Ever go rock-crawling for several hours off-road with that jeep? If the stakes are high because you're far from a paved road, 4x4 is also a very immersive experience. After a while the tires become like toes, and finding a good line with the vehicle starts to feel like stepping carefully around broken glass. You cringe almost in anticipation of personal pain when you take a bad line. There's surely some neurological basis for this, some kind of reverse of phantom-limb syndrome. Similarly that sense of "stumbling" when you're fighting with a glitching IDE or whatever is also very real, at least for me. If you haven't ever felt something along these lines, then you might not have found something yet that you're accustomed to fully focusing on.
Even with playing a racing simulation, where it's a constant challenge to control the car, while the controller or the wheel become quickly abstracted away, the car itself become something your conscious inhabits. You react to stimuli (sound, visual, and vibration), not from your point of view, but from the car.
I think you just improved my Rocket League game by just accurately describing what probably should have been obvious, that's exactly what it feels like to be in the zone.
