The Kinesthetic Life

Like many parents I find I have feelings of guilt because of the amount of time my children spend on their Xbox 360, not so much because of the lack of cardio-vascular exercise that this implies but more because of the bad kinesthetics they are picking up from it. And what is kinesthetics? It is the body's sixth sense (forget 'seeing dead people'). Kinesthetics is "the sense of muscular effort that accompanies a voluntary motion of the body" or, as the great intellectual Jacob Bronowski put it in his 1965 essay The Identity of Man, "the kinesthetic sense is an inner signal that runs parallel with our own outward action". Bronowski, for anyone who hasn't seen The Ascent of Man, was intent on unifying both art and science - the world of meaning and the world of mechanics - in the whole man (or woman), and kinesthetics was central to his task.

So kinesthetics is the sense responsible for our desire to play the air guitar or air drums, or to tap our feet or dance on hearing music (or, more specifically, rhythm), or to punch the air or make a clenched fist on experiencing victory. It's what makes us squirm when witnessing someone else struggle through Total Wipeout. It puts us in readiness on the edge of our seats when watching a 'thriller'. And ultimately it's what teaches us the meaning of effort.

My children not only lack cardio-vascular exercise, but the bad kinesthetics they are picking up means they are inevitably learning to associate actions that require physical effort with simpler feelings in the thumbs and index fingers only. Want to sprint across that compound and throw a grenade? That's push left thumb forward and pull right index finger back. Want to skateboard down that near vertical incline in a crouch and hit the horizontal at max speed? That's right thumb and left index finger. Want to go pee? Ah, that's a bit trickier...

In recent years makers of such 'toys' have recognised a problem here and injected some kinesthetic content into the technology. I quite enjoy playing Ten-Pin Bowling on the Wii because in the swing of the arm and the flick of the wrist I get a sensation that almost corresponds with the result. (If only the Wii remote weighed as much as a bowling ball!) The Xbox 360 Kinect has tried to take this a step further with its whole-body motion-sensing, but there still seems a dis-Kinect between the effort required of the body and the effort required on the Xbox. More often than not you'll bash into your living room walls before you bash into an object on screen.

The lack of kinesthetics is a problem in schools as well. I am convinced that children are learning to read slower than they did in the past because they are not learning to write in quite the same way. The letters that children must sound out are not being associated with the kinesthetic sensation of pushing and pulling a pencil along a piece of paper. Each letter written has its own kinesthetic feeling, which is lost when children use keyboards to write, and so children must rely on sight alone to identify the letter before them, making it all the harder. But that's a topic for someone else's blog...

This somewhat chilling article in the Daily Telegraph highlights a more dangerous consequence of the world losing its kinesthetic sense. Controls in some Airbus planes are now so computerised and simplified that pilots can no longer feel the manoeuvres (literally, 'the work of the hand') they are initiating. "Pilots cannot sense the power setting by touching or glancing at the throttle levers. Instead, they have to check their computer screens." In other words, they have to rely on one of the five traditional senses. But in using only these senses we are essentially passive receivers of information. Man and his five senses are made active through the kinesthetic sense.

The crucial element of kinesthetics is the feeling of using our muscles to overcome the resistance offered by the external world. To traverse distance we must move the legs, overcoming friction on the ground, in the air and even in our legs themselves. As the world pushes back against our will we are able to moderate our effort, to increase or decrease it accordingly, so that the resultant net movement is both smooth and controlled. If we did not have the world pushing back at us in this way we would be quite unable to calibrate our own self-consciousness, and we'd be unable to distinguish our waking from our dreaming. Everything would be either impossible or impossibly easy. So the harder the world pushes back, the greater the kinesthetic sense and the greater the sense of being alive to the earthly possibilities that exist.

The next time you run, my advice is this: feel your feet in your shoes, feel your legs, feel the ground, feel the incline, feel the wind, feel your breathing, feel the cold, feel the sweat, feel the beat, feel everything that is working with you and at the same time against you. What you are feeling is yourself in the world but changing the world. That's life; that's kinesthetics.

Man v. Gravity

Wirksworth Incline

Man is at his noblest when fighting against and overcoming the laws of nature, and there ain't no law tougher or more unforgiving than gravity. Just ask the people at NASA.

