
“In The Zone” - dang
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/09/16/zone/
======
jordigh
By the way, speaking of quote investigations, I want to figure out how this
fake Cervantes quote came about:

    
    
        Time ripens all things. No man is born wise. Bishops 
        are made of men and not of stones.
    

The fake part is "time ripens all things." Cervantes didn't write that part in
Chapter 33 of Don Quixote II. The rest is indeed said by the Duchess to
Sancho. The cheesy empty word play of "time" and "ripens" struck me as odd for
Cervantes and more like something that Heidegger would write in Being and Time
such as "time is the ripening of temporality". As an amateur Cervantes scholar
I looked it up, but I could not find any Don Quixote translation that has the
phrase, yet it always appears this way in English quote collections, which all
seem to quote each other. It's even in Wikiquote. I first encountered it in
xkcd:

[http://xkcd.com/1704/](http://xkcd.com/1704/)

So, who added that "time ripens all things" crap?

------
x0x0
If you find this interesting, you may find _The Professor and the Madman: A
Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary_ [1]
interesting as well. The Oxford English Dictionary was made in the mid-late
1800s and laboriously tracked down the etymology of most english words by
asking for submissions and tracking them on paper. The largest contributor,
Dr. W. C. Minor [2], was a rich doctor who murdered a man and, because of his
class and genuine insanity, was confined to an insane asylum and left alone
with his books.

I never thought the origin of a dictionary could be fascinating but I spent an
entire Sunday reading this book.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Professor-Madman-Insanity-English-
Dic...](https://www.amazon.com/Professor-Madman-Insanity-English-Dictionary-
ebook/dp/B000FCKM7E/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Chester_Minor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Chester_Minor)

------
yusee
I'd love to see a serious study of rapping, especially free styling and
rappers who don't write their lyrics in advance (celebrity examples include
Jay Z, Lil Wayne, Kanye). For everyone who hasn't tried to rap: it's nearly
impossible to create or perform a good verse if you're not in the zone.
Improvisational poetry to the beat is too demanding of your mental bandwidth
if there's anything else going on in your head.

And I'd love to see this study done with both high and sober participants.
Cannabis makes it significantly easier to enter flow state, and it's no
coincidence that it's popular among rappers and other improvisational
musicians.

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danidiaz
In her book "Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas" [1] Natasha
Dow Schüll also calls "the zone" the trance-like state of mind addicted
players strive to prolong.

Like in programming, it is a state of mind driven by machine interaction.

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13748038-addiction-by-
de...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13748038-addiction-by-design)

------
bcg1
See also, "hack mode"

[http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/hack-
mode.html](http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/hack-mode.html)

------
skndr
Now known as a state of flow:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_\(psychology\))

~~~
prodigal_erik
I suspect "in the zone" is the better-recognized phrase, despite the book.

~~~
skndr
Fair enough! Perhaps "also known as..." would have been better.

