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Partnering Science

 

In the early stages of my Praxis I became interested in Neurologist, Antonio Damasio, and his theories based on feeling and consciousness. I also came across this reference in Buckwalters book that related dance directly to science....

 

The critical difference [between artist and scientist] is that the artist measures from his intuition, his feeling. In other words, he uses himself as the measure. Whereas the scientist measures out of an external logic process and makes his decision finally on whether it fits that process in terms of various external abstract measures.

Buckwalter (2010)  Compsing while Dancing in Robert Irwin , in Lawrence Weschler, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. 

 

From reading Damasio's latest authoriship 'The feeling of what happens,' I am inclined to suggest that scientists like Damasio work on intuition and feeling in relation to the source - ones self. The measure also starting with the body. Whilst in many reviews it has been questioned and argued, I belive what Irwin is providing, is a statement that concludes that there is no questioning or justifying for a dancer, because it is the natural reaction of the present body in space. In giving scientific logic to the matters of feeling Damasio is sharing with the world the dancers decision-making process when consciousness  is available. A mind/ body process which has occured when even Desecartes famously presented a dualist theory of the mind and body being two seperate entities. 

 

It is important that Damasio defines the difference between emotion and feeling.....

......taken from an interview in The New York Times with Alexander Star. May 2000.

 

"When we talk about emotion, we really talk about a collection of behaviors that are produced by the brain. You can look at a person in the throes of an emotion and observe changes in the face, in the body posture, in the coloration of the skin and so on.

Feeling, however, is a private process, an inner process. It involves your perception of all the changes that are taking place in your body during an emotion.

 

Can you give me a specific example? Say, sadness?

 

When you experience the emotion of sadness, there will be changes in facial expression, and your body will be closed in, withdrawn. There are also changes in your heart, your guts: they slow down. And there are hormonal changes. The feelingof sadness involves your perception of these changes in your body. You may have the sense that your body has slowed down, has less energy, feels ill. Your thought processes also change. The production of new images slows down, your attention may be concentrated on a few images. By contrast, when you experience joy and elation, you become able to create images more rapidly, and your attention can be proportionally shorter. You feel quick, not stuck.

 

Emotions and feelings can be slippery. Is there, nonetheless, a basic human repertory?

 

Absolutely. When you do studies across cultures you find an enormous stability. You find certain repertories of behaviors that obviously have been placed in our biology during the history of evolution because they match certain challenges in the environment.

Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism toward certain outcomes. Let's say you are trying to make a complicated decision. If you try to do a cost-benefit analysis, it may take you forever to decide whether to do A or B. However, if you have previously been in similar situations, and if you have been either rewarded or punished by the choices you made in those situations, then emotional memory may help you with your current choice. That help may come in the form of a gut feeling or, more subtly, in the form of a nonconscious bias that leads you in a certain direction. And we know this because if you're deprived of those emotions then, lo and behold, rather than being sort of a coolheaded reasoner, you become a rather poor reasoner.

 

But using emotional memory to guide decisions doesn't always work.

 

Exactly. If you have not had the right experiences, or if you have not classified your experiences in a good way, your emotional memory could be leading you in the wrong direction. So I am not saying that you should start listening to your emotions and do what your emotions tell you. This is not a "touchy feely" prescription.

 

 

In defining this difference, the dancer is able to find distinction between the observed emotions and the internally felt. In giving consciousness to the observed feelings, a dancer is able to have maximise their external impact through choice.

 

 

With the many images recieved by the body that form our feelings and emotions, as well as the conscious collection of these images that then inform our thoughts, in relation to our perception of the world around us....as a dancer we then have to feed a movement vocablary with this, in order to make decisions that form a a performance - when doing this in present time, the mulit-layered process that a dancer considers could be overwhelming. Hence, trying to follow every image we bring to our consciousness, or fear/self-consciousness takes over - the feeling of this overwhelming being the first image our body processes and executes unconsciously. The science is identifying that we can begin to train and approach these areas in preperation of performance improvsation.

 

Furthermore, we mustn't forget that our history and habitual training has built a process which we rely on to make sense of the world around us. Our unconscious instincts.... Damasio further discusses the role of intuition with Sandra Blakeslee...

 

"Intuitions help guide decision-making on an unconscious level. If covert memories make it into consciousness, he said, they remain enigmatic but are given a name: gut feelings." [...]

"While people use facts, logic and pure reasoning to make decisions, these inputs are not enough, he said. Decisions are also influenced by what has happened to a person in previous situations, he added, and he speculated that stored emotional memories came percolating up through a circuit in the prefrontal lobes, the region of the brain involved in decision making. Damasio. 1997.

 

 

Whilst, we can trust our gut feelings in improvisation, I have become further interested in the decision-making process of  a conscious dancer.....the exploration of self within this is the individual approach which makes one artist different to another....it gives the bodies intellgence primacy for articulating our own movement practice. Science suggests that we start and end with the body!