Rethinking Thinking

Body Imagination

By David Jiles, Ph.D.

Humans tend to over-intellectualize, forgetting that our bodies “know” how to do things that we understand only after we have done them. Thinking with the body depends on our sense of muscle movement, posture, balance, and touch. This general sense, discovered in the 1800s by the neurobiologist C. S. Sherrington and called proprioception, is fundamental to our experience of the body. As we walk or run or jump we are constantly aware of how our body feels; and we know where we are in space. Most of the time we have this awareness without realizing it. According to neurologist Oliver Sacks, “that continuous but unconscious sensory flow from the movable parts of our body” has been called our “sixth” or “secret” sense. We continually monitor our muscles, Sacks notes, and adjust their “position and tone and motion …but in a way which is hidden from us because it is automatic and unconscious.” (1)

That is, it is usually hidden from us. We are very aware of our proprioceptive senses when we are learning a new skill, such as riding a bike, hitting a baseball, using a hammer or screwdriver, playing a new instrument, knitting a sweater, or blowing glass. Each of these skills requires long periods of conscious learning and practice. As you master the movements involved in bike riding or piano playing, you do them increasingly without awareness. When you no longer have to think about how to hit the ball, you can actually start to enjoy playing tennis. When you no longer have to remember where and how to move your fingers to play a piece, you can begin to make real music. Pianists speak of muscle memory for the notes and dynamics of a sonata; they store these memories in their fingers, just as actors store memory of pose and gesture in all the muscles of their body. When actors improvise a character’s behavior, the remembered gestures come easily and naturally, as they do for a musician. If the musician is also a composer, he or she may imagine musical phrases as the movements involved in playing an instrument or singing — Mozart, for instance, often composed in public with movements of his hands and mouth. This is body imagination at work, when the feel of muscle movement or physical tension or touch is enacted in order to think and create.

It is possible to conjure up feelings of body tension or touch or movement in the mind, but most of us overlook these imaginative feelings because we are trained so early to see them or translate them into descriptive words. Sometimes it takes a person like Helen Keller, unencumbered by competing visual or auditory information, to understand just how clearly the body speaks. On several occasions in the 1930s, Keller visited Martha Graham’s dance studio. Keller was used to “hearing” music by placing her hand on a piano or some other instrument and feeling its vibrations. Similarly, she “saw” Graham’s troupe dance by feeling its vibrations of the floor through her feet and the stirring of air on her face and hands. Still, Keller knew some aspect was eluding her. Certainly she had no visual sense of ballet or of the revolution Graham was creating in modern dance, but she had no physical sense of it either. How could she? She had never run, jumped, or twirled about as most sighted people do; such activities were considered too dangerous for a blind girl. This lack of internal body images became clear one day when she said, “Martha, what is jumping? I don’t understand.” Graham responded at once by calling out one of her dancers, Merce Cunningham, to the barre and placing Keller’s hands on his waist. As Graham tells the story, “Merce jumped in the air in first position while Keller’s hands stayed on his body. Everyone in the studio was focused on this event, this movement. Her hands rose and fell as Merce did. Her expression changed from curiosity to one of joy. You could see the enthusiasm rise in her face as she threw her arms up in the air and exclaimed, ‘How like I thought. How like the mind it is.’” (2)

With these words Keller movingly validated what Graham and many dancers had long known, that jumping is a kind of thinking. As Jean Cocteau said of the great dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, “His body knew; his limbs had intelligence.” According to Cocteau, Nijinsky seldom articulated his dance innovations in words; he simply placed his foot where it had never been placed before and jumped higher and farther than anyone ever had. Graham believed that the body’s use of space, force, and time had to make sense on a purely physical level.

For Keller, body thinking also had a wholly mental dimension. The gathering of physical energy and its sudden release in the dance jump reminded her of the manner in which ideas burst into consciousness. She herself experienced this mental jump many times, most famously when the string of letters w a t e r, spelled into her hand by her teacher, mysteriously and suddenly revealed itself as the name for the cold liquid spilling from the pump. Moreover, she realized that many of the ideas that burst upon her consciousness were not actual sensations but memories or imagined perceptions of busy movement and feeling. During her years of silence and darkness, before her first “vision” of language at the age of seven, Keller knew herself and her world primarily through sensations of the body, including touch. “When I wanted anything I liked, ice cream, for instance,” she later wrote,”…I had a delicious taste on my tongue (which, by the way, I never have now), and in my hand I felt the turning of the freezer. I made the sign [presumably a rotating motion as if she were turning the freezer handle], and my mother knew I wanted ice cream. I ‘thought’ and desired in my fingers.” (3)

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© David Jiles, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

About the Author | More by David Jiles
David Jiles, Ph.D. latest book is Creativity and the Secret Language of the Mind (LuLu Press, 2007). In an effort to re-think thinking, he has examined the best creative thinkers e.g. Einstein, Hemingway, Picasso, Tesla, Beethoven and countless others to find common secrets towards creative thinking.

06/19/08