Kinetic creativity

ABSTRACT

Beginning with a detailed example of ravens accessing food not immediately accessible, this article documents the fact that tool-making and tool-using are a creative kinetic process that engages mindful bodies in the course of their animate lives. It shows how thinking in movement and kinesthetic memory are basic aspects of synergies of meaningful movement in tool-making and tool-using and how corporeal and topological concepts link early hominid stone tools and teeth, concepts such as hardness and edges. The import of if/then relationships becomes evident in a processual awareness of consequential relationships between movement and effect: if I do this, then this happens. Two notable research studies of tool-making are considered, one concerned with identifying areas of the brain involved in tool-making, one concerned with identifying areas of the brain involved in experienced animate realities. Sperry’s conclusions drawn from his research studies of the brain and Kelso’s extension of Sperry’s conclusions in his neurobiological research studies of coordination dynamics support the latter approach. Both sustain the central import of self-movement and the awareness of movement in the process of tool-making and tool-using.

KEYWORDS:

• Thinking in movement
• kinesthetic memory
• mindful bodies
• coordinated movement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For detailed aesthetic, ontogenetic, and phylogenetic analyses of thinking in movement and of non-linguistic corporeal concepts, see see Sheets-Johnstone 1981, 1999/2011 (Chapter 12), 2010. For detailed analyses of kinesthetic memory, see Sheets-Johnstone 2003, 2010.

2. The dictum appears originally in Masterman Ready, a book by 19th-century sea captain Frederick Marryatt, and later in Mary Beeton’s The Book of Household Management and Samuel Smiles’s Thrift. In today’s 21st-century world, ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’ accords with the reductionist practice of neuroscientists who believe that whatever humans do, feel, say, and so on, is properly understood and describable only in point- by-point, localized ways.

3. A reviewer’s comment on this article is relevant in this context. The reviewer mentions the relevance of Gibson several times in the review, noting specifically at one point – where Sperry’s writings are discussed–that I make no reference to Gibson and that while there’s no need to do so, readers might ‘expect to see his name somewhere in the paper.’ Gibson is not referenced because ‘perceptual affordances,’ ‘visual proprioception,’ ‘pick up information,’ and so on (Gibson 1966, 1979), are not descriptive of experience, specifically, the experience of movement as a dynamically experienced bodily happening. Though Gibson at one point appears to recognize ‘muscle-joint kinesthesis’ (Gibson 1979, 125), he nowhere fleshes out the sensory faculty of kinesthesia in real-life, real-time terms. Indeed, he says that the ‘muscle-joint’ system provides only ‘supplementary information’ (ibid., p. 126). In effect, and as pointed out elsewhere, ‘There is no intimation of a qualitative dynamics in this [Gibson’s] instrumental-informational view’ (Sheets-Johnstone 1999/2011, 238/2011, p. 205).

4. Four basic qualities constitute the qualitative dynamics of movement – self-movement or the movement of persons or things in the world: tensional quality (a gradient from strong to weak); linear quality (describes both the linear design of a moving body and the linear pattern of the movement itself, both of which can or do change in the process of moving, thereby changing directional configurations); amplitudinal quality (describes both the expansive to contractive design of the body and the extensive to intensive pattern of the movement); projectional quality (describes the manner in which force is released, basically, in an abrupt, sustained, ballistic, or collapsing manner, and in any combination thereof). No quality exists separately from the others in the reality of movement, but each can be elucidated separately.

5. One could, of course, update Muller’s 1943 observation: to say that a man is made up of certain computational and programmable elements or certain cortico-neuronal modules is a satisfactory description only for those who intend to use him as a computer or a brain.

6. Kelso is Founder and Director of the Center for Brain and Behavioral Studies, Florida Atlantic University.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone is an independent interdisciplinary scholar affiliated with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oregon where she taught periodically in the 1990s and where she now holds an ongoing Courtesy Professor appointment. She received her B.A. in French with a minor in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. She received an M.A. in Dance, a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Dance, and completed course work but not a dissertation for a second doctorate in Evolutionary Biology—all at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She has published numerous articles in humanities, science, and art journals. Her book publications include The Phenomenology of Dance; Illuminating Dance: Philosophical Explorations; the ‘roots’ trilogy–The Roots of Thinking, The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies, and The Roots of Morality; Giving the Body Its Due; The Primacy of Movement; The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader; Insides and Outsides: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Animate Nature; Putting Movement Into Your Life; A Beyond Fitness Primer. A new book—The Importance of Evolution to Understandings of Human Nature—is in submission. She was awarded a Distinguished Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, UK, in the Spring of 2007, the inaugural year of the Institute dedicated to ‘The Legacy of Charles Darwin.’ She received an Alumni Achievement Award in 2011 from the School of Education, University of Wisconsin. She was honored by a Scholar’s Session at the 2012 meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.