Name: 【TED】Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow, the secret to happiness (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow, the secret to happiness)
Uploaded: 2016-07-13T09:46:08.000Z
Duration: 18 min 56 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I grew up in Europe, and World War II caught me

when I was between seven and 10 years old.

Past simple

And I realized how few of the grown-ups that I knew

were able to withstand the tragedies that the war visited on them --

how few of them could even resemble a normal, contented,

satisfied, happy life once their job, their home, their security

what contributed to a life that was worth living.

And I tried, as a child, as a teenager, to read philosophy

and to get involved in art and religion and many other ways

that I could see as a possible answer to that question.

And finally I ended up encountering psychology by chance.

I was at a ski resort in Switzerland without any money

to actually enjoy myself, because the snow had melted and

I didn't have money to go to a movie. But I found that on the --

I read in the newspapers that there was to be a presentation

by someone in a place that I'd seen in the center of Zurich,

and it was about flying saucers [that] he was going to talk.

And I thought, well, since I can't go to the movies,

at least I will go for free to listen to flying saucers.

And the man who talked at that evening lecture was very interesting.

Instead of talking about little green men,

he talked about how the psyche of the Europeans

had been traumatized by the war, and now they're projecting

He talked about how the mandalas of ancient Hindu religion

were kind of projected into the sky as an attempt to regain

some sense of order after the chaos of war.

And I started reading his books after that lecture.

And that was Carl Jung, whose name or work I had no idea about.

Then I came to this country to study psychology

and I started trying to understand the roots of happiness.

This is a typical result that many people have presented,

But this, for instance, shows that about 30 percent of the people

on a scale that has been held constant to accommodate for inflation,

has more than doubled, almost tripled, in that period.

But you find essentially the same results,

namely, that after a certain basic point -- which corresponds more or less

to just a few 1,000 dollars above the minimum poverty level --

increases in material well-being don't seem to affect how happy people are.

In fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources,

material resources, contributes to unhappiness,

but the increase in material resources does not increase happiness.

So my research has been focused more on --

after finding out these things that actually corresponded

to my own experience, I tried to understand:

where -- in everyday life, in our normal experience --

those studies about 40 years ago, I began to look at creative people --

first artists and scientists, and so forth -- trying to understand

what made them feel that it was worth essentially spending their life

doing things for which many of them didn't expect either fame or fortune,

but which made their life meaningful and worth doing.

This was one of the leading composers of American music back in the '70s.

But this little excerpt is a very good summary

of what he was saying during the interview.

And it describes how he feels when composing is going well.

And he says by describing it as an ecstatic state.

simply to stand to the side of something.

And then it became essentially an analogy for a mental state

where you feel that you are not doing your ordinary everyday routines.

So ecstasy is essentially a stepping into an alternative reality.

And it's interesting, if you think about it, how, when we think about

the civilizations that we look up to as having been pinnacles of human achievement --

whether it's China, Greece, the Hindu civilization,

or the Mayas, or Egyptians -- what we know about them

is really about their ecstasies, not about their everyday life.

We know the temples they built, where people could come

These are the remains of civilizations and they are the places that people went

to experience life in a more concentrated, more ordered form.

Now, this man doesn't need to go to a place like this,

which is also -- this place, this arena, which is built

like a Greek amphitheatre, is a place for ecstasy also.

We are participating in a reality that is different

from that of the everyday life that we're used to.

He needs just a piece of paper where he can put down little marks,

and as he does that, he can imagine sounds

that had not existed before in that particular combination.

So once he gets to that point of beginning to create,

a new reality -- that is, a moment of ecstasy --

Now he says also that this is so intense an experience

that it feels almost as if he didn't exist.

And that sounds like a kind of a romantic exaggeration.

But actually, our nervous system is incapable of processing