Neuroscientists Claim to Have Pinpointed the Brain States Unique to 'Team Flow'

Story time: I used to work as a sommelier in a high-end restaurant as part of a very close-knit team of highly trained and experienced professionals. At some point we became so attuned to each-other, that even guests regularly asked if we were telepathic or if we were communicating wirelessly.

The busier the day or the more chaotic the environment, the deeper this "connection" went. These "Team Flow" events resulted in some of the best reviews and highest/most tips too and I can still remember all of the occurrences in great detail.

from the various accounts of so called 'feral children' or the few experiments that we know of that have been conducted involving depriving children of social contact and the pretty severe consequences it had on development I always wondered in general how much of the functioning of the brain can only be understood in the context of social groups and connectivity between individuals. i wonder how much of a systems approach maybe at some point will enter these fields where people move away from thinking of cognition in terms of individual tasks and potentially start to think of it like more of an emergent property.

This is interesting work and I hope to see more. I'm not qualified to comment on the mathematical analysis but the setup seems legitimate and repeatable.

The discussion of the results leaves much to be desired. The nature of the task is highly synchronized, so it's not surprising to see "brain wave" synchronization that correlates with higher performance. The task also involves auditory signals and timing, which may influence the identified brain regions and activity.

I would like to see this independently verified, and validated across tasks that are primarily visual or proprioceptive. It would also be especially instructive to contrast this to the sense of flow state achieved in high-level competitive play, such as technical fighting games.

The inclusion of line numbers in the paper and the separation of relevant text from graphics is an effective way to disrupt flow of reading the paper. It's a shame I wasn't hooked up to an EEG.

I expected something more granular than brain waves, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Some of my favorite memories are playing music with my friends. In the moment it has no philosophical flavor because everyone's focus is so pinpointed on performing, but afterwards, intellectually it felt like we were a single entity for a few moments. I've also had this happen during pair programming a few times.

Incidentally, if this brain waves stuff is interesting to people, earlier this year I found out that there's research showing that ADHD is correlated with more theta states. Theta is like a low-level, comically chilled out brain. I struggle with ADHD symptoms and medicine hasn't helped. I have a Muse meditation headband that does some crude but fun measurements of brain states. Sure enough, when looking at the raw data, my brain was overwhelmingly in theta states just as the research had found... I'm afraid that maybe I meditated incorrectly for years and accidentally nerfed my own noodle.

Individual flow I get, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced team flow.

This is why it can be fun to work in an office at least so sometimes