Mindful Bodies in Action/
Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes:
embodied skill and kinesthetic memory
Doris
McIlwain
and John
Sutton, with Wayne Christensen, Andrew Geeves, and Kellie
Williamson.
And with the much-needed help of Greg Downey, Lyn Tribble, David
Mann, Ed Cooke, Lincoln Colling, Ole Lund, Will
Newsome, and many more.
Contact: John Sutton, Macquarie
University,
Sydney. Back to my home
page. Email
mefor more information.
This is the home site for the
research project 'Mindful Bodies in Action: a philosophical study of
skilled movement' (ARC Discovery Grant 2013-2015),
which is descended from 'Applying Intelligence to
the Reflexes: embodied skill and kinesthetic
memory', (Macquarie Uni Research
Development Grant, 2006-2008).
There is a PhD scholarship available on this project: closing date 26
April 2013. See
http://www.hdr.mq.edu.au/information_about/scholarships/hdr_scholarships_domestic_and_international
or email
me for more information.
Skilled experts in sport or dance perform extraordinary
actions in perfect time, with exquisite control, and display resilient
coping
under pressure: their mindful bodies
blend cognition and emotion in
action. This project in philosophy of psychology seeks to integrate
disconnected research on skilled movement in a new account of
embodied intelligence. We
seek to integrate disconnected research on skilled movement in distinct
disciplines. Our studies focus on three sets of issues, concerning
a) timing and anticipation; b) control and agency;
c) resilience, personality, and pressure.
For a taster, if you're interested in applications to sport, listen to 'The
Philosophy of Cricket' on ABC
Radio's The Philosopher's
Zone.
For some of my earlier work on this try
'Batting,
Habit, and Memory: the embodied mind and the nature of skill',
Sport in
Society 10 (5), 2007.
For more recent papers see Sutton,
McIlwain, Christensen,
& Geeves, 'Applying
Intelligence to the Reflexes: embodied skills and habits between
Dreyfus and Descartes',
JBSP:
Journal
of the British Society for
Phenomenology 42 (1), 2011, 78-103;
and McIlwain &
Sutton ,
'Yoga from
the mat up: how words alight on bodies', Educational
Philosophy and Theory, in press. And see below for more of our
work.
This collaborative project
in philosophy and psychology
investigates relations between thought and
action, developing both conceptual and empirical
approaches
to embodied
skill through case studies of a number of distinctive domains of
expertise
– sport (eg cricket batting), performance (dance and
contact improvisation), music, psychotherapy,
and yoga. Mainstream philosophy of mind
has long neglected embodied intelligent action: we use these emblematic
cases
to demonstrate the theoretical significance of complex
acquired skills,
and to exemplify an interdisciplinary
spirit in studying the embodied mind, in which phenomenology and
cognitive
science are natural allies rather than glaring
antagonists.
Independently
interesting questions about (eg) batting and yoga – issues which matter
to participants
and coaches, sports scientists and medical researchers,
commentators and
spectators – show up in new forms when considered in light of our
theoretical
concerns about memory and skill.
‘Think? How can you hit and think at the same time?’, complained
the baseball great Yogi Berra (quoted in Beilock et al 2002, p.1236).
Self-conscious thought can, notoriously,
disrupt well-practised
actions. Practitioners
in skilled domains like music, sport,
yoga, and dance like to entrust
well-grooved actions to the body, to the habitual routines of
kinesthetic memory.
But they also know that true open-ended expertise in dynamic contexts
requires thought
and action to come together, to cooperate instead of competing.
A top cricket batsman,
for example – with less than 500ms to execute
an ambitious cover drive to a hard ball moving at 140kmh (Muller &
Abernethy 2006) – draws not only on
his smoothly-practised strokeplay,
but
somehow also both on his experience of playing this quick
bowler in
conditions like this, and on
his awareness of the current state of the
match, the series, and his
career,
to play an elegant shot with breathtaking precision. How and under what
circumstances can embodied skills be so minutely open to memory
and situational
awareness? How do we influence ourselves,
in practice and in performance? What kinds of intelligence are flexible
and
fine-grained enough to influence habits
which have become second nature
or
ingrained reflexes? How can instruction
alter grooved embodied skills? And what are the relations, in
particular,
between personal and
conceptual memory on the one hand, and embodied or
procedural memory on the other?
Our work on these topics:
- (in press) John Sutton, 'Collaboration
and Skill in the Evolution of Human Cognition', on Kim Sterelny's The
Evolved Apprentice, book symposium in Biological Theory
- (in press) Andrew Geeves, Doris J.F. McIlwain,
&
J.
