ArticlesProgrammers who have passed through their larval stage, talk knowingly about “The Zone” – a sustained period of focussed attention on a problem. The upside is a remarkably high-level of productivity. The downside is a loss of awareness of time, tiredness and hunger – and a general unpredictability about whether you will find the way into the zone and what inevitable distraction will bring you out again.
Of course, it is not limited to programmers – it is experienced by many people attempting endeavours that require focus, from artists to artisans, athletes to aesthetes. Some refer to it as pschological state, others link it to spiritualism and mysticism.
I have been noticing an odd phenomenon when I am in the zone; I am interested if it is just me, or others notice the same thing.
Occasionally, while I am deep in the zone, a random memory flashes in my mind.
It’s not a case of “Oh, this reminds me of the time…” – the memory is totally unrelated to the work I am doing, or the thoughts I was having.
It’s not a case of déjà vu – I don’t feel like I am reliving it.
It’s not a case of a flashback to some emotional situation – the memory is often mundane, and something I haven’t thought about for a while. That time I bought a pair of shoes. That strip of off-coloured carpet at the place I rented 9 years ago. Nothing special.
It just flashes in my mind, and I am left thinking “What’s that got to do with the price of fish?” even as I continue typing.
It doesn’t seem to happen when I am not in the zone – in fact, when it happened to me last weekend, it triggered the realisation that I was actually in the zone – I was surprised I had achieved that level of focus on something that seemed to me to be rather mundane!
I recently began to suspect that it occurs when there is a piece of mundane work to do in the middle of a more complex task (e.g. reindenting a large block while refactoring code) but I haven’t gathered enough evidence yet.
My theory is that I have a corruption in my brain software – when I get near the top of my mental stack, my brain tries to derefence a corrupted pointer, that references a random memory location. That’s why I am trying to reproduce the problem in other brains. Does this happen to you?
I am waiting for the inevitable – I’ll be in the zone, when a sudden memory will spring to mind – an image of that time, back in 1998, when I was in the zone and a sudden memory sprung into my mind.
Comment by Sunny Kalsi on October 18, 2005
You might dismiss me as a n00b, but I haven’t had this happen to me. Maybe I just don’t notice it, or somehow otherwise ignore it, but I haven’t noticed. I’ll put another comment if it happens.
I have, however, had recursive dejavus. Dejavus where I remember having a dejavu, and ones where I remember having a dejavu ad infinitum. It’s really quite perplexing.
Comment by Alastair on October 18, 2005
This reminds me of … the book I’m reading. “Peopleware” by DeMarco and Lister talks a lot about The Zone and how to set up a working environment to ensure that workers get there as quickly as possible and stay there for as long as possible. For those of us who work in noisy environments, music is often conducive to becoming isolated from the surroundings, and retreating into The Zone. However DeMarco and Lister point out that listening to music is an activity performed by the right side of the brain, and that it becomes more difficult to make the kinds of intuitive leaps that are sometimes needed to solve difficult problems when the right brain is occupied in this way. In other words, listening to music has an impact on creativity.
If you don’t listen to music while you are in The Zone, your right brain may be active in other ways, such as dredging up unrelated thoughts from your long-term memory. I don’t know about this myself, because I often listen to music while in The Zone (occasionally entire albums will go by unnoticed), and coincidentally I haven’t experienced the uninitialised pointer dereferencing that you are talking about.
This comment brought to you by the left side of my brain.
Comment by Andrew on October 18, 2005
Heh. So Julian gets memory corruption, and Sunny had a stack overflow. Maybe you’ll be more sympathetic to those poor machines that you subject to these bugs, over and over again.
AFAIK your memory (and your brain) work by making lots of connections between things, and pruning back the ones that don’t seem interesting. Constantly deferencing random memory, if you will. Some part of creativity is making these connections between apparently unrelated things.
So if you’re in a creative zone, maybe you’re more likely to be doing a lot of that, and some of the connections are strange enough to make you sit up and look. This may be especially likely when you’re doing something mundane but your brain is in creative mode.
This one is probably Works As Designed.