Dr. Cal Newport

I'm inventing this on the fly, but neurosemantic coherence.

This is going to be my alternative term for flow when you're working on something hard.

It's not that you're in an actual flow state where you lose track of what you're doing.

You're concentrating really hard.

But why I'm saying neuro-semantic coherence is you get to this place where the sort of relevant semantic neural networks are all – those that are activated are all relevant to what you're doing.

And you've over time inhibited most of the unrelated networks that were fired up before.

And so you get in this sense of it's hard.

Maybe I'm not losing track of time, but like I'm all focused on this.

I'm grappling with the bear here, the math equation, the book chapter, whatever it is.

And so it's something different than flow, but it's also different than Linda Stone had the term partial continuous attention, which is what you're – that cognitive disaster of I'm constantly network switching back and forth.

So we'll call it neuro-semantic coherence.

I'm going to coin that term because it's – you have this coherence of the semantic neural networks on what you're doing.

And that's the feeling of I'm getting after this hard problem.

And it might be really hard to do.

I mean I know the feeling of trying to solve a math proof for me, for example.

It can be so difficult because, I mean, what does it actually feel like in your head when you're solving a math proof?

It's a lot of you hold this here and then you try to get to the next step by doing this.

And it doesn't work.

But you have to keep holding this here, which takes a lot of concentration.

Okay, let me try this.