Learning involves processing information

From Literacy and Intrinsic Motivation by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

In a series of studies based on in-depth interviews in various cultures of the world, including India, Thailand, the American Southwest, and various European countries, a team of psychologists from the University of Milan concluded that reading was one of the most ubiquitous and widespread activities people did for sheer enjoyment.

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But what constitutes a challenge? This question raises the most profound issue in the theory of motivation, and points to the pons asinorum where so many well-intentioned educational programs fall. The problem is that the same thing will be an attractive challenge to one person and a bothersome nuisance to another. Imagine leaving a copy of Livy's Histories among the magazines in a doctor's waiting room, and then observing the reaction of the patients. Most people will look puzzled as they start thumbing through the pages, and quickly replace the book on the table with a faint air of having been insulted. Perhaps one person in a hundred - or a thousand? - after the initial puzzlement will start reading, and eventually get immersed in the book. Why would this imaginary person find Livy challenging, while everyone else did not?

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A related outcome is that flow provides a sense of control even when the person is involved in dangerous activities such as spelunking, sky diving, or rock climbing. Because these activities are clearly demarcated, and the appropriate rules are identified, the participant is able to anticipate risks and minimize the unexpected. Besides, there is just too much to do to worry about failure. Those individuals who cannot keep their attention concentrated on the task at hand start worrying about the possibility of losing control. They do not enjoy the activity and eventually drop it.

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A matching of challenges and skills, clear goals, and immediate feedback, resulting in a deep concentration that prevents worry and the intrusion of unwanted thoughts into consciousness, and in a transcendance of the self, are the universal characteristics associated with enjoyable activities. When these dimesions of experience are present, the activity becomes autotelic, or rewarding in itself.

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It is important to note that what people enjoy the most in their lives is almost never something passive, like watching television or being entertained. When reading is enjoyed, it is active reading, which involves choosing the book, indentifying with the characters, trying to recreate visually the places and the events described, anticipating turns of the plot, and responding with empathy, yet critically, to the writer's craft. Nor is enjoyment the same as pleasure. Flow requires the use of skills and depends on gradual increments of challenges and skills so that boredom or anxiety will not take over. Pleasure, on the other hand, is homeostatic: pleasurable experiences like resting when tired, drinking when thirsty, or having sex when aroused do not require complex skills and can be repeated over and over without losing ther rewarding quality. For this very reason, pleasure does not drive us to develop new potentialities and thus does not lead to personal growth.

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Reading cannot be enjoyable unless the student can imagine, at least in principle, that the symbol system of letters is worth mastering for its own sake. If the child knows adults he respects who read, he will take it for granted that reading is worthwhile.

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Learning involves processing information. Complex information processing requires the allocation of attention to the task. There cannot be any learning unless a person is willing to invest attention in a symbolic system. Human behavior is determined in all sorts of ways, but in one sense, for better or worse, we are relatively free: short of torture or other drastic means, no one can force us to pay attention to something unless we want to. The old saying "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink" is really a metaphor for the human ability to "tune out" at will. And that is what students usually do when the material fails to interest them - which is what invariably happens when challenges are either much too high, or much too low, relative to their skills.

Even talented students in mathematics and science (who score in the upper 5 percent of national norms in these subjects) generally report overwhelming challenges when involved with math and science, and only rarely report matching challenges and skills. As a result, their self-ratings of intrinsic motivation are very significantly below baseline when involved in the area of their talent. (Conversely, students talented in the arts or in music - that is, in fields which notoriously lack extrensic rewards such as status or monetary incentives - show an opposite trend: challenges and skills are usually in balance when students do art or music in school, and consequently their level of intrinsic motivation is much above baseline when involved with their talent. These findings help flesh out the distinction between "hard" sciences and the arts).

It is not only the lack of balance between skills and challenges that detracts from intrinsic motivation in learning. The second condition that makes flow possible is the clarity of goals and the immediacy of feedback. Both of these are usually lacking in formal learning settings.