Embodied knowledge

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Please don't read this yet 🙏.

Here's something I figured out when I was a kid. I was not a very well behaved kid, although this is not particular of troublesome kids. See: I love trowing balls of paper to the bin, at a distance. I still do, actually. And I sort of professionalised it. Like I would spend time thinking about how to be better at scoring.

And at some point I figured out that I would perform better if I didn't think about it too much. And this was weird. I thought, okay maybe if I don't look and I just throw it would be even better. But that did not work at all. So the key was looking, feeling the weight of the paper ball and throwing just like I would while thinking, but without thinking. And that worked best. Trust me, I did a ton of experimentation with this at school.

So it's weird because, if it wasn't me who was throwing it, who was performing the calculations? Not me. Or at least not the me that did things like studying or counting or whatever.

So here's the thing. The knowledge of how to throw something is embodied. If you ask this tiny part of my body (my brain) how do I do it, it does not know. You should ask my arm. And my arm does not speak, so it cannot tell explain it to you. But it knows how it's done and it does it quite well.

It's quite similar when you hold a can of soda or a bottle. I just want to grab it and all my fingers and my arms just do the mechanical operations required. And it's so funny because sometimes I may be talking or listening to you, and my hand is like playing with something, without my permission. It's just bored while my brain does something.

And I think that we all know this. That most of what we know is embodied. Definitely most of what me how about how to do something. Like speaking: I don't think about what my tongue and lips must do in every syllable, and yet I speak clearly.

Now, some people think, and I think that they are wrong, that the brain does the difficult stuff, and the easily automatable tasks are the ones that are delegated in the libs or whatever. And I don't think that's the case. I think that the body can even do math faster than the rational part of the brain.

For instance, sometimes I say: "yes yes yes yes yes" frenetically, when I want to quickly reply to something or show extreme agreement with something. One time I became conscious, and I wondered: how many times did I say "yes" there? So that means counting. That means I had to store how many times, a number, a count, something had happened. Of course, I did not know the number. But I could easily access sort of the sound, like the musicality of the "yes, yes, yes" and I could reproduce it with accuracy. Then, I just had to count what I was remembering. Or rather, my conscious brain had to count them, because my body already knew how many and could reproduce it, even without calling it 6 (Six), the body knew if was six times. So it did math better than my brain.

And this is not surprising. Because what is your body doing when you are throwing a paper ball into a bin that is far away? It's calculating, in real time, a number of couplex mathematical equations:

Music

This is specially proven in the field of music.

In terms of neurobiology, one of the most robust findings in the neuroscience of music is that attending to rhythmic aspects of music activates motor areas of the brain even in the absence of any overt movement.

• Chen, J. L., Zatorre, R. J., and Penhune, V. B. (2006). Interactions between auditory and dorsal premotor cortex during synchronization to musical rhythms. Neuroimage 32, 1771–1781. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2006.04.207
• Cook, P., Rouse, A., Wilson, M., and Reichmuth, C. J. (2013). A California sea lion (Zalophus californianus) can keep the beat: motor entrainment to rhythmic auditory stimuli in a non vocal mimic. J. Comp. Psychol. 127, 412–427. doi: 10.1037/a0032345
• Crease, R. P. (2000). “Jazz and dance,” in The Oxford Companion to Jazz, ed. B. Kirchner (New York, NY: Oxford University Press), 696–705.

Even on the absence of any movement. So your body is moving in your brain, even if you don't move it. And what is it doing?

It thus appears that motor regions provide part of the necessary predictive scaffolding that enables the auditory system to properly “parse” a musical surface into an appropriately structured rhythmic representation (Schubotz, 2007)

• Schubotz, R. I. (2007). Prediction of external events with our motor system: towards a new framework. Trends Cog. Sci. 11, 211–218. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2007.02.006

This paper in particular is very cooL.

• Merchant, H., Grahn, J., Trainor, L., Rohrmeier, M., and Fitch, W. T. (2015). Finding the beat: a neural perspective across humans and non-human primates. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. 370:20140093. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0093

It says that motor regions provide the predictive timing needed for the perception of, and entrainment to, musical rhythms.

So what does this mean. That when you are playing music, it really your body who is enabling the mathematic calculations required to follow the beat.

the concept of ‘beat perception and synchronization' implies both that

• (i) the beat does not always need to be physically present in order to be ‘perceived' and
• (ii) the pulse evokes a particular perceptual pattern in the subject via active cognitive processes. Interestingly, humans do not need special training to perceive and motorically entrain to the beat in musical rhythms; rather it appears to be a robust, ubiquitous and intuitive behaviour.

