ABSTRACT

This chapter describes how the matching of intentions and performance can help explain the radical loss of self-consciousness and sense of action-awareness merging that characterizes experiences of flow. This model has largely worked with a representationalist model of mind but has gone beyond internal computational representations in supposing there to be a cognitive task distributed with the physical group interactions. The chapter argues that spontaneous interactions with the overall musical product play a vital role in generating the content of each musician's intentions. In this sense, group flow does involve a genuinely collective cognitive task. However, the common complaint about embodied views of the mind is that it is perfectly coherent to emphasize the causal dependence of certain mental processes on behavioral interactions while maintaining that the immediate realizers of conscious experiences are brain-based representations. The chapter highlights a key psychological feature of the musician's intention is a "map of saliencies".