How Does the Brain-Body Connection Affect Creativity?
Humans have a complicated relationship with walking. This wasn’t always so. British paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey identified marks of bipedalism dating back 3.7 million years in Tanzania—it’s an old endeavor indeed. The story of our uprightness was, for most of history, one of survival and thriving. Today the tale of our peculiar relationship to gravity is being written much differently.
Bipedalism conferred onto us two distinct advantages. First, it helped us gaze longer into the landscape than quadrupeds, who must rely on mountaintops and trees to acquire such spatial information. This helped us quickly identify prey and predator, both of our species and others. Our reaction time increased.
Secondly, and more importantly for this story, the ability to walk turned us into efficient communicators. As a social animal the extra distance offered by bipedalism let us signal across large expanses. Creative means of communication developed. Walking and creativity developed together.
Was walking considered a creative endeavor, however? Utilitarian, definitely. Every facet of our existence relied on an ability to travel long distances (as well as, in the early days of agriculture, walk around tending to crops). Today nomadism is romanticized, but for millions of years it was necessary for survival.
The more sedentary the world has become, the more the primitive act of walking is romanticized. Gardens erected by 17th-century British aristocracy were our introduction to what would become public parks—specific locations of recreation and retreat to spend hours meandering through. To celebrate, poets and thinkers poured accolades on our simplest and most profound example of biomechanics... (continues)
Friday, May 19, 2017
Wednesday, May 10, 2017
Conservatives are right about one thing
Revisiting Richard Hofstadter's classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, as timely and relevant now as in '64. "Let us admit the case of the conservative," John Dewey once wrote. "If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome..." Sapere Aude!
Lea's Lookout
Nice Tennessean story about Laura Lea Knox, 90-year-old daughter of Luke Lea, the benefactor of the land and "lookout" that's become my ritual Sunday morning hike destination.
...both the Warner Parks and Knox came to be in the same year, 1927. And both just celebrated their 90th birthdays. The parks are part of her family roots, a legacy of her of grandfather, Percy Warner, and her great-uncle Edwin Warner. But many people wrongly assume that they were men who gave the land for the acres of green space preserved by our city today. That man was actually her daddy, Col. Luke Lea. He was a lawyer, a soldier, a senator, a newspaper publisher and a man who went to jail and lost every penny of his fortune — but not before he gave 868 acres to the city, protecting the trees and trails from development while the city has boomed around it...
Tuesday, May 2, 2017
Forest-bathing
 | Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) |
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Word(s) of the day: "shinrin yoku" - 'forest-bathing'; the calming, restorative power of simply being in a forest or among trees (Japanese). pic.twitter.com/h2dzLQ81PO
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| Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) | |
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Word of the day: “nuddle” - to walk in a dreamy or preoccupied manner (English, regional). Cf “soodle”, to stroll thoughtfully. pic.twitter.com/2ZQIcR3f2X
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| Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) |
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Word of the day: "shadowtackle" - the shifting webwork of shadows cast on a woodland floor by sun, branch & leaf (Gerard Manley Hopkins). pic.twitter.com/304NhzPmnV
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| Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) |
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Word of the day: "flâneur", "flâneuse" - a wanderer of the city, sauntering observer of urban others, a "passionate spectator" (Baudelaire). pic.twitter.com/JsPYupXKyj
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| Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) |
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Word of the day: "inscendence" - the impulse not to rise above the world (transcendence) but to climb into it, seek its core. (Thomas Berry) pic.twitter.com/u7XsX7nC4q
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Robert Macfarlane @RobGMacfarlane
Word of the day: "cynefin" - one's place of true belonging, the habitat with which one feels most attuned (Welsh). Distinct from "hiraeth".
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