Flow is a state of optimal performance experienced across domains like art, athletics, gaming, and writing. Its puzzling features include a reported loss of self-awareness despite skilled agency, and effortlessness despite task complexity. Using the active inference framework—where action and perception minimize variational free energy—the authors propose that flow arises from high precision weighting on expected sensory consequences of action and beliefs about sequential action. This draws the embodied system to exploit pragmatic affordances while restricting counterfactual planning, leading to inhibition of the sense of self as a temporally extended object and higher-order self-conceptualization. However, self-awareness is not entirely lost; it remains pre-reflective and bodily.
People often judge whether time is passing quickly or slowly, yet the brain mechanisms behind these judgments are poorly understood. A leading explanation from predictive processing theory suggests that the speed of experienced time depends on how rapidly the perceptual system abandons its current hypothesis about the present. This account fails to explain existing experimental data and has internal flaws. An alternative theory proposes that the sense of time moving quickly arises when the cognitive system unconsciously detects that it is reducing prediction error faster than expected; time feels slow when prediction error is reduced slower than expected. This new model is internally consistent and can account for key empirical findings.