another time, I was completely dominating a game and scored on 7-8 straight shots. When I finally missed, I was shocked. It felt like I woke up from a dream somehow.

24

There were undoubtedly a few errors/close calls on the base path that were scored hits just for the sake of DiMaggio’s streak.

25

Perhaps. But it’s a matter of record that DiMaggio only struck out 13 times that entire season. Thus, hitting streak aside, he was putting the bat on the ball and putting the ball in play every other time (not counting bases on balls, of which he had only 76). Thus, 89 plate appearances were non-contact appearances. Every other time (well over 500 plate appearances,) he put the ball in play. Making contact that consistently certainly defies the odds, and making it to base safely most definitely defies the odds.

Add to that the number of extra-base hits (not likely to be close calls or errors) and multiple-hit games he had during those 56 games, and I think Gould (and others) are correct in saying that what DiMaggio did in 1941 was one of the most unlikely feats of sustained athletic success in history.

Whether Joltin’ Joe was aware of being in The Zone, or had a name for it, or whatever, it would seem he was in it for at least one third of the 1941 season.

26

I think the old adage “think long, think wrong” applies to many games!

I am thouroughly convinced that some of the best decisions (game wise) are made without the brain even being involved voluntarily.

I have also been “in the zone”(bowling). It didn’t matter how or where I threw the ball, it always came right back to the pocket!!
Untill I got to thinking about it!!! Then it never found it again!!

Sometimes the brain can undermine your abilities I think…

27

Suppose that “the zone” is an altered state of consciousness…

If so, then supporters of the remaining dregs of Behaviorist psychology will try to debunk it. After all, according to the Behaviorists an organism is a black box with inputs and outputs only, and any internal states are declared Unimportant with a capital “U”. (Few Behaviorists exist anymore, and mainstream researchers of today regard the 1950s Behaviorism outbreak as a kind of communal insanity.)

Psychologists with overly strong “physicist” leanings will also try to debunk it, since altered states of consciousness are seen only from the inside; they are subjective, and in physics “subjective” means the same as “not real.”

But this is PSYCHOLOGY, where “subjective” also means “the researcher is examining his own mental processes.” If The Zone is experienced as an unusual type of consciousness, and if many people report similar experiences, then it’s just as real as dreams, memories, drug effects, etc.

On the other hand, if we don’t have a clear description of “The Zone,” then people will question whether or not they’ve experienced it. Some might even question whether it exists or not. (But some people aren’t certain whether or not they’ve experienced orgasm, so should we question whether orgasm’s exist?)

Taking the Physicist angle, we could attempt to measure The Zone by looking for streaks of highly skilled play during sports events. However, this has a big down side; we’re trying to study a subjective experience using instruments. Might as well try to discover the story line of someone’s dreams by looking at their brainwaves. Also, winning-streaks occur naturally in any random process, so detecting a winning streak is not the same as studying “The Zone.”

Until outside observers can get inside human minds and see what the owner sees, we’re stuck. All we can do is ask for eyewitness reports.

28

Very interesting discussion. I have to disagree with the last poster, though. There’s plenty of ways to verify the existence of the zone. We could have people play sports while having their EEG’s measured, or having MRI’s taken (I realize this is difficult to do, but probably it’s possible to get in the zone somehow even in the MRI machine). You could then ask the subject to report when they are in the zone (perhaps after the fact) and look for differences in brain activity.

Any psychological study that just used anecdotal evidence or survey results would be seen as rather weak.

29

Here, have at laugh at this. I’ve been “in the zone” while working the line at Taco Bell. Where I could just fly tacos down the line 4, 6, 8 at a time. I could see several orders ahead and combine them all in the fastest way possible to fill them.

I attribute it to solely to confidence. When you’re confident you don’t second guess your actions. When you’re confident you do all those repetitive things the same way. When you lose your confidence suddenly you grab too much meat for the taco and have to scrape some off or you put too little beans on a burrito and have to take another scoop.

It seems like that will work for sports as well. There are times when you have complete confidence and trust in all your actions. You don’t believe you can go wrong, everything you do you do because you believe it to be the right thing to do.

30

Ok, sorry to drag this into a nerdy area but…

I’m currently at uni (college for those of you from the States) and (as all students should) do all my assignments the night before well into the night. I find that when I have a programming assignment (I’m doing Computer Science), I start off slowly on it. All of a sudden, it’s like a switch is flipped mentally and I can not type fast enough to write the rest of the program. It’s all worked out in my head, it’s fairly bug free (except for typos I make during my typing spree), and the few bugs I do come across I can instantly know the fix for. I can program any time of the day, but I get in the “zone” between about 9pm to 3 or 4am. I finish the program and look up at the clock, suddenly realising how late it is. Funny, doesn’t feel like 4am at the time. I am wide awake. Once the program is finished though, tiredness hits me like a brick wall (as well as the sudden thirst and need to pee hehe). It’s an effort just to get ready to go to bed. All I can think of is my head hitting my pillow.

I guess it’s kind of like when gamers stay up all hours playing games. I don’t game, so I don’t know for sure.

Anybody else get this?

31

I vaguely remember seeing a report on Discovery, TLC or one of those channels a while back where they did something like this. I remember they had a target shooter with a laser pointer on their gun and were measuring how it tracked across the target.

Under “normal” circumstances the pointer wobbled about quite a bit, but sometimes the shooter would get into a different mental state where the pointer wobbled much less. There was some difference in brain activity at the time too.

They also had a lot of stuff with various martial artists and were trying to connect everything to the concept of “Chi” but it sounds like they may have been studying the sort of stuff we are talking about here.

32

This guy (under “Flow: A reverent explanation”) thinks it has something to do with dopamine.

That is, when you’re concentrating on something that involves a lot of different decisions (whether that involves primarily effort of body, as in sports, or of mind, as in creativity), your brain pours on the dopamine, which makes it more efficient by making neurons fire in a faster, more coordinated way. Plus, it’s apparently a marker that delivers the message “this is important, pay attention!” The more important the decisions required are to you, the more dopamine your brain pours on, the better you are at making those decisions. For some reason, this feels good to us. I guess having paying attention to important stuff feel good is helpful to survival.