Kinesthesis

To start off with a correction: I talk pretty often about things "kinaesthetic," which I group under the term "kinaesthesia." Apparently these terms are nonsense and I actually mean "kinesthetic" and "kinesthesis." Sorry if I offended anyone's academic sensibilities. Nerds.

So four years ago at Swarthmore college, a dance teacher stopped her class and told her students to sit down and go through the dance phrase we'd been learning. In our heads, without moving. I did my best, taking advantage mostly of visual memory and my memory of the rhythm. As I recall, I couldn't get to the end of the phrase. I got distracted or hung up on exactly how a particular movement was functioning.

In dance school a couple weeks ago, a similar task was assigned. We could move small, but had to remain on our spots. And as I stepped through the phrase in my head, which was full of imagined swathes of force and weight, accompanied by predictable sound effects and dabs of color from the kinesthetic palette, the memory of this class at Swat came back to me. The way I went after the problem was entirely different. No longer was I using visual memory by literally trying to picture the image of my body in space, and rhythm memory had taken a back seat to kinesthetic memory. Also, I realized this abstract imaging was a part of my daily routine at dance school. You do it while watching others dance a phrase, waiting your turn. You use it while you're dancing. It pops into your head as you walk home, or when you trip and catch yourself--really at any time, because there are so many movement dynamics in your environment that are abstractly tied to dynamics dancing has made you familiar with. An entirely normal phenomenon as far as I'm concerned; like with any activity that you perform daily and place under some kind of focusing lens, it gets into your head and gets worked around.

To take a couple of steps back and talk about exactly what kinesthesis is, I went through the trouble of googling for its definitions: "The ability to feel movements of the limbs and body." And kinesthetic: "resulting from the sensation of bodily position, presence, or movement." This also turned up: "the kinesthetic system interprets the excursion and direction of joint movement." So the general idea is experiencing and filtering the physical sensations of movement. To me it sounds an awful lot like perception. Like kinesthesis is another of our senses, but for our internal environment instead of the world around us. It's an idea that appeals to me, at least on an aesthetic level, because it feels like it completes the five senses model--instead of an absent, passive interloper with instruments to perceive and mentally construct an external environment, separate from us, we're IN it, an embodied, integrated part of our environment.

I do not find kinesthesis to be at all encompassed by the sense of touch. There's just too much other information involved in the "movement" element, in being aware of weight, of force exerted by muscles, of speed, direction, and orientation in space for it to be merely about touch.

So I'm not at all done with this topic, I still want to talk about why I want to understand kinesthesis better, how we perceive and communicate through kinesthesis (kinesthetic empathy), how some dance arts are more visual than kinesthetic... but since we're working blog style we'll go in installments. Oh, I know you're on the edge of your computer chair.