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- Curated in My fav books human and work psychology
- Answered to What's your favorite book about psychology?
- From Twitter
As a young man, I wrote a peer-reviewed article that attacked music critics from the 1930s who claimed jazz musicians get into a trance when improvising. I thought that was a simple-minded and reductionist attitude. But I was forced to change my opinion by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934-2021), whose pioneering research into the mental underpinnings of peak performance resulted in a number of influential books, most notably Flow (1990). After studying his work, I not only renounced my previous opinion, but started looking more closely into the role of altered mind states in the history and practice of music. I now believe that the jazz mindset is a real thing, and very powerful—with all sorts of implications we have only just begun to grasp.
- Curated in Anthropology & Psychology