Sudoku and peak experience
I’m reading Flow: The Psychology of Peak Experience, by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi. On the one hand, I am struck by how well doing a sudoku fits his description of a peak experience:
- A challenging activity that requires skills
- Clear goals, within reach
- Immediate feedback
- Sense of control
- Total absorption
- Altered sense of time
On the other hand, a sudoku is just a logic puzzle. What does it say about modern life, that so much of it is less satisfying than a logic puzzle? Work, for example: loss of control is the whole point of a job. Television: the commercials deliberately disrupt absorption every few minutes.
Doing a sudoku is a freely chosen activity. No one does a sudoku while thinking “I’d rather be doing a crossword puzzle”. Real life requires interaction with other people, who have other agendas that don’t necessarily involve creating peak experiences for us. Sudoku’s artificiality isolates it from those other agendas and gives us total control.
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Peak Experience: This also applies to shooting empty shotgun shells with a .22 revolver.
It is challenging: Just try it some time. Clear goals: whack it. Immediate feedback: miss and it sits there snearing at me, or if I hit the plastic part it hops a foot or two, but if I hit the brass part it goes Zzzzzzzzing! thru the air (this is repeatable within the limits of accuracy of the gun if you practice a bit. There is no need to settle for hitting the plastic part). Hitting consistantly definitly provides a sense of control. It definitly requires total absobtion, which turns out to be extremely relaxing. And I lose all sense of time in doing so.
Totally mindless, extremely satisfying.
Go figger.