Body thinking

If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it - Isadora Duncan

We think with bodies.

In a conclusion emerging from disciplines as different as philosophy, artificial intelligence, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, academia is coming to understand that our thinking, while catalyzed in the brain, is initiated by our bodies. Our bodies are not just transportation for our heads, as Sir Ken Robinson famously said, but the co-conspirator in the sense-making enterprise of human life. No two people, even identical twins, will ever encounter that exact same external stimuli in their lifetimes, which means, among other things, that the first-person experience is unique to each of us.

Where Do Thoughts Occur?

The body’s influence over our perceptions is more than just academic — it could have serious consequences in high-stakes situations, argues Jessica Witt, a psychologist at Colorado State University. She wondered if embodiment could help explain tragic misperceptions such as the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo, who was killed by New York police officers who perceived Diallo’s motioning to open his wallet as the brandishing of a gun.

To investigate, Witt and a colleague showed college students photos of people holding different objects and asked them to quickly decide whether what they saw was a gun or some neutral object, like a shoe or a cell phone. 

When participants were themselves holding a plastic toy gun, versus some neutral object, they were about 30 percent more likely to perceive the object in another person’s hand as a gun. Merely seeing a gun nearby had no such effect on their perceptions. 

'We see the world in terms of our ability to act,' Witt concludes. The same object 'can look different, depending on what we’re intending to do and our ability to perform that intended action.'

It also raises questions about how particular kinds of bodies might inform the thinking and experiences of the embodied.

Aesthetically, body thinking may account for some of the skill exhibited by dancers and studio furniture makers alike, who, through the long experience of trial and error can feel their way toward the spectacular.

There are many ways to know.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved at ballet dancers

Do stay in touch

We're so happy you read the IdeaFestival blog! You've no doubt heard by now that Google Reader will be discontinued on July 1, so if you'd like to continue taking the blog's syndicated feed, you will need to move it and any other feeds you may have to another service by the end of the month.

I've found Feedly to be an exceptional replacement, and the service, which appears to be the destination of choice for former users of Google Reader, has said that it will provide the cloud backend to quite a few desktop and mobile RSS clients, including Reeder, Press, Nextgen Reader, Newsify and gReader. Feedly also has iOS and Android clients for those news junkies who take their feeds on mobile devices.

Feedly's plug-ins for Chrome, Safari and Firefox web browsers are a terrific way to add feeds to your collection as you browse the web.

The IdeaFestival syndicated feed isn't of course the only way to stay in touch with us! Why not consider taking the IdeaFestival newsletter, which provides subscribers with festival speaker and agenda updates, ticketing information, select blog posts and generally talks about all things IdeaFestival. See the lower right side of our home page to subscribe with your email address.

The festival is also quite active on Twitter (@ideafestival) and Facebook, where you will find assorted and eclectic linkage, comment and general nerdery all day long. Our Twitter following is growing especially fast. If you haven't tried Twitter, or if you're an old hand and don't follow us already, please do so.

Finally, video interviews with Maria Konnikova and Jason Pontin have also been scheduled and will be recorded soon for posting to the IdeaFestival blog. The festival is also working with several other people, including Ariel Waldman, to schedule similar efforts. Many of these individuals will be speaking at IdeaFestival 2013 as well. So stick around to see what they have to say about their upcoming appearance!

Stay curious.

Wayne

Peter Sims image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Rafe Sagarin - The writer, philosopher and marine biologist

Taking his cue from the biological systems he studies, Rafe Sagarin, who will speak at IdeaFestival 2013, describes how nature differs from individual expertise when it comes to problem solving.

Step one: don't be so sure that you understand the problem.

That more perspectives you can bring in, which could be represented in nature as multiple... ways to solve an unknown problem, the more likely you are to be able to deal with whatever it turns out that problem [is].

Oriented toward survival in the singular and perpetuation on the whole, nature is marvelously resilient because it is adaptable. In human affairs that means the help you seek just might enter through the side door. Yes, of course! Expertise and accomplishment should be applauded, but it can often benefit from a perspective other than its own.

So don't be the hedgehog.

In a sad parenthetical, Sagarin also describes how the trained volunteers on hand to attend to the exhausted runners in the Boston Marathon supplied the necessary expertise to deal with an entirely unforeseen event.

Wayne

Don't be the Hedgehog

Has 90 percent of all the world's data really been created in just the past two years? Referring to IBM research, Nate Silver throws out that statistic in the RSA video embedded here.

Silver, author of "The Signal and the Noise," talks about big data and hedgehog thinking, or a predisposition, in the case of the latter term, toward One Big Theory to explain a collection of unrelated information. The problem for the would be theorist is not that she might be right, but that she might be right in an unproductive way. Her result does not arrive with the potential for a deeper understanding of the questions being asked. And when wrong - and perhaps this is particularly true in a world now emulsified with more and more data - she is surprisingly or alarmingly wrong.

"We are our own constraint," Silver says, as explains why the process of inductive reasoning is so productive and the advice of experts, especially media-driven personalities, has a no better than random chance of being right.

Following up his initial observation, he concludes that "the obvious problem here is that 90 percent of the useful knowledge has not been created in the past two years."

Watch the video. And stay curious.

Wayne

The Signal and the Noise from The RSA on Vimeo.

Curioustimized

Can forgetting help you learn? Of course! Imagine trying to rummage through all the possibilities, ever, for where you left your keys yesterday morning when you were running late for work. Having lived in one place for the past several years, you discount, without thinking, every possible answer that includes prior residences.

The flexible brain has not evolved for perfect recall, but for recalling relevant information. Moreover, we don't strictly remember facts of the matter, but the meaning derived from those facts - especially, and sadly, if the facts of the matter are associated with a bad experience.

Dwelling excessively on past failure is a learning inhibitor, and it has often been said that elite athletes must have a short memory. Perhaps one factor in athletic achievement is a capacity for learning from, and then forgetting, the failure itself.

Perhaps the same is true of innovators. Because our metaphorical minds relate everything in a terms of another thing, forgetting can open us to new ideas, experiences or emotions.

In his latest Guardian column, Oliver Burkeman, who will speak at IdeaFestival 2013, links to a new tongue-in-cheek dictionary, the "Emotionary," that seeks to assign words to unnamed emotions. Naming these emotions may seem like a fun if pointless exercise, but as Burkeman suggests the process of naming serves an important and practical purpose in psychiatry since it may determine whether a patient's sad experiences are part living, or if they stray into rather more serious territory and medication is recommended.

The sheer variety of emotion is staggering.

Having been involved for several years now in the growth of the IdeaFestival, I'm quite familiar with the feeling of minding my own business, contentedly listening to a speaker discuss her experiences or breakthrough when BAM!, a new thought leaps into my head because I was unknowingly relating the discussion to that vague notion orbiting recently on the periphery of my own thinking. I've been curioustimized, or experienced the state of having had my curiosity optimized by forgetting for a few moments what it is I thought I knew.

Give thanks that our recall isn't perfect.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by gagilas