The Middletown Centre for Autism Podcast

Understanding Autistic Flow with Dr Brett Heasman

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In the latest Middletown Podcast, we chat to Dr Brett Heasman about his research into Autistic Flow. He explains how it can be a helpful model for understanding autistic experience and how beneficial flow states can be for wellbeing.  

Find out more about the work that Brett and his team are doing at the Heasman Flow Lab.  

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Middletown Podcast. I'm Kat Hughes, I'm a researcher at Middletown, and I'm also autistic. In this episode I checked a researcher Dr. Brett Heasman from York St. John University with the work he's doing to explore the concept of autistic flow. I think this is such important work and the concept of autistic flow is something that in the future we're going to be talking about a lot. I think it does a wonderful job of explaining autistic experience in a very kind and supportive way. Brett's team at the Heasman Flow Lab have been doing such thoughtful work and I was delighted to have a chance to talk to him about it. I hope you enjoy our chat. Brett, it's so lovely to chat to you for the podcast. And I suppose I wanted to start by asking a big question that probably a lot of people will be wondering is what exactly do we mean when we say flow state?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's a very big question and one which is definitely occupying my scholarly career. Um there are lots of ways in which we might talk about flow states. So some of what I need to do with that question is uh declutter it a little bit. In a very basic sense, a flow state describes being really deeply absorbed in an activity uh of interest. It can happen consciously, you can choose to do it, it can spontaneously grab you. But when we're really deeply absorbed, we start to lose the ability to monitor everything else going on. So our perception of time, our perception of space, our sense of self, our sort of intrusive thoughts, these are all things which begin to dissolve as we go into an attentional tunnel and focus really deeply on one specific thing. So this is a term flow states has been used to describe this, sort of being in an attentional flow. It was developed in psychological literature by um Hungarian-American psychologist uh Mihali Chiksen Mihaili, who's got like really hard to pronounce name. Um, but you can go much earlier than the psychological literature to see evidence of flow states in sort of spirituality, in in terms of uh religious texts, in terms of meditation. Uh as long as there have been humans writing and communicating, you can see evidence of flow states. Um and indeed, one of the things that really sort of fascinated Chick Setmahai was the way in which we've built our world to cultivate flow. So when you go into an amphitheater, the seating of that is to focus the attention on a specific space. If you're driving down the road, you don't have all the road signs at once, they're spaced out because it understands like your capacity for being able to pay attention to things uh whilst doing your driving. So we use flow to actually design the world around us and to experience life in a really concentrated form to help us enter flow states. So it's something that, you know, I said it was a big answer to your question, what is meant by a flow state? I think it's a fundamental unit of consciousness. It's what happens when you have consciousness, where you begin to be able to connect one moment to the next and uh to achieve some kind of depth of thought about something.

SPEAKER_00:

Brilliant. And then you're one of those researchers that I'm always very excited to see what you're working on because you've done you've worked on such interesting things, a lot to work on double empathy, employment, things that are really important, I think, to the community. So I was wondering what drew you to to flow states in particular.

SPEAKER_01:

