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Flow - The Psychology of Optimal Experience

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vita

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I was wondering if anyone had come across this or read this, and if so what did you think about it?

the authors name is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I read it, I reviewed it for Second Renaissance Books. That was years and years ago, and all I recall was that I gave it a thumbs down, and they finally decided not to carry it.

Mindy

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I read it and it is essentially full of mystic philosophy. But it´s not worthless.

This book has some very wierd things to say about conciousness and the author tries to integrate physics and thermodynamics with emotions and happiness. I think he does a terrible job at it. "Entropy increases in the brain" - therefore people get sad, right.

However there are some interesting parts of the book and I´d say it´s generally good written so it´s not a waste to buy it - if you can sort out the facts, and the generally worthwhile parts, from the new-age package that they´re in.

I´d say the good thing about the book is that it gets you thinking and he talks about some people who manage to always stay happy and how he tried to figure out the cause of it. And then he explains the feeling of being in "flow" ie. when you´re focused and attaining your values etc. He says that people he surveyed experienced it as if their "ego disappeared" and time stopped or something ike that, they were less self-concious when they were in "flow".

Not very good and full of crap but not worthless either because of the concrete facts he throws in.

You could of course, as an Objectivist, look at it like this:

He says Entropy causes unhappiness (I think it was something like that, I read it some time ago). But entropy is only another word for Disorder. Having a dis-orderly mind might be taken to mean a dis-integrated mind. Then what he says is somewhat more concistent with Objectivism since being disintegrated puts you in conflict with reality and causes you to be unhappy.

Edited by patrik 7-2321
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