Indeed, even young infants perceive metrical structure [6], and if an infant is bounced on every second beat or on every third beat of an ambiguous rhythm pattern, the infant is biased to interpret the metre of the auditory rhythm in a manner consistent with how they were moved to it. Thus, although rhythmic entrainment is a complex phenomenon that depends on a dynamic interaction between the auditory and motor systems in the brain [7,8], it emerges very early in development without special training [9].

So why did they find it interesting? Why was not obvious to everyone and therefore discovering feels new? I know why, we all know why. But isn't it weird that we do not know this? How can we not know this?

Well, I know why. Because we have a very rational and scientific view of the world and ourselves. So much so, that we become blind to such simple facts and we need scientific publications to re-discover what out ancestors surely knew.

Okay, so I was telling you that people do know that some tasks are done "automatically" by the body without you "thinking". So they think that the body would do the easy things, and you, your thinking mind, would take care of the difficult. But that's not the case at all, is it? Look at those calculations necessary to score a goal in the paper bin. Look at how we maintain a specific beat per minute motion across time that allows us to coordinate and create music.

Obviously, it's not that the conscious mind does the difficult and important tasks and that the body does the easy and repetitive. If anything, it's the other way around.

So I want you now to re-consider how you do psychological, personal tasks, such as moral or ethical decisions, or how you chose your career, or who you are and who you want to be. Who is the good and the bad, what's the smart and the stupid. I'm guessing that, before reading all of this, you were totally sure that it's you, your conscious brain who makes the ethical decisions, who informs the decisions about your life. But you are not so sure now, right?

Firstly, because it would be a shame if you were only using the conscious mind, the rational, linguistic, formalistic mind. You would be losing a lot of processing power. So it would be desirable that the body, that calculates parables and maintains rithm, took a part of those processes. The outcome would be much better. So it's definitely desirable.

And luckily it is absolutely the case. Parts of you that you don't call you play a huge role in deciding who you are. Like when you have a gut feeling, what is that? Or having butterflies in your stomach? Or when you frown you face? It's your body, that "automatic" part of you who's making those decisions.

The embodied knowledge of how to be

I don't know much about this, except that it's about patters.

When I'm throwing the ball, I kind of know that my brain is doing equations and parables. Because that's what I would consciously do to emulate the process. So I'm guessing that's what's happening. And hopefully that's the case – otherwise it would mean that we know so so so very little about everything.

So, in the same way, regarding the task of who you are and who you could be, it assume that the body is recognising patterns. We look at tens of people every day, in real life and in stories, and tens more in our imaginations, and we see what they do and what happens to them. And the body extracts patterns.

This is very well studied by Jean Piaget. He analysed children in play and documented their development, and how their brains would be able to do different thing across the span of infancy.

And one funny phenomenon is that children could play a game with each other, a game with rules obviously, because all games have rules otherwise it would just be like existing. But if you asked them what were the rules of the game that they were playing, they did not know. So they must have known, because they were following the rules, but they could not explain them. And this is because the rules were embodied, but they had not become yet verbalised.

And something else that kids do it play house. We've all done this. They would pretend to be a mother or a father, or a knight, or a fireman. But if you look at them, they are not replicating exact behaviour that they have seen. They are not copying a specific act. If they are acting like a father, for instance, they might pretend to smoke on a pipe or something – but their father don't do that. So they are acting out the pattern of being a father, not imitating one father in particular.

And that's why I think that what it's going under the hood is that the body is recognising patterns of people, patterns of behaviour, and encoding actions and outcomes to determine what's good a what's bad, who you could be, where should you go, how should you act and behave in situations... all of that.

The language of embodied knowledge

Now, here's the problem. Remember when I was telling you that, if you want to ask an expert paper-ball thrower, such as myself, how to score correctly, you should ask my arm? That's totally true. It's the same with tango dancers or jet pilots. We, our brains, can only say: it's about putting in the hours. Because that's the only thing that our conscious bran did: be disciplined about repeatedly training. The actual knowledge is embodied. The knowledge is in the arm, in the feet, in the tongue...

Now, that's a shame, because we cannot share that knowledge. My feet can't speak. It does not understand language. In fact, language would be a sister function, my feet have no agency over the part of the brain that does language. They are neighbouring functions, the cannot interact; they are not part of one another. So it's absurd that the knowledge in my feet would be expressed through language.

So it's difficult to communicate with your arm, with your knowledge.

And this is also true when it comes to ethical or moral tasks. When it's about your own goals: who you are and who you want to be.

But it's very important to do that. How to behave in the world may be the single most important problem to solve correctly. That has been true since we were prehistoric animal, and it's still true today. You really want to figure out what is the right way of behaving so that you don't get killed, or excluded, or poisoned... instead, what is the way of being that helps you survive, and even thrive and hopefully be happy and have a meaningful life.

That's the main thing.

And my proposition is that they way your body communicated this language is through two ways:

1. Dreams
2. Stories and art And they may even all be the same thing. The language of embodied knowledge.