It's a few things, yeah. So in terms of my academic interests, my research was always interested in interactions, particularly going beyond normative and conventional understanding of how people should interact, to thinking about um what are the creative and novel ways in which people interact, which is what drew me to research on neurodiversity. Um, as part of that, uh what I found were different patterns of interaction or flow that could take place between people, particularly autistic people, as I studied early on in my research. And um what was interesting was I was always searching for a theoretical framework or model to help explain the fact that you could have these different patterns of connection between people, and that the transition into and out of them can happen in different ways as well. Um and one of the things I observed as well was that sometimes, particularly in the context I was looking at with autism, the interaction could be between people and it could also then become sort of individual. So it seemed to switch a lot between cooperative and individual forms of what you might call sense making, where you're talking about the world and making sense of the reality that surrounds you when you're in dialogue with people. Now, um this seemed really like intuitive to me. Um, but when you start to apply frameworks of social convention, you start to say, okay, someone's ignoring someone here. This is a bad sort of social rapport, um, someone's talking too much here. I don't know if you know about like Grice's maxims of uh content and relevance, these are kind of maxims that have been used to characterize what's appropri what's an appropriate amount to speak, uh, what's the most relevant sort of thing to say, uh, what's the correct way to say it. So these are things which have sort of governed theories of communication. Um they just uh and and this was part of like a wider problem and why I did double empathy research as well, was I just always felt like whenever I looked at theory and I looked at psychology more broadly, it seems to always take the position that we need to look at being human through the lens of an incredibly social perspective. And I am I I am a social psychologist, you know, I I absolutely like I've been trained as a social psychologist, so I understand um why uh being part of a group, having identity, having a sense of self-like these are all core concepts in the development of our psychology. But to me, that's different from social convention and normative rules, which are then become the kind of prism through which all of human behavior is looked at. And so the reason I'm explaining this in terms of like what drew me to flow states is this is a different model for understanding what it means to be human. Uh, instead of being a socially based model, it's an interest-based model. It's a model that says um it's natural to become deeply absorbed in things you're interested in. And that can be other people, but it can also be the world around you. It can be sensory, it can be performance-related, it can be euphoric, it can be spontaneous. Um and this is to me, intuitively made a lot more sense as a framework for understanding diversity that I was looking at in terms of neurodiversity and communication, but also what it means to have a sort of meaningful psychological life, because when we're in these moments where we follow our interests, we're really motivated, we're kind of happy, we're um not really thinking about the negative things. It's very well supported with our well-being. So I became really interested in this concept of flow as being maybe a framework that's from outside of the autism literature that applies to all human beings and indeed all organisms with conscious uh life, um, that this could be maybe a better way to reposition human sociality as being interest-based.

SPEAKER_00:

Um and yeah, it it it I suppose it makes me think about how there's such an emphasis on kind of mindfulness at the moment in terms of how we try and support ourselves and support each other, but at the same time, in relation to autistic experience, it's like, oh, but not like that, you know. So, how does flow specifically um I suppose sit with our understanding of autistic experience?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so that's a very good question. I mean, uh there's there's another layer to to all of this, which is worth mentioning before I go into the the subset of looking at flow and autism, which is that we've designed a world, like physically, technologically, which is very disruptive of flow, um, which is very interesting. Like it's try or or or not disruptive of flow, but very coercive of flow. So advertising and marketing use principles of pulling you in to be in a sort of commercial flow state, which is going to be kind of uh um advantageous or lucrative. Um, likewise, like we just have so many distractions now. Um, if we are trying to focus on something because of the technological hyperconnected world we're in. So um that is like I've spoken a bit about social norms and conventions, but there's also like the sort of technological, physical architecture of our world, um, competing with flow. Then within all of that, we have difference, neurodivergence that isn't understood at a social level and can be really affected at the physical and technological level. And it's so easy to miss what's going on, or even mischaracterize what's going on as a result of not being able to access low states or having a really great challenge transitioning in or out of them. So, in terms of um, so that's like my sort of contextual framing of the problem. Uh, that then makes it really interesting to understand low states in the context of autistic experiences. So uh flow is a term that's been used by autistic people for a long time, uh, along with other words such as uh hyperfocus, for example. So this is already part of like common language and talking about experiences of being autistic. Um and uh in particular, when you look at the diagnostic framework for autism, you have things like repetitive behaviors, you have uh fixated interests, you have these what you would call pathologized ways of looking at being really intensely absorbed in something. Yet when you look at the flow literature, these very same um qualities are positively seen. They're seen as strengths. So it found it very curious that you could have, as we have in the diagnostic framework for autism, this the very sort of ingredients of a flow state um kind of make up most of the diagnostic framework for autism. Yet at the same time, it's pathologized, uh, whereas in the flow literature these are seen as natural consequences. So there was an interesting sort of mismatch here, um, which again further drew me to flow states. And then when I started talking with autistic people, looking at um autobiographical uh autobiographical accounts of autism, we start to see um some really interesting features that could tell us that maybe the flow states autistic people are experiencing are not only a vital part of navigating the world of well-being, but also these questions of how you transition into and out of flow states are particularly complicated. Um, but also then the overlap of hypersensitivities and the extent to which that can both provide an enhanced route to finding flow, being stimulated to enter flow, and at the same time be distracted or pulled out of it in ways that can be quite violent and uncomfortable. Uh, so there was lots there in terms of even at a theoretical level to start exploring this uh before we then went out and uh uh started gathering some data on it. And where does or does like monotropism fit within sort of our understanding of flow states Yeah, so one of the nice things about doing the research that I have done is I've been able to collaborate with some fantastic scholars, uh, one of them being uh Fergus Murray. And monotropism is a term that's been used to describe the attentional profile and how it can differ between people, where some people have an attention tendency to go really deep on a smaller number of topics as opposed to spreading one's attention much wider but in a shallower way across topics. So this obviously aligns with flow states in terms of the ability to go into an attentional tunnel, is a key requirement of flow states. But it's important to say that anyone can experience a flow state, even if you've not got a monotropic tendency, you can still become deeply passionate or deeply absorbed by something that really motivates you. It's just that some people may be doing that more frequently or more naturally as part of the way that they orientate to the world.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that makes sense. And are there sort of specific conditions that sort of allow flow states to happen more easily?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, this is another good question. And there's been lots of research which has tried to explore how we can create flow states. Um, they've been termed preconditions, and a lot of this research comes from either cognitive uh psychology or experimental psychology, and you need to take it with a pinch of salt, I think, because I I also have a slightly more critical view of what flow is than the more traditional view. So the traditional view says a flow state is a really positive thing, that it improves well-being, that it's linked to high performance, which um I don't discount, but as uh maybe a more critical social psychologist, I can also see that addiction would also be a type of flow, but that could be quite a harmful behavior. People who over-train for a marathon are hurting themselves in in in in ways that uh kind of align with flow principles, but don't. So I think it's a little bit more nuanced than just saying it's always a happy, perfect, positive thing. Sometimes people um flow states themselves can vary, and it can be experienced in different degrees of intensity as well. Not every flow state is sort of comparable to the other. People have different thresholds for entering flow. Um we find that as we were just talking about, maybe with a monotropic attention style, the threshold's much lower. You can enter flow potentially faster, but then maybe susceptible to being pulled out or disrupted if you have hypersensitivities as well. So there's a dynamic there to consider. Uh so there's a lot to say about like what even is a flow state, let alone the preconditions. So the preconditions that have been spoken about in literature include things like um having really high feedback. So people need to know where they are in an activity. Uh, the more feedback, uh the more they can sort of spend less energy worrying about their performance or task or whatever. Um, another classic one that's been used is saying that there's some kind of uh fit between the skills of the individual and the demand of the tasks that's been done. Uh this I think becomes slightly problematic, particularly when you look at circumstances which have nothing to do with skill and task demands. You know, I always give an example when I was volunteering at a charity that supports people with uh learning difficulties, and there was one person that had this cotton scarf, and they like to open a book and just waft the scarf over the pages, and they obviously got a really great sensory feedback, and they were just in their world for sure in a in a flow state, enjoying this activity. And it has nothing to do with skill and task demand. It's a very cognitive way of thinking about flow. But this is uh, you know, often flow has been done in contexts such as sports psychology and uh uh uh and other disciplines. So I think when you look at the full range of where flow is actually happening, some of these preconditions um uh attempt to try and predict flow when actually what I would say as a critical social psychologist is we are entering and exiting all these kind of microflow moments, um, and that it can actually be really hard to predict or say with any certainty what's going to work for one person will work for all people and will result in high performance. You know, uh I think these things are much harder to ascertain. We're much better off going into the real world, seeing what people are naturally motivated to do, and understanding where they feel more or less comfortable in finding those zones of interest and focus.

SPEAKER_00:

It it it makes so much sense what you said about flow sites not necessarily just being beneficial, and it's something that hadn't really even fully occurred to me, although I'm someone who, you know, I I make a lot of stuff. I, you know, I sell, I paint, I'm generally kind of always making something. And there will be times where I'll have forgotten to eat, and you know, I will be so in the flow of what I'm doing that it's not necessarily beneficial to me anymore, and it would be better if I had stuff. So that it makes so much sense. Um and I know you've done some research around flow and well-being. Um, and I'd love to I'd love to hear a bit more about that.

SPEAKER_01:

We've done a whole series of different studies, and it's always the case with academia. Where we're at, people will understand it in two, two years' time when the research comes as such a long delay. So it's really frustrating when so much great stuff has happened uh and really interesting knowledge has been built. Um but uh yeah, so we've done a study which um is in the final stages of review, which was looking at autistic flow and well-being uh using an interpretive phenomenological um analysis approach to understanding. And so that's another type form of analysis which is qualitative and is very much uh trying to understand the lived experience uh perspective of our participants. Uh so that study um was exploring ideas of flow, and we were very careful to design an interview schedule that didn't use the word flow because immediately you get people's preconceived notions. As to what that is. So we used other terms like being immersed or being absorbed to try and sort of circumvent that. But we also developed a really nice interview schedule that's sort of structured around what we know are key theoretical concepts of flow. And we use that to understand their uh autistic experiences. And um some of the key findings from that um flow was well I suppose I've sort of skipped the the theoretical, the earlier theoretical work I did on it with um my co-authors, uh Fergus Murray and Damien Milton and Gemma Williams and Lorna Hamilton and Divine Choro, which was a paper that was uh exploring from autobiographical accounts of autism, what what does flow look like? And one of the points we made in that paper was that we really need to focus on transitions, because if we want to build an enabling environment for supporting flow, we need to understand this process of transitions better. Uh, but also that the type of flow experienced uh for neurodivergent people, particularly maybe autistic people, could be really different from um other types of flow, particularly because one of the things about flow is that you feel in control. But if the world around you is chaotic or feels overwhelming or over stimulating or it's really hard to make sense of, then being in a flow state isn't just feeling in control, it's like it's a vital source of uh security and anchoring and knowing yourself. So it takes on a different meaning, a flow state potentially. So we were interested in this idea that it plays a really important role in um in autistic sociality. With our IPA study, we found that our participants spoke a lot about how flow was a really important mechanism for providing a predictable structure that helped to regulate sensory input and uh reduce overstimulation. So, you know, again, we're departing from the idea of flow being this euphoric perfect state. Actually, here we're talking about a a life management strategy, a way in which um what is an overstimulating world could be used, like you might term it sort of low-intensity flow, could be sort of mobilized to try and just overcome the uh some of these more practical everyday challenges. Um, and that the sense of knowing what's going to happen next, the sense of predictability was like a really important, if you want to call it precondition um or circumstance that helped to support finding flow. So um and and and and the safety that participants would feel when when they did find that. Uh the the so uh that study was led by Daniela Wayne within uh my lab. Um so I just want to acknowledge Daniela's fantastic work that she's done on that. And then also Veronica Robokovska, who's a PhD candidate in my lab, has also been running an experimental study looking at that topic of predictability, and she has looked at it across neurotypes as well. And so she did a reaction light task, which was on a computer screen, and there were essentially two versions of the task: one where you could uh you had this kind of stimulus that would help you predict accurately where the reaction which reaction light was gonna light up, and then you could react quicker. And then other task, which was just providing chaotic information, and uh there was no correlation between the stimulus and and which light was gonna light up next. And she was looking at people's sort of self-reported perception of flow, but she also used eye tracking to see what did people behaviorally do um when they were faced with these two different circumstances. Um she found some interesting things there, particularly around the fact that uh people are uh tend to be less consciously aware of when they're in flow than when there are actual behavioral differences. So uh the participants would say uh that they felt broadly in flow for both tasks, but when we looked at the behavior, there was much more anxious looking in the unpredictable condition. There was much more uh uh there was a higher number of fixations. So fixations are like points where you look with the with the eye tracking, a much higher number of mean fixations for um the unpredictable condition. So bringing in a degree of unpredictability, slow down reaction time, and uh uh affected flow but in a way that people weren't consciously monitoring. So there's definitely something there about um you know predictability is important, but we uh might not always be aware because we're we're flowing in a direction in in one way, but not really monitoring our comfort levels in another.

SPEAKER_00:

That that work that you and your team have done sort of makes me think then about how we bring that information into sort of the the practical, um sort of everyday world. And would you in particular have any ideas around how educators might um I suppose understand flow and then support flow in a healthy way with their student?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's a very good question. And I have more studies to talk about from my lab on that front. One which we ran with a school looking at uh neurodivergent sixformers experiences of flow. And also another member of my lab, Maya Noddings Walker, a fantastic student who has been running over the last couple of years a interactional study of flow where people have played while playing tabletop games, and she's looked at conversational flow and how that differs across neurotypes. And there's insights from both, which we could use to inform the question of how we could build a more enabling environment, whether it's for learning or social interaction. What we found from our Flow in Education project, and again, Daniela Wayne was working on this project uh with me along with uh Tatiana Hogarth, um, who also supported the project. So I just want to acknowledge uh their incredible input. Uh with this project, we were running focus groups with uh Neurodivergent Six Formers uh over a period of four months exploring aspects of flow in in school life. And one of the interesting findings we had from that project was that there were different pathways into flow. Sometimes it could happen spontaneously. You didn't plan for it, it grabs you. One participant talked about just suddenly getting up and dancing around, you know, in her room because she had the energy in her and it just felt like the right thing to do at that moment. And there's another type of flow which or pathway into flow which is cultivated. So this is where you deliberately say, okay, I'm going to set aside X amount of time to focus on this particular topic or this particular piece of homework. And I need to find a quiet room, I need to uh turn off my phone, I need to just sort of zone zone in. So you do all these like little adjustments to your environment to make flow more likely. Now, when you think about the school life and school curriculum, it is very much based around purely that one approach to flow, the cultivated form. You have to like do this particular task. You might not be interested in it, but you have to do it now. The time's being allocated. And then I don't know how long a school period is, like 40 minutes or something, suddenly a bell rings, big high, you know, sensory disruption, and bang, you have to switch tasks to something else. Uh, the space for spontaneous discovery of flow isn't really built into the curriculum. But what we were finding from our participants was they were saying that the spontaneous approach to flow gave them energy, it reset them, it calmed them down. The cultivated approach to flow took energy. You had to spend it very carefully, uh, it could make them anxious. And what seems to work is having an environment where you can switch between the two. So the first learning I would extract from there is if you're trying to design an environment that's going to work for people, particularly neurodivergent students, taking into consideration the need to naturally move between these different approaches to flow might help uh sustain energy and sustain interest in uh the learning journey. From Maya's study looking at interactions, and she was looking at groups of either autistic or non-autistic people playing role playing tabletop games, there were lots of interactional uh differences. There were some overlaps, but there were interactional differences which were quite interesting to observe. One of them was that the autistic participants seemed to be hit the ground running faster in terms of playing with fictional characters and you know, voicing, pretending to be the vic fictional characters that they've invented and just sort of inhabiting other selves, sort of moving away from their own sort of social identity and playing the game, than we saw with the non-autistic participants, which spent a little bit longer sort of uh sort of managing social uh bonds and were maybe a bit reluctant or a bit embarrassed to like voice characters in the game. So we saw something really interesting going on with uh an interactional dynamic that supported interactional flow, which was uh more playful on the autistic side, but we also saw loads of evidence that both parties manage uh social anxiety or social welfare for each other, and they just do it in a slightly different pattern. Uh so it was really is really shown, and this study still needs to be written up, and you know, Maya will be able to speak much more to the nuances of the data than than I can. But what it highlights is that there are different ways of interacting if social norms are relaxed, uh uh, and then we can see the these these types of interactional flow emerge as a consequence. But you need a situation at the moment we have to artificially create it where everyone's uh a similar neurotype, and then then it kind of works. But when you've got mixed uh neurotypes, then you start to see the imposition of norms and conventions that can disrupt interactional flow. So thinking about an educational context, you might want to think about uh ways in which people are able to express and communicate themselves or maybe even inhabit other versions of themselves in the in the fr and have the freedom to do so without social judgment. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

That's really lovely. What an interesting set of studies. Um is there a plan for more? Where would you like if you could go anywhere next to that, where would you take it next?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, there's too many plans, is the problem, and you've got to decide in some way a bit like a flow state, where are you going to pour your attention to? I have a few things going on. One of them is uh I've been doing some programming over the last year, software programming, because I needed software that didn't exist, so I started making it for myself, which is to analyze dialogue. So I I'd use conversation analysis in my research and in my teaching, and I needed a system for helping me structure dialogue, uh annotate it, and then visualize the data so I could understand interactional dynamics. So that's something that I've done, which I'm slowly scaling up and uh I'd really like to make uh available to everyone else to use. Um, so I'm in the process of doing that. So that's like one major strand of research I've been uh involved in. We um want to do more in terms of working with uh charities and organizations and schools to help them design flow into their practices more, but that's definitely a two-way process of like going and listening and learning and then feeding back. But that's part of like the real-world impact we're really keen to do. We're also thinking about public communication of these concepts. I'm kind of very acutely aware that when people talk about social interaction or they even study it in psychology, they still import lots of normative bias into the way that they look at things, which I find quite frustrating. And there are some really important concepts, such as intersubjectivity, which sound complicated but are actually really intuitive, but it's just this the communication of the science isn't there very well. So as a lab, my flow lab are trying to develop some resources on things like YouTube that will allow anyone to kind of access and understand the concepts that we're using and how it can be applied to data. So we've got this kind of really big project of um not just researching flow, but making it accessible to everyone.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's I I think that's the at the heart of it. And I think that's where I find research so exciting. It's where it it then actually becomes something that belongs to everyone. It's not just something that's published in papers that people don't get to read. Because it impacts all of us. So it's really important, I think, that it's shared with all of us. Um then my very, very last question for you is um, based on all of the research that you've conducted, if you could go back and give your your younger self some advice, either research-based or personal, what advice would you give? It's a hard question, I know.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, this question I I couldn't prepare for because I don't know the answer. I don't know the answer what I would uh advise. I wouldn't change, in one sense, I wouldn't change a thing because I might not have the motivation and interests that I have now, which seem to be well directed. I would I would have loved to have made things be less painful for me personally in a way that I can now understand through flow states as someone who had always identified as neurodivergent because of hypersensitivities and a complete inability to to blend into to social and group and culture. Um, but then more latterly had a diagnosis, uh, an autism diagnosis and um that whole process of seeing your life mapped onto the framework, even as someone who's researched autism, um understanding it from the perspective of flow uh just made it makes more sense to me in a way that I I had kind of overlooked or not understood. So um that's kind of why I want to make these concepts accessible to everyone because it starts to shift how you see yourself, but in a very um accepting, understanding way of of yourself, matching circumstance, you know, it's not all about you as an individual not working. So um, so yeah, I I don't have advice to give to myself. I have information to like about flow. I'd love that to just be there from the start. Um and then, yeah, life might not have been quite so uh uh painful at times in in ways it maybe didn't need to be.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks so much for listening to the podcast. This is a conversation-based interview designed to stimulate thinking and hopefully support the development of practice. It's not intended to be medical or psychological advice. The views expressed in these chats may not always be the view of Middletown Center. If you'd like to know more about Middletown, you can find us on X at Autism Center and Facebook and Instagram at Middletown Center for Autism. Go easy until next time.