Sutton, 'To think or not to think: the apparent paradox of expert skill
in music performance', Educational
Philosophy and Theory.
- (in press) Doris
J.F.
McIlwain &
John Sutton ,
'Yoga from
the mat up: how words alight on bodies', Educational
Philosophy and Theory.
- (in
preparation)
Lincoln Colling, John Sutton, & William F. Thompson, 'From Action
Control to Joint Action: functional equivalence between acting together
and acting alone'
- (2012) John Sutton, 'Memory before
the game: switching perspectives in imagining and remembering sport and
movement', Journal of Mental
Imagery 36 (1/2), 2012, 85-95.
- (2012) Wayne Christensen & John Sutton, 'Reflections
on Emotions, Imagination and Moral Reasoning: towards an integrated,
multidisciplinary approach to moral cognition',
in Robyn
Langdon & Catriona Mackenzie (eds), Emotions,
Imagination, and Moral Reasoning (Psychology Press),
323-343.
- (2011) John Sutton, Doris McIlwain, Wayne
Christensen,
& Andrew Geeves, 'Applying
Intelligence to the Reflexes: embodied skills and habits between
Dreyfus and Descartes',
JBSP:
Journal
of the British Society for
Phenomenology 42 (1), 2011, 78-103.
- (2010) Andrew
Geeves, Doris J.F. McIlwain, John Sutton, and Wayne Christensen
(2010). Expanding
expertise: investigating a musician’s experience of music performance.
In ASCS09: proceedings of the 9th
conference of the Australasian Society
for Cognitive Science, pp.106-113.
- (2009), 'The
Feel of the World: exograms, habits, and the confusion of types of
memory', in Andrew Kania
(ed), Memento:
philosophers on film (Routledge, May 2009), 65-86
- (2008) 'Material
Agency, Skills, and History: distributed cognition and the archaeology
of memory',
in Lambros
Malafouris
and Carl Knappett (eds), Material
Agency: towards a non-anthropocentric approach (Springer),
37-55.
- (2008) Andrew Geeves, Wayne
Christensen, John Sutton,
& Doris McIlwain. Critical Review of Practicing
Perfection, by Chaffin, Imreh, & Crawford,
in Empirical
Musicology Review 3 (3), August 2008, 163-172
- (2008) 'Between
Individual and Collective Memory: interaction, coordination,
distribution', in special collective
memory issue
of
Social
Research: an international quarterly of the social sciences Winter 2007-08, volume 75 number 1,
23-48.
- (2007) ''Batting,
Habit, and Memory: the embodied mind and the nature of skill',
in
Jeremy McKenna (ed), At
the Boundaries of Cricket,
special
issue of Sport in
Society 10 (5), September 2007, 763-786.; reprinted
in
Robert Dale, Denis Burnham, & Catherine Stevens (eds), Human
Communication Science:
a compendium (Sydney: ARC Research Network
in Human
Communication Science, 2011), pp. 473-495.
- (2006) 'The
Philosophy of Cricket' on The Philosopher's
Zone, on ABC
Radio National with Alan
Saunders, Saturday October 21 2006.
- (2005) 'Moving
and Thinking Together in Dance', in Thinking
in Four Dimensions: creativity and cognition in
contemporary
dance, eds Robin Grove, Kate
Stevens,
& Shirley McKechnie (Melbourne University Press e-book)
- (2003), Doris McIlwain, 'Book
Review - Yoga and Psychology', Metapsychology Book Reviews.
Select Interdisciplinary Bibliography
(circa 2007)
(see also this
reading list on The Philosophy
of Habit, 2008)
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(1981).
‘Mechanisms of Skill in Cricket Batting’. Australian
Journal of Sports Medicine 13, 3-10.
Allard, F. & Starkes,
J.L. (1991). ‘Motor-skill Experts in Sports, Dance, and Other Domains’,
in K.A. Ericsson & J. Smith
(eds.),Toward a General Theory of Expertise. Cambridge:
Cambridge
U.P.,
pp. 126-152.
Bartlett, R.M. (2003). ‘The
Science and
Medicine of Cricket:
an overview and update’. Journal of
Sports Sciences 21, 733-752.
Behnke, E. (1997). 'Ghost Gestures: phenomenological investigations of
bodily micromovements and their intercorporeal
implications', Human
Studies 20, 181-201.
