Clapping, Tapping, Mind

For this post, I'll be directing you to my new blog. It's about clapping. \(^_^)/
Here is my first post there, and I hope to be able to continue on this theme/obsession I have acquired. If not, well then I'll be back here, writing random blogs, searching for my purpose in life, etc...
Enjoy! http://clapcog.blogspot.com/

Putting our hands together is easy; we do it often to applaud a great show, and sometimes just out of sheer excitement. Putting our hands together in time to a beat, on the offbeats, in strange syncopated patterns - that can be difficult. But it's fun!

If you are a musician - you might have had the experience of trying to clap along to a blinking light on your metronome. Not so easy is it? This is no accident, as research has shown that people actually tend to be better at clapping along with auditory clicks than visuals. Professor Bruno Repp from Haskins Laboratories has done extensive work on this, and has shown in a not-so-recent paper that even visuals along with auditory information won't help you.

In the case of this video - there may be something different going on. In order to understand patterns and rhythms, it helps to have a way to structure them that makes sense. If you try to listen to the clapping in this video on its own... it will most likely sound like nonsense (as it did to me), but the visuals help to organize it. At least for me - in this case they help me clap along. What do you think?

Where is my mind?

In our bodies or our brains? In the system that includes us and our social, cultural, physical environment? How can we hope to attain knowledge of something that isn't graspable, and that has few bounds?

Mid-way through reading an article about embodied cognition and situatedness, I realized even though I’ve been exposed to these ideas for so long… I still find it hard to wrap my mind around them...

...so I decided to try. I chose the next thing I thought of as the subject matter. Instead of thinking through my chosen activity in the usual way - walking to the door, opening it, walking down the stairs, and using a rake to do some work in the backyard - I would think about it from an embodied/situated perspective as much as possible.

Here is my first attempt at wrapping my mind around “the mind”(there will probably be more):

I am a body, moving through the path of least resistance.

I carry myself to the sliding-glass door.

I extend into the handle, and slide myself to the side.

I am a door-body-handle. Its edges are mine.

I release.

I am a body, moving through the gradient of the visual world.

My body follows my feet which fall on the first stair down below, then precisely on the next.

I am the ground beneath me.

I extend into a rake and my long, cold fingers scrape the soil in front of me.

I flow through the same movement, again and again, in time.

I extend into the ground and become soft, pliable.

I am not always a body, but I am always.

I am a mind.

Formalizing the Everyday

What if everyday communication involved the use of graphical representation, formal logic, or mathematics?

Most of us seem to prefer the use of folk theory and folk logic in order to discuss and contemplate issues related to human relations, but would this communication not be more efficient if existing metaphors and variables could be extended to a graph with x and y values and rates of change(for example)? Of course, relationships mostly involve more than two variables at a time, but if the two variables were representative of the issue at hand they could presumably accurately describe trajectories and relations between various functions in the graph. One could even predict future complications/events/miscommunications using pre-existing data. This might be limited to the few situations and variable interactions that use a metaphor which can be expressed in these terms, but on further exploration one might find that this method is actually applicable in many cases, especially ones involving time as a variable.

If the problem at hand is an important enough part of our lives, why do we still shy away from using the tools that are summoned in more formal and academic settings? Perhaps we refuse to see the significance of human relationships in our lives, or perhaps our culture prevents us from treating this aspect of our lives as priority by taking it seriously. Maybe we feel that this kind of application is a large leap and too much of a hassle to actually implement. It is possible that this kind of thinking should stay in the realm of nerdy, humorous, and impractical. Either way it brings up some interesting questions as to what sorts of conditions would lead us to use and extend our metaphors in various ways.