Peak Zone
In June 1958, 17-year-old Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pelé, arrived in Stockholm with the rest of the Brazilian national football team to play against Sweden in the World Cup Finals. Just before the game, as the peppy marching beats of the Brazilian national anthem rang out, Pelé’s thoughts wandered. He thought of his mother back home, too nervous to listen to the game on the radio. Then the whistle blew and the men were off. Pelé and his teammates were shocked by the skill of the Swedes, who scored their first goal within four minutes. Only then, he writes in his 1977 autobiography, did Pelé get his head in the game:
…Suddenly I felt a strange calmness I hadn’t experienced in any of the other games. It was a type of euphoria; I felt I could run all day without tiring, that I could dribble through any of their team or all of them, that I could almost pass through them physically. I felt I could not be hurt. It was a very strange feeling and one I had never felt before.
I came across this passage, believe it or not, in a study published this week in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. In it, Janet Metcalfe of Columbia University and her colleagues used Pelé’s words to define a somewhat fuzzy psychological concept: the feeling of being “in the zone.” You’re probably familiar with the feeling, especially if you’re an athlete, musician, artist, writer, or video-game aficionado. It’s the mental state of being focused intently on a specific task, a complete absorption that allows you to forget any self-consciousness and lose all sense of time. For me, it’s the (all too elusive) feeling that makes writing fun.
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