“The Way (Tao) goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. Now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.” – The story of cook Ting, from the Zhuangzi (quoted with many apologies to vegans) We are constantly bombarded by sensory information. But according to the famous psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, our nervous system can process no more than 110 bits of information per second. If that’s right, whether you multitask or single-task, that’s the threshold to what your brain can register, or the limit of your attention. That may be why it’s now generally agreed that multitasking is a myth, because it usually degrades your performance. Single-tanking, or focusing your full attention on a single task, still generally delivers better results. And if you are lucky and skilful enough, you may go into what cook Ting has described in the Zhuangzi , or what Csikszentmihalyi has famously called the state of “flow”. Are we butterflies or computer games? I recently watched a YouTube clip of the Beethoven biopic, Immortal Beloved . In the scene, Beethoven is playing on the piano alone as the haunting melody of the Moonlight Sonata takes shape. He is completely immersed in his music. Unbeknown to him, his lover is hiding behind a doorway and listening. Deeply moved by the melody, she quietly approaches him from behind and puts her hand on his shoulder. He is so surprised and shocked by the rude intrusion he falls off his chair. Furious, he takes off without saying a word. Silly woman! Doesn’t she know her lover is in the flow or “in the zone”, and that the worst thing she can do is to knock him out of it? Sheldon, the theoretical physicist, in the hit comedy series The Big Bang Theory , often finds himself “in the zone” for hours working at the cutting edge of physics. When that happens, his flatmates, who are also scientists, know they have to tiptoe and stay quiet away from him in the flat. All these, though, have been dramatisations of the state of flow. Here’s how American basketball legend Bill Russell actually describes it: “It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. During those spells I could sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken.” How Taoist teachings can expose the hype and pretensions of artificial intelligence When I was a teenager, like everyone else, I was a big fan of Canadian ice hockey icon Wayne Gretzky in the 1980s. If you were in the audience watching a live game, you could feel him entering into “the zone”. He was not bigger or faster than most other players, but he had an uncanny way of anticipating where the puck and everyone else was going. Athletes in many other fields, such as long-distance running, have talked about “being in the zone”. Csikszentmihalyi, in fact, came to his idea of flow while investigating how artists, especially painters, can be so intensely focused that they forget everything else, like eating. But I can’t help thinking that this idea of flow has been overly romanticised, and coloured by the Western notion of the creative individualism of the lone genius. Cook Ting was no genius; he was just a skilled butcher. Even Gordon Ramsay would have told you to cut through the joints, not to hack through the bones. Flow is a state that is not specific to noble creations in the arts and sciences. It can happen while performing quite mundane tasks. In fact, our success in navigating our daily life requires a good deal of skilful mastery of many mundane jobs and tasks. There is no news now, only stories If you are a skilful driver, you can navigate through heavy traffic while talking on your mobile phone or arguing with the wife on the passenger seat. Skills enable you to utilise your environment, equipment and craft to focus on the task at hand while they recede into the background without your noticing. A skilled carpenter doesn’t pay attention to his tools, so long as they are working, when he is crafting his products. That’s why I felt a well-regarded Hong Kong surgeon was unfairly penalised a few years ago for talking on his mobile phone while performing on a patient. By all accounts, the patient turned out fine. Martin Heidegger, the great German philosopher, argues that such skilful engagement with, and navigation through, the physical and social worlds, is intrinsic to our being human, or what he called being-in-the-world. On this point, he is extremely close to the philosophy of the Zhuangzi . Why do some Western critics inevitably get China wrong? Somehow along the way, by being human, we or most people anyway, develop the skills needed to cope and survive, perhaps even to succeed and lead meaningful lives. Heidegger is anti-romantic and very close to Eastern philosophy. Interestingly, Csikszentmihalyi’s son Mark is a professor in Asian languages and a specialist in ancient Chinese philosophies, including Taoism. Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow is, in a way, a version of the Western romantic genius. He himself recognises a certain danger: “[E]njoyable activities that produce flow have a potentially negative effect: while they are capable of improving the quality of existence by creating order in the mind, they can become addictive, at which point the self becomes captive of a certain kind of order, and is then unwilling to cope with the ambiguities of life.” It needs to be balanced with a less grandiose notion of flow and skilful engagement in the performance of ordinary jobs and tasks – mundane, yes, but can be no less meaningful and immersive.