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This chapter focuses on developing an experimental technique for inducing flow and creating instances of effortless action in the laboratory. The effort to experimentally induce flow involves two conditions which are correlated with the flow state: The firstis the idea that the challenges of a given task are well within one’s capabilities; the other involves perceived goals and immediate feedback from the given task. The chapter explores these factors along with other contextual factors, including autonomy and distractions, to experimentally induce flow and demonstrate instances of effortless action in the laboratory. One of the most extensively used approaches for experimental induction of flow in the laboratory involves exploring difficulty levels of video games.

This chapter examines the relationships between effortless attention, reduced mental ability, and perfectionism. It examines the findings of earlier neuroscientific studies in this regard to understand neurocognitive mechanisms driving the autotelic experience or the flow state. This is required to understand the fact that two distinct information-processing systems operate in the brain, viz. the explicit system and the implicit system, where the flexibility-efficiency feature is applied to find a solution for the computational problem related to skilled motor performance. The chapter also describes the hypofrontality theory or the theory of reduced mental ability in the frontal cortex region and reveals that this deficiency results in the inability to differentiate between different emotions and control and the motor reflexes required for performing and controlling different tasks. Individuals suffering from this deficiency are unable to differentiate between awareness and action, with the added inability of sensing the significance of time.

Richard Powers gives an exclusive interview about his creative process in novel-writing, drawn from the experience of writing twelve novels to date. Powers brings neuroscience and technology into his fiction writing for the twenty-first century. This is especially seen in his novel The Echo Maker, which shows how fiction can represent different aspects of human consciousness. Power’s artistic process is capsulated in a metaphor of “lock and key.” The “triggering stimulus” is the key to the endless possibility of insight. That trigger is less important than the techniques to keep the creative process unfolding—in the case of the novel, chapter by chapter, sentence by sentence, word to word. Along with the initial idea of inspiration, there is the repeated course of corrections along the way, which are “micro” inspirations. A flow state is needed that retains looseness in the progress of creativity. Thoughts and emotions are woven together, as Antonio Damasio has explained, in creativity, and this applies, says Powers, to creative writing. Memory is used in a creative way, reactivated, as shown in novels like Three Farmers, Plowing the Dark, and Galatea 2.2. This interview shows how the overlap between science and art can be demonstrated in the creative process.