The idea of flow as a universal human experience was put forward by the Hungarian American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. As a researcher of intrinsic motivation, Csikszentmihalyi had studied artists to understand how they spent hours, days and weeks on developing their paintings, only to put them aside once finished and move on to the next one. After this initial study, Csikszentmihalyi turned to people engaged in diverse activities – from basketball to chess, from dancing to surgery – and found they described their experiences of total task-engagement in very similar ways, often using the word ‘flow’. Flow is an optimal state of consciousness. In flow, we feel at one with the activity. In flow terms, this is known as action-awareness merging.