Csikszentmihalyi did not just explain “flow” he offered a pointed critique of why so many people fail to achieve it. “I think in a world where it’s become harder and harder to focus, his work on flow has become even more important.”ĭr. “Csikszentmihalyi was such a leader in our field it’s hard to do his contributions justice,” Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology at Yale, wrote in an email. It focused not on the pathologies of the human mind but its everyday experiences. Csikszentmihalyi and Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Csikszentmihalyi’s 1990 book made him a public figure.įlow became an important element of positive psychology, a movement started in the early 2000s by Dr. Flow occurs in that delicate zone between boredom and anxiety.” If there is too much for them to handle, they get anxious. “If there is too little demand on them, people are bored. Csikszentmihalyi said in an interview with The New York Times in 1986. “People seem to concentrate best when the demands on them are a bit greater than usual, and they are able to give more than usual,” Dr. Csikszentmihalyi was not the only person to recognize that people can fall into states of intense focus, he was the first to explain how they did so, in empirical terms.įlow, he argued, was a state of mind, a level of concentration in which outside stimuli, even time itself, seem to fall away. “Flow” brought to a general readership ideas that he and other psychologists had been developing for decades. Csikszentmihalyi has been viewed nearly seven million times. Newt Gingrich sang its praises so did Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who once boasted that half his cabinet was reading it. He even held up a copy of the book during a postgame interview. Csikszentmihalyi’s work as a critical piece in his preparation for the team’s victory in the 1993 Super Bowl. Jimmy Johnson, the coach of the Dallas Cowboys, cited Dr.

The book made “flow” a part of popular and political culture. Csikszentmihalyi, who went by Mike and whose full name is pronounced mee-HIGH CHEEK-sent-me-HIGH-ee, was a polymath whose passions for painting, chess playing and rock climbing informed his work on subjects as diverse as the teenage brain and the psychology of interior design.īut it was his research into creativity and focus, which began while he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, that constituted his life’s work, and that made him a public figure after the breakout success of his 1990 book, “ Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.” His son, Chris Csikszentmihalyi, said the cause was cardiac arrest.ĭr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian American psychologist who showed how everyone from artists to assembly-line workers can be transported to a state of focused contentment by getting caught in the “flow,” a term he coined and later popularized, died on Oct.

Flow mikhail