The deepest learning seems to be physical, bound into muscle and bone, printed on the skin, and found in the repeated firing of nerve patterns. I dream that my bicycle learns from me, in the way my riding style and paths tune its vibrations. I know that my body learns from my bicycle. The deeper I can embody abstract thought the better I remember it and the wider the web of associations it can weave. Makes me wish I was a dancer, or at least a musician.
Now that it is spring, and I am riding longer and faster, I am noticing body memories from other sports in how I corner my bike or try to read traffic patterns to avoid the most dangerous places on the road. Dodging my bike to the right around a car that has suddenly lurched into my path I sometimes lead the turn with my right shoulder. The feeling is almost like running gates, something I did a lot in winter on skis, more than twenty years ago. The same balance and confidence I feel on skis I also feel on my bike, and the same ability to feel the terrain and react quickly is one of the things that keeps me safe. Riding faster, into a wider turn, I stay square on the bike, but drive to the left with my right leg and right shoulder, like carving a turn into ice. Of course you can't carve a turn into ice on a bike, but on a good road the feeling is the same. My years skiing all sorts of slopes in all kinds of weather help me stay up on my bike and have tuned my peripheral senses and tied them to my reactions.
The physical link between skiing and cycling is, for me anyway, very much short term and in the moment. But there are other body memories I call on when I am managing LeveragePoint (where I am CEO). When I lived in Tokyo in the 1980s we had a Yamaha 26 sailboat and spent a lot of time on the open water outside and beyond Tokyo Bay. One thing I like about sailing is that the present can become much longer. One spends time watching the sky for cloud patterns, feeling how the tide run is changing the current and working out how the wind and waves will shape up over the next hour, three hours, day or week. One lives in an extended present. Accidents at sea are often several hours (even days) in the making and happen when one doesn't bother to think ahead. Sailing into Tokyo Bay it was always important to work out the trajectories of the ships (it is a very crowded seaway), time the tide (especially if there was a low and the wind was coming up) and find a safe way through. One lived in the present and the future at the same time. I sometimes try to be in this mindspace when I am making decisions about the company and where we need to go. There is a lot of immediate pressure, especially with a new company in a transforming economy, and one is tempted to respond to the immediate needs and issues, many of which turn around survival. But I find I make better decisions if I bring my mind and body back to a state similar to that I am in when sailing. I try to keep in close contact with the present, following the instant messaging threads, watching the issues emerge on our development tracking system, following our CRM, and most importantly talking to people. But my goal is to track the present in the context of our future trajectories, and make immediate decisions that will, bit by bit, take us into a better place. At a small company, the big strategic moves are made in the tactical decisions. Each of these small decisions is committing us to a future that is always coming into being.
Body learning also helps me make abstract concepts real and to embed them in memory. I am reading Brian Rotman's book Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being this week. He reinforces the importance of gesture and diagram in mathematical thinking (he is channeling Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Chatelat here) and the close links that exist between the body and the abstract. I see this everyday walking around the office and looking at the scrawls on the white boards and in people's notes. (I ran into Bruce Chew this week, Bruce is one of the wisest people I have ever met, in a room that has four walls of white boards, he had worked his way around three of them and was delighted to still have one more left.) The transformation of these visual gestures into code, and then back into vizualizations is a big part of what LeveragePoint does. Part of Economic Value Estimation's power lies in the simple and easy to read image of relative value that it provides. Over the next few years we will be trying to make these vizualizations even more powerful by keeping them simple, and making them into shared gestures that people can use to think together.
Creating a simple set of gestures can be a great mnemonic. For example, I find Kevin Lynch's five pattern's of urban navigation to be a very useful frame for thinking about navigation in general. To help me to remember these, and to explain them to other people, I have come up with a simple gesture for each pattern:
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Landmark: A 'thumb's up sign'
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Neighbohood: Hand spread, palm down
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Border: A chopping motion with the hand
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Pathway: A sweeping motion with the index finger extended
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Node: Hand spread, palm up, pointing to the palm with the index finger of the other hand
One can even string these gesture together in a sentence. The Charles River is a Barrier on my way from the South End to MIT (chopping motion with my hand), but Harvard Bridge provides a Pathway over (sweeping motion with my hand, index finger extended), and leads to the Node of Kendal Square (hand open, palm up, pointing to the palm with the index finger of my other hand), a Neighborhood that I like to explore (hand open, palm down, sweeping motions of the hand to suggest exploring the area).
It will be interesting to see how body learning transfers back and forth from virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft, especially as user interfaces like the Nintendo Wii become the basic way we live in these places. The potential of these worlds for a physical form of learning may be the key to their rapidly growing popularity as places for people to learn together.
In any case, I am going to try to become more aware of the role that my body, physical memory, gesture and shared motion play in my own learning and that of my team.
A final thought from Rotman,
"We listen, it seems, not to speech sounds as such, not, that is, as isolatable sonic entities, but to the movements of the body causing them; we focus on what happens between the sounds, to the dynamics of their prepatory phases, pauses, holds, accelerations, fallings away and completions - the very features of gestures we attend when we are perceiving them."
from Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves, Duke University Press, 2008, page 23.
