From flow to mystical experiences: Connecting entropy and fluency along the unifying framework of cognitive continuum
Philosophical Psychology December 16, 2025 Hüseyin Beyköylü, John Vervaeke, D. Meling
Self-transcendent experiences (STEs), such as flow states and mystical experiences, are profound shifts in cognition and consciousness with transformative potential. A proposed cognitive continuum framework, grounded in enactive cognitive science and complex dynamic systems, treats the embodied person embedded in their world as the unit of analysis. STEs reflect an enhancement of relevance realization—the organism's active engagement with its environment to adaptively frame its world—across increasingly global levels of cognitive organization. Destabilization and complexification are central processes, with entropy as their metric. The Entropy-Fluency hypothesis posits that increased entropy signals destabilization followed by increased fluency, bridging first-person subjective experiences with third-person scientific observations. STEs are dynamic, person-specific, and context-dependent phenomena requiring idiographic and transdisciplinary methods.