There's a moment when you're paddling for a wave where everything else disappears. The crowd on the beach, your work stress, your phone notifications — all of it fades. There's only you, the wave, and the split-second decisions that determine whether you make the drop or eat it.
This is flow state. And it might teach us something fundamental about how intelligence works.
Attention as a Limited Resource
When you're surfing, you can't attend to everything simultaneously. Your brain rapidly prioritizes:
- —Wave speed and shape
- —Your position and momentum
- —Balance and body positioning
- —Other surfers in the lineup
This selective attention isn't a bug — it's a feature. It's what allows you to process complex environments in real-time.
Modern AI systems use "attention mechanisms" inspired by this principle. Transformers, the architecture behind GPT and similar models, learn which parts of input data deserve focus. Just like a surfer scanning the horizon for the next set, these models allocate computational resources dynamically.
The Predictive Dance
Surfing is continuous prediction. You're constantly forecasting:
- —Where the wave will break
- —How your board will respond
- —What adjustments you'll need to make
Your brain builds predictive models refined through thousands of hours of practice. Each wave provides feedback that updates these models.
This is remarkably similar to how machine learning systems work. They build statistical models, make predictions, receive feedback (through loss functions), and update their weights accordingly.
But there's a crucial difference: surfers achieve flow.
Consciousness and Processing
In flow state, you're simultaneously:
- —Highly conscious of sensory input
- —Operating largely on trained intuition
- —Experiencing a subjective feeling of effortlessness
Can machines experience anything analogous? When an attention mechanism "focuses" on relevant inputs, is there any subjective experience associated with that focus?
I don't know. But I think the question matters.
If consciousness emerges from certain types of information processing — particularly the kind of recursive, self-modeling attention that occurs in flow states — then understanding how human attention works might be key to understanding machine consciousness.
From Waves to Weights
The next time you're in flow state — whether surfing, skiing, making music, or coding — pay attention to your attention. Notice how it sharpens and focuses. Notice how prediction and perception merge.
These moments of peak human performance might hold clues about intelligence itself.
And they remind us that the most sophisticated neural network we know of isn't artificial — it's the one reading these words right now, shaped by millions of years of evolution and a lifetime of learning to ride waves.