Beilock, S.L., Wierenga,
S.A.,
& Carr, T.H. (2002). ‘Expertise, Attention, and Memory in Sensorimotor
Skill Execution’.
Quarterly Journal of
Experimental Psychology 55, 1211-1240.
Beilock, S.L., Wierenga, S.A.,
& Carr, T.H. (2003). ‘Memory and Expertise: what do experienced athletes remember?’, in
J.L. Starkes & K.A.
Ericsson (eds.), Expert Performance in
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Calvo-Merino, B., Glaser,
D.E., Grezes, J., Passingham, R.E., & Haggard, P. (2005). ‘Action Observation and
Acquired Motor
Skills: an fMRI study
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1243-9.
Carr, D. (1987). ‘Thought and
Action in the Art of Dance’. British
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Casey, E. (2000). ‘The Ghost
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Flesh.
Oxford:
Blackwell, pp. 207-225.
Chaffin, R., Imreh, G., &
Crawford, M. (2002). Practicing
Perfection: memory and piano performance. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Crease, R.P. (2002). ‘The
Pleasure of Popular Dance’. Journal of
the Philosophy of Sport 29, 106-120.
Davids,
K, Glazier, P.S., Araujo, D., &
Bartlett, R.M. (2003). ‘Movement Systems as Dynamical Systems’. Sports Medicine 33, 245-260
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Anthropology and Physical Education'. Anthropology in Action 12, 56-71.
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Ericsson, K.A. (2003).
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Starkes
&
K.A. Ericsson (eds.),
Expert Performance in Sports. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 49-83.
Gallagher, S.
(2005). How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Gallese, V. (2005). ‘Embodied
Simulation: from neurons to phenomenal experience’. Phenomenology
and
the Cognitive Sciences 4, 23-48.
Glazier,
P.S., Davids, K., & Bartlett, R.M.
(2002). ‘Grip Force Dynamics in Cricket Batting’, in Davids, K.,
Savelsbergh,
G., Bennett, S.J.,
& van der Kamp, J. (eds.), Interceptive
Actions in Sport: information and movement. London: Taylor and
Francis, pp. 311-325.
Gordon, S. (2001).
‘Reflections on Providing Sport Psychology Services in Professional
Cricket’,
in G. Tenenbaum (ed.), The Practice
of
Sport Psychology. Morgantown,
WV: Fitness Information
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Hagendoorn, I.
(2003). ‘Cognitive Dance Improvisation: how study of the motor system
can
inspire dance
(and vice versa)’.
Leonardo 36, 221-7.
Land, M.F. & McLeod, P.
(2000). ‘From Eye Movements to Actions: how batsmen hit the ball’. Nature Neuroscience 3, 1340-1345.
Michaels, C.F. (2000).
‘Information, Perception, and Action: what should ecological
psychologists learn from
Milner and
Goodale?’. Ecological Psychology 12, 241-258.
Moe, V.F. (2005). ‘A
Philosophical Critique of Classical Cognitivism in Sport: from
information processing to bodily background
knowledge’. Journal of the Philosophy
of Sport 32, 155-183.
Morris, D. (2002). ‘Touching
Intelligence’. Journal of the Philosophy
of Sport 29, 149-162.
Muller, S. & Abernethy,
B. (2006). ‘Skill Learning from an Expertise Perspective: issues and implications for
practice and coaching
in cricket’,
in J. Dosil (ed.), The Sport
Psychologist’s Handbook:
a guide for sport-specific performance enhancement.
Chichester: John Wiley, 245-261.
Preston, B. (1996). ‘Merleau-Ponty and Feminine
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R.P. (2002). ‘Dreyfus on Expertise: the limits of phenomenological
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Arno Press.
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‘Kinetic Tactile-Kinesthetic Bodies: ontogenetical foundations of
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Sheets-Johnstone, M.
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Historia Scientiarum 7, 69-92.
Stevens, C., Malloch, S., McKechnie,
S. & Steven, N. (2003). ‘Choreographic Cognition: the time-course
and
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Pragmatics
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Stevens, C. & McKechnie,
S. (2005). ‘Thinking in Action: thought made visible in contemporary
dance’. Cognitive Processing 6, 243-252.
Stretch, R.A., Bartlett, R.M.,
&
Davids, K. (2000). ‘A Review of Batting in Men’s Cricket’. Journal
of Sports Sciences 18, 931-949.
Stuelcken, M.C, Portus, M.R.,
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Williams, A.M., Davids, K.,
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Last updated 15 March 2013.