SMU Professor Fiona Nah investigates the neural connectivity underlying the state of flow.
SMU Office of Research – Mental block and the cursor blinking in perpetuity are annoyingly familiar to anyone tasked with writing work. But when the stars are aligned and you are ‘feelin’ it’, the result is phenomenal: You are ‘on fire’, ‘in the zone’, unstoppable. Psychologists call that “flow”.
And Information Systems Professor Fiona Nah of Singapore Management University (SMU) is trying to capture it.
Flow research has been around since 1975 when Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term to describe how a person is so completely immersed in an activity or work that “nothing else seems to matter”. In his scholarly search for the root of happiness, he identified nine dimensions associated with the optimal experience of flow. His academic peers did not warm to his ideas initially, but once big names in business and politics latched on, flow entered the mainstream and Professor Csikszentmihalyi became the undisputed Father of Flow.
Professor Nah is a human-computer interaction researcher, who is constantly on the lookout for ways to design for flow to make computer usage easier and more effective. Since the 1990s, she has conducted experiments and published paper after paper on various phenomena associated with the flow experience such as in gaming and 3D virtual environments.
Today, flow research has moved beyond positive psychology studies, reeling in gurus and scholars, such as Professor Nah, who want to find out how to harvest flow to elevate performance, whether in sports, education or career-wise.
So prolific are her ideas and findings that she was named among the world’s top two percent most-cited scientists since 2021 using citation metrics (excluding self-cites), according to the annual lists compiled by Stanford University and Elsevier. Her upcoming research paper may further boost her ratings.
Using EEG to study flow in the brain
In a multi-disciplinary collaboration, Professor Nah has teamed up with colleagues from other fields including neuroscience, electrical engineering, and communication to investigate the neural activity patterns of flow. They recruited subjects to play the video game, Tetris – simple enough with minimal hand movements, she explained – in various levels of difficulty to reflect the states of boredom, flow (where the subject’s skill is on par with the game’s challenge) and anxiety. During each state, brain activity was recorded using a 64-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) system, which allowed the team to study the “moment-to-moment experience of flow” in real time, Professor Nah told the Office of Research in an interview.
It is a significant departure from most studies of the flow experience which have relied on two self-reported assessment methods: One is the experience sampling method, where a beeper interrupts subjects at random times so that they can be asked about their flow experience; the other method gets subjects to retrospectively fill out a questionnaire on their flow experience after the session is concluded.
“Our findings are very encouraging,” said Professor Nah, who is also a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) and the Editor-in-chief of AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction that is indexed in Scopus and Clarivate.
The EEG project was presented at an information technologies and systems conference in Thailand in December 2024.
“Although there has been research done on the brain activity for the flow state, what’s unique about our team’s work is that we focus on the functional connectivity patterns in the brain. Our inter-disciplinary team makes for a more holistic understanding of flow,” Professor Nah said.
They have drafted a paper on their investigation, which Professor Nah hopes to submit to a top academic journal soon.
Flow in pairs in the metaverse
After more than 25 years of researching and teaching at universities overseas, Professor Nah finally returned to Singapore last July when she joined SMU.
For her maiden experiment here, she plans to purchase an EEG system and study non-gaming aspects of the flow experience in human-computer interaction such as social media, virtual worlds, computer usage in the workplace and online skill training.
“Flow intrigues me – I would love to be in flow all the time when I work! I would be super productive and creative,” said Professor Nah, who has an energetic personality with many real-life stories to share of her experiences with flow (or not) during her National Junior College days of kayaking, dragon boating, and cross-country running in national schools competitions. She got into running full marathons during her undergraduate years at the National University of Singapore.
Looks like the mark of an ultra-active person or someone who relishes a challenge? “Yes, I am a go-getter,” Professor Nah laughed, “however, these days, I can manage only the half marathon”.
Did she get into flow during those long runs? Not very often, she said. In the flow state, a person is deeply absorbed in a self-rewarding activity, with a distorted sense of time and a loss of self-consciousness, sometimes to the point that physical needs are neglected. What is produced is usually creative and high-quality while the experience is highly satisfying and effortless. When running full marathons or race kayaking, Professor Nah said she could not get into flow because she had to be aware of possible hazards in her surroundings, plus the need to strategise. However, in leisure runs and kayaking, it is easier to get into flow.
In the workplace, however, it is possible to encourage flow, she said.
For starters, companies may consider using the metaverse to carry out training and onboarding of employees, according to Professor Nah’s paper, ‘Flowing Together or Alone: Impact of Collaboration in the Metaverse’, published in Decision Support Systems in January 2025.
This is because the metaverse offers “an immersive environment that induces a highly engaging and enjoyable experience termed flow or cognitive absorption,” she wrote. Specifically, getting people to work together in the metaverse, rather than solo, makes the flow experience “more pronounced”, she said. Professor Nah’s experiment involved subjects tackling a design task in the virtual world, Second Life, either in teams of two or alone.
“When collaborating with a partner, individuals can assist each other with properly aligning and maintaining their concentration on the task,” she said.
What about triggering flow in oneself while working? People can get into flow more easily when the challenge of the task at hand and their skill are at a similar level, she said. Minimising disruptions while having clear goals and immediate feedback is also important for flow.
Professor Nah added that researchers have been studying ways of stimulating the brain so that flow is induced. Although that is not her research focus, her project using EEG has “implications” for that branch of research, she said, “because if we know the brain activity that is associated with flow, then we can trigger flow using brain stimulation techniques”.
However, she said, “I personally prefer and suggest using natural ways to induce flow.”
Back to Research@SMU May 2025 Issue
