Summary of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Chapter 2: Flow, Metaphor, and the Axial Revolution
Flow is a state of enhanced awareness and insight, wherein learning and creativity are often effortless. It occurs when 4 conditions are met: 1) a good match between skills and challenge, 2) tight coupling between action and feedback, 3) clear information, 4) failure matters.
Flow is highly correlated to a sense of meaning. Shamans would often attempt to induce this state through dancing, fasting, and tripping.
People are capable of implicit learning, i.e picking up on subtle environmental patterns without conscious awareness (as demonstrated experimentally). This is often expressed as intuition or ‘gut instinct’. However, it is difficult to explain or teach explicitly — it is powerful precisely because it transcends rules. Moreover, it can often deceive us by picking up correlational patterns instead of causal patterns (bigotry and bad data science). Flow creates a context in which implicit learning is primed for finding causal patterns (the feedback loop).
A metaphor is a bridge between two unrelated concepts that can arise from spontaneous connections between different parts of the brain. It feeds creative problem solving, insight, and meme generation (sorry: meaning generation).
The Neolithic Revolution increased the complexity of societies via agriculture. This was followed by the Bronze Age, at the end of which a pivotal event of Western Civilization known as the Axial Revolution (800–300 BCE) occurred. This was the time when alphabetic literacy and numeracy developed, and along with it, second order thinking (metacognition). Crucially, this enabled people to detect errors in their own thinking and perception, from which arose the desire and responsibility to eliminate self-deception. How did this affect our sense of self, the world, and the meaning of wisdom?