This morning saw me arrive in Wirksworth, Derbyshire, for Wirksworth Running Club's annual 4 mile Incline race - which consists of 2 miles up and 2 miles back down. The total climb is approximately 550 feet, but the most testing part is a half-mile section of the High Peak Trail that has a 1 in 10 gradient.

Most days it's possible when you're running on the level to give yourself the impression that running is a sort of freedom: your workaday cares seem to fade when you bounce along the road; you can calmly take in the views you miss when you're hurrying along in a car; you can almost philosophize. But all it usually takes is a slight incline to bring you back down to earth. And the Wirksworth Incline will certainly knock the philosopher out of you for a good half-hour.

In any case, while philosophy is perhaps not best conducted while ascending a 1 in 10, any philosophy that ignores man's being confined to the low points and dark places by gravity is not going to be able to truly celebrate those times when man (and within this concept I include every woman) has scaled the heights, be they the summit of Everest, the surface of the Moon, or even that pinnacle of intellectual effort the Critique of Pure Reason. You don't necessarily have to be sitting in a leather armchair, surrounded by books, to express an idea. Actions speak as loud as words, and the refusal to be pinned down by gravity, to instead chase down the summit of a hill, to lift in turn each leg while feeding oxygen to the blood like a grimy engineer feeding coal into a boiler, these express an idea of man's nobility and greatness.

Personally I love the climb - that's where I make up a few places by a judicious and well timed swinging of the arms. Coming down is harder. On the decline my legs, which feel like they are running too fast, are never quite running fast enough. If I'm lucky I don't lose as many places I gained on the climb. Today I was lucky. I lost only one place on the downhill, to a heavy breather whom I couldn't shake. But right this minute I can't be sure whether that place was taken from me fair and square or whether I simply gave it away. The 'nobility and greatness' I expressed on the uphill was not easily retained on the down. Never mind. I'll get it and keep it next year.

The Fitness Concept

Holly Hayes Wood

"Conceptions without perceptions are empty". That was the nagging idea circulating round my head as I pushed hard during last Sunday’s cross country run (the last of the season) at Holly Hayes Wood near Coalville. It’s funny how the body does that when you run. At your run-all-day pace you can be creative and think up solutions to your problems. But when you’re pushing hard the higher faculties shut down, and your body does the 'thinking', concentrating just on the important stuff like breathing, lifting the knees, and swinging the arms. At this pace you’re mind is left only with the remnants of a thought: a half-remembered phrase that becomes a mental chant to be repeated in time with your stride.

Why that particular phrase at Holly Hayes? Well, Kant says something like it in the Critique of Pure Reason to imply that the rationalist philosophy is unable from its own resources to arrive at knowledge - it needs the content provided by experience to make its concept meaningful. I’m perfectly sure that Kant did not have running in mind when he wrote those words, but for a moment last Sunday I thought they might apply: tackling an incline through the trees whilst listening to the heavy gasps of a fellow runner on my tail I became desperate to inject some perceptions into my conception of fitness.

It seems that we are all increasingly concerned with physical fitness, and the world seems divided sometimes between those who are ‘fit’ and those who are not. But does the concept of fitness neatly divide into an either/or condition like that? Is the concept meaningful at all without a set of circumstances to which it can be applied? In other words, we must ask "Fit for what?" This is where the race comes in. Before Sunday's race I would have replied “Fit enough to run” if asked. But during the race I, like every runner, was given the opportunity to fine tune my pre-race fitness assessment. As I kicked up the incline with the heavy breather ready to take my place at a split second’s notice I knew, at that moment, that I was at least fitter than him, but not quite as fit as the runner just ahead who had already reached the crest.

As my position fluctuated during the remainder of the race so did my assessment. And so did my view of who was doing the assessing (viz. me). I was not simply measuring my fitness, I was playing with the concept. At various points in the race I was deciding that "I don't fit in here, I'd fit better over there, just the other side of the runner in front". And just behind me many others were 'playing with the concept' in the same way (I'm not bloody Superman).

Kant was right: for any concept to apply it needs to be filled with intuitions that we actively provide for ourselves. The race is the perfect place to get them.