Flow and mushin

I've been having a lot of conversations with people about Flow lately, so thought I'd post a little about it. I've had experiences with flow in aikido and eventing — moments where the movements or communication between me and the horse or me and the uke (same thing, essentially) becomes effortless and completely natural -- but not even that — time stands still, you get completely lost in what you're doing.
When this happens in aikido, you're not thinking about anything other than the movement. In moments like this, if I'm uke, I have no idea what just happened to me. Sensei will do a thing, and I won't be able to replicate it once she stops demonstrating, because I wasn't paying attention to anything other than where my body is in space. The idea of flow seems to be related to, or correlates with the concept of mushin, or no mind. 無心の心

From Wikipedia:

There are six factors as encompassing an experience of flow.

1. intense and focused concentration on the present moment
2. merging of action and awareness
3. a loss of reflective self-consciousness
4. a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
5. a distortion of temporal experience, one's subjective experience of time is altered
6. experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience

Mechanism of flow

In every given moment, there is a great deal of information made available to each individual. Psychologists have found that one's mind can attend to only a certain amount of information at a time. According to Mihaly's 1956 study, that number is about 126 bits of information per second. That may seem like a large number (and a lot of information), but simple daily tasks take quite a lot of information. Just having a conversation takes about 40 bits of information per second; that's 1/3 of one's capacity. That is why when having a conversation one cannot focus as much attention on other things.

For the most part (except for basic bodily feelings like hunger and pain, which are innate), people are able to decide what they want to focus their attention on. However, when one is in the flow state, he or she is completely engrossed with the one task at hand and, without making the conscious decision to do so, loses awareness of all other things: time, people, distractions, and even basic bodily needs. This occurs because all of the attention of the person in the flow state is on the task at hand; there is no more attention to be allocated. 

Conditions for flow

Schaffer (2013) proposed 7 flow conditions:

1. Knowing what to do
2. Knowing how to do it
3. Knowing how well you are doing
4. Knowing where to go (if navigation is involved)
5. High perceived challenges
6. High perceived skills
7. Freedom from distractions

A review of his book in Psychology Today (2007).

Reiner Klimke and Ahlerich: