the screen above him, there was a picture of brain synapses they had studied before. “Alpha and theta brain waves are indicative of subconsciousness while beta brain waves are what we experience as consciousness. Consciousness is labeled System 2 thought because it was the second to happen in our development while subconsciousness is dubbed System 1. Our mind is designed to get as many things from System 2 transferred to System 1 or subconscious thought mostly because conscious thought or System 2 thought takes up a lot of energy and is very cumbersome.
“For example, when you learned to drive a car, you started in System 2. You had to think about each and every thing you did. It took precious seconds and a lot of thought energy to accelerate and brake reliably. You had to navigate in System 2 as well. It was a lot. But then, after your brain got used to it, it moved many of the tasks into System 1 so that now I’ll bet most of you can drive, sing to what’s on the radio, talk to your friend, hopefully not text or make phone calls… but you get what I’m saying.”
Oh, Taylor got it and then some. Yoli would never believe this.
“Csikszentmihalyi actually did a study in which he had the subjects purposely not do the thing that put them into flow. They were supposed to do the study for a month, but after ten days, he called the study off because the subjects had already started to show signs of depression. That’s how important flow state is even to our mental health. The problem is, very few people even know this state exists, and too many people are actively going against what puts them into flow.
“See, we’ve been told this story about how to live a successful life. It goes like this, go to school and get good grades so you can get into a good college and get more good grades so you can get a degree, get out and get a good job at a company that will take care of you for 40 years at which point you can retire and play golf until you die. The problem is, if that ever worked, which I doubt, it certainly doesn’t work now. Good companies are often not around for 40 years and certainly career paths change and morph and disintegrate and re-emerge as something completely different all the time. Life is not a play-it-safe game. Life is a learn-to-deal-with-risks-and-find-your-best-path game. Find what you do that adds value to the world and find people that you can be in synergy with to do that. Do you and find where you fit.
“What Csikszentmihalyi and Seligman say over and over again is that positive psychology, or learned optimism as Seligman calls it, is not about avoiding mental illness. It’s about finding what makes you feel alive and doing that in a way that is productive and valuable to the world. If you can find your flow in something that is valuable to the world, that’s your sweet spot. But please get out of the trap of doing what you hate because everybody else says it’s what you should do to make the old story work.”
At the end of the class, Professor Peters reminded them of the discussion assignment for Thursday. Taylor had taken to doing the assignment as a discussion and not as a paper, and she’d found that she really enjoyed conversing about life and all of the things that went into making it work. It was strange to talk about things like that because other than her talks with Yoli and Lily, she hadn’t thought anyone her age talked about that stuff.
The new assignment was to think about what Professor Peters called your “team,” or the people around you that you go to when things get dicey.
“Who celebrates your victories?” Professor Peters asked. “Who listens and is there for you? Who makes you a priority?”
Taylor wrote the questions in her notebook, remembering the night before. She already had a few people in mind.
“Now, I want you to make a list of those people, and we will discuss them on Thursday, or your paper about them is due Thursday. Your choice. That’s it for today.”
“I hate Chemistry.”
The words had been spinning around and around in Taylor’s head non-stop, and she had to say them to someone out loud or she would go crazy from their relentless assault. They had been in her heart far,