how to think with your body
Activities that occupy partial attention – like driving or cooking – make me restless. They understimulate me. I itch for fuller engagement. Multitasking has a bad reputation, but I find certain tasks easier and more enjoyable to do if I can direct part of my attention to a secondary task. I can’t, for example, just sit idly while I talk on the phone. I need to do something with my body. It’s almost like both my body and my brain need to be engaged.
While I write this, I type on the keyboard the sentences I’m forming in my mind. If my hands stop moving because I haven’t figured what I will type next, other parts of my body start moving. My eyes flit about the living room as if searching for my next words among the furniture. My head cocks to one side and my mouth opens slightly as if I am trying to make out a sound. I scratch my neck as if it were itchy.
I am reminded of the first few sentences of my piece Is This Working?:
When I do work and I get stuck I leave my desk and wander down the hallway. I meander and look out the window as I think lightly about the problem. I weave through the complications crowding my thoughts until I’ve sorted them out. Then I return to my desk and refocus on the screen.
The more I think about it, the more I notice a fast bond between my mental and physical activity. If I recall a memory, I often see a place. If I think of the podcast episode between Tim Ferriss and Derek Sivers, I see in my mind’s eye the sunny valley in Washington state near British Columbia that I was driving through when I listened to it. But my memories are not always linked to the places where I originally experienced the object of my memory. Sometimes they are linked to places where I’ve previously recalled and considered the memory. This relationship between spatial images and abstract memories mirrors the interdependence between my body and my mind. I can’t have one without the other.
In some ways,
thought and movementwhat is attention? #2
The shower is so fertile a place for contemplation and creative thinking for so many of us that we have the name shower thoughts for the novel ideas that we produce while we’re there. It’s one of the most ordinary of activities, but it is exceptional as an “ecology of attention.” Like many other routine activities, it occupies you for a small window of time every day. But, unlike other routine tasks like driving, it frees you from having to respond to external information. Unlike household tasks, it renders you in uncontested privacy. All these things are also true for baths, but do they provoke thoughts in the same way? Showers, unlike baths, do not allow you to stay idle nor do they let you entertain yourself with a book or a TV show.
I suspect this last bit is crucial. Keeping your mind busy on a menial task seems to have extraordinary powers for unlocking a certain kind of thinking. There is a reason for the psychoanalytical practice of hypnosis, represented in pop culture in the form of a dangling pocket watch. There is a reason, similarly, for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy. It’s not magic. There are mysterious ways of programming our attention and psychological capacities through interactions with our external environment.
are two sides of the same coin. In the quiet privacy of the shower, novel thoughts emerge from the depths of the mind. On an ambling walk, a line of thought gains traction. Going for a run dispels clouds of anxious thought and worry like a sudden change of weather. Our brains developed in servitude to our bodies so I suppose it’s no wonder these two are so entwined.