Reigniting the Flame: An Exploration of Flow in Surgery
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: Although distress and burnout in medical practice are widely acknowledged, less attention has been paid to the positive experiences that help keep physicians engaged. Cognitive flow (being "in the zone") is an intrinsically rewarding state in which individuals feel challenged and focused. To date, academic investigations of flow have largely been limited to the cognitive aspects of the phenomenon, limiting understanding of other elements, such as practice culture and environment. This study examines flow in surgical practice through a multifaceted lens. METHOD: Guided by a constructivist grounded theory approach, semistructured interviews were conducted from June 2018 to May 2021 with staff surgeons at the University of Toronto. Purposive sampling was used to include a range of surgical disciplines and experience levels to produce a conceptual framework that captures the multifaceted experience of flow. RESULTS: Twenty staff surgeons from diverse specialties participated. A conceptual framework was developed for illustrating the different facets of flow, including the traditional view (cognitive) and an expanded view (physiologic, physical, affective, social, cultural, and environmental facets). Through the cognitive lens, participants appreciated how they could achieve the necessary mindset to experience flow and enjoy their work. The ability to feel in control, use creative approaches to solve problems, and possess the agency to continue to learn and improve invoked positive feelings about their work and practice. In the expanded view, it became evident that experiences of flow were much more multifaceted and complex. Beyond the individual, aspects such as the sociocultural environment shaped and comprised key aspects of the flow experience that surgeons found truly meaningful in their practice. CONCLUSIONS: Appreciating flow as a multifaceted phenomenon may assist in the identification and optimization of experiences that are central to encouraging lifelong career advancement and innovation while also helping protect against burnout and distress.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it