"What am I passionate about? What do I want to do?": This is the first of six questions that my peers and I were to answer five weeks ago while initially choosing our Masterpiece Project topics and beginning to research them. When this question was first posed in class, I looked around me and observed writing utensils casually scratching at paper all around the room, indicating that nearly everyone had some idea what they wanted to do, both for their projects, and their lives; this is as it should be. Each of us must have something that we are deeply passionate about, right? Unfortunately, I have never been able to personally confirm that statement. While most everyone else answered the question "What do I want to do?" with natural triviality, my pen never touched paper; for I was faced with the exact question that I have spent the majority of my life attempting answer without even approaching success. The preceding years of failure made it clear that the likelihood of me spontaneously producing an answer on my own was slim or none, so I came and saw Dr. Preston at lunch to see if he could work his magic and give me some ideas. Sure enough, only a few minutes later, I walked out of the room with feelings of clarity and excitement towards my project that I would have never thought possible prior to having that conversation. As a starting point, Dr. Preston had me rattle off some of my interests from before school got its sapping hooks into me, and we determined that, cultivated by a long-standing family culture of surfing and diving, the ocean is the closest thing to a passion that I have. There's something about being out there and feeling the power of the waves--the incessant crashing and gurgling sounds slowly washing away the rest of the world--lips tasting of salt, eyes and nose burning from duck-diving seemingly endless sets of waves; a "saltwater cleansing" as my dad calls it. And that got me thinking: When else do I experience that sort of rapture/elation? While listening to a 'moving' piece of music immediately came to mind - "the music chills". It also hit me that, although induced by different circumstances, what I described is the same sort of sensation that artists/musicians report after creating a new piece, and that athletes report as "being in the zone". So, I took that fantastic sensation and applied it universally, thus yielding "The Science of Stoke".
Personally, for me, music is the most common inducer of that type of the sensation, so I began my research there. Upon looking into, in my exact words, "how physical processes are able to have such a profound effect on our moods/emotions (i.e. being 'moved' by art or music, or being elevated to an almost euphoric state while performing a favorite activity)?", I discovered that, as I suspected, emotion-charged, 'moving' music can trigger the release of dopamine in the listener's brain. This "reward chemical" explains the physical pleasure that occasionally coincides with listening to music; a phenomenon commonly referred to as "the music chills". The emotional connection that is said to cause this release of dopamine was left unspoken for, however, raising a new question: How does music arouse, if not induce, certain emotions in the listener? After finding not even an attempted explanation where it seemed that this information should fit in the resources I was looking at, I foresaw a substantial roadblock in the form of the aforementioned question. Unfortunately, my trepidation was realized, and I encountered more difficulty here than anywhere else in my project thus far. Phenomenology, the blend of psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy that aims to study conscious experience through the perspective of the "experiencer", is an incredibly difficult field that is tasked with taking on some of the most daunting problems in modern science (i.e. David Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness"), and it just so happens that the answers I was seeking fall under that domain. So while, sadly, I did not find any magical resources that resolve the mysteries underlying conscious thoughts, feelings, sensations, experiences, etc., I did find enough information to put together a partial account of which elements of music seem to have the greatest effect on a listener's emotions and the pleasure that he/she experiences as a result, although the "why" and the "how" are still missing. Two main ideas that I came across stood out: firstly, Paul Bloom's idea that we derive our feelings about things not solely from what they are, but also from what we believe them to be (or what they are to us); and secondly, that the technical components of music--pitch, rhythm, intensity, tempo, etc.--all relate in one way or another to human communication and movement, effectively rendering music a form of "emotional language" (as outlined by Mark Changizi in this article). While not a complete explanation by any means, ideas such as these are moving us in the right direction in terms of figuring out why music "speaks to us" the way it does, though the true answers surely will continue to elude us so long as we fail to understand subjective experience in virtue of itself.
It was at this point that my topic took a relatively drastic shift. I realized that my research was growing redundant, both in that the answers to my questions we becoming fewer and farther in between, and especially in that, as I mentioned in my essay a couple weeks ago, any sort of practical application of my research appeared doubtful, which was cause for concern when thinking about delivering a final product in June. So, with this in mind, I slightly augmented my topic. Dr. Preston had just recently introduced me to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's theory of flow, which quickly became the object of my research. It was immediately apparent to me that the midpoint at which my initial path of inquiry and my new/current one intersect is, quite simply, happiness. So the topic of my project then became human pleasure and happiness. This more general topic enabled me to tie my research together without anything seeming out of place, and it will allow me more freedom in the future for researching and applying what I find. What's more, thinking back on that surfing scene that led to the initial, epiphanic birth of my topic, it is clear to me that it was actually a flow experience, even though I didn't even know about flow at that point. So it turns out that a sizable portion of my initial inquiry has been satisfied by the information I've obtained with my new one - funny how things turn out.
Anyways, I am now looking into human pleasure and happiness in general, with flow being my primary focus. I am not going to go into too much detail on flow here because I am currently reading Csikszentmihalyi's book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, for this semester's second literature analysis (I know it's super late...) and have already included nearly everything I would write here in that assignment, which I hope to have finished and posted within the next few days. It would not be fair to even mention something without at least providing a definition, though, especially since this is supposed to be a remix of everything I've done, so I will include this much: Flow is a mental state that can occur when a person is working towards a clear and inherently rewarding goal that requires roughly the same amount of skill that that person possesses. Flow is characterized by absolute focus/immersion (often to the extent that a person experiencing flow will lose track of what time it is, forget to eat, etc.), greatly increased performance/productivity, and inexplicably deep momentary enjoyment accompanied by a notable increase in long-term happiness (again, I have explained Csikszentmihalyi's arguments on this matter in much greater detail in the literature analysis that will hopefully follow this post very soon).
While I have been collaborating with several other individuals/groups, this "remix" tells the story of where I'm at with my own project. As of now, I have not gotten past the idea/research stage, though I do believe I'll be ready to start making something happen soon. The only question is, how can I take the information I gather and construct something meaningful with it?
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