“Think with your head!” – we ironically advise friends or relatives who cannot get out of a situation that is not the most difficult, from our point of view. It seems the time has come to drop this advice, because the head is by no means our only organ dedicated to thinking.
When asked what we think, even the laziest first grader will answer without hesitation. The head, of course, in which the brain is located, is given to us by nature and to think. And this, of course, is fair. But only in part. The brain is an extremely important and complex organ. But most living beings on our planet do just fine without it. For example, snails, worms or ants, whose total mass, as you know, far exceeds the mass of all people on Earth, do not have not only a brain, but also a spinal cord in our understanding. It is replaced by bundles of nerve nodes – ganglia, distributed throughout the body. In a sense, the whole body of these creatures is their brain. And they have been quite successfully living, feeding and breeding for millions of years. And the same ants or bees, for example, also have a developed social organization, build complex dwellings and are able to learn new skills.
Take a winning stance
This, of course, does not mean that we can do without a brain at all. This means that our body is able to help our brain in solving the most complex problems. And our ancestors seem to have been well aware of this. For example, yoga, which is so popular today as physical exercises, is considered in India solely as a stage on the path to spiritual enlightenment. And the Indian tradition prescribed physical activity (hatha yoga) to help those who were not ready to immediately move on to control their own minds (raja yoga).
Today, not spiritual teachers, but representatives of fundamental science are talking more and more actively about this help of the body to our consciousness. Lecture by social psychologist Amy Cuddy collected on the website already more than 26 million views. Cuddy clearly and convincingly argues that adopting a “victory pose” – an open position in which the body takes up maximum space in space – increases our self-confidence by lowering the level of the stress hormone cortisol in the body and stimulating the production of testosterone.
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- We can change ourselves through our body
There are many other studies on this topic. Ohio State University psychology professor Richard Petty asked student volunteers to complete a simple questionnaire. It was necessary to indicate your strengths and weaknesses that could affect your future career. At the same time, some of the students answered the questions while sitting straight. And the other group was asked to take a not too comfortable hunched posture, strongly leaning forward. The result was very telling. The students, who sat upright, were extremely confident in their strengths and just as clearly aware of their shortcomings. And those who filled out the questionnaire, hunched over, showed catastrophic indecision. They found it difficult not only to define their qualities, but also to understand whether these qualities are good or bad for a future career (1).
hot-cold
We often say “warm welcome”, “hard task”, “biting remark”, without in any way connecting these concepts with physical sensations of heat, heaviness or prick. And absolutely in vain. Because our body and here actively “prompts” to our consciousness. In 2008, psychologists at Yale University proved this quite spectacularly. Participants in their study took the elevator one at a time to the laboratory, where they received a description of the character traits of people unknown to them. And they had to, having familiarized themselves, describe these people in their own words.
The “zest” of the study was that, along with each participant in the elevator, a laboratory assistant with a paper cup of coffee in her hands went up. And she asked the subject to hold the glass while she wrote down his name and other necessary data. In half of the cases, the coffee in the cup was hot, and in half it was cold, with ice. And what? Those who held a cup of hot coffee were much more likely to describe strangers as “warm” or “hot.” And those who got ice coffee, on the contrary, were much more likely to find strangers as “cold” people. (2).
The conclusion is obvious: our tactile sensations are actively involved in the process of thinking and making judgments. Another question is that they can help us, or they can confuse us, but it is very useful to know this in any case.
Follow your eyes
And the Australian psychologist Mark Yates (Mark Yates) did an experiment, more like a trick of an illusionist. Initially, he became interested in the research of his colleagues. They asked the participants in the experiment to think of an arbitrary sequence of numbers from 1 to 30. At the same time, special equipment recorded the slightest eye movements of the subjects. The results showed that when a person thought of a smaller number, his eyes made an involuntary and imperceptible movement to the left. The larger number is to the right. And the amplitude of these movements testified to how great the difference between the numbers is.
Yeats decided to make the experiment a little more difficult. Now the participants, conceiving an arbitrary sequence of numbers from 1 to 30, followed the dot on the monitor with their eyes. The point moved left and right at different distances. And the subjects obediently guessed the numbers either more or less. Surprising but true: eye movements essentially dictated to the brain which number to think of (3).
These and many other works are increasingly pushing scientists to follow the “ordinary” and emotional intelligence and introduce into everyday life the concept of body intelligence – Embodied Intelligence. But while theorists are clarifying the meaning of this term, practitioners are already actively using it in their work. For example, psychologist and coach Leonid Krol has long been convinced that a person thinks with his body. It is the impact on body intelligence that is one of the main components of the Incantico project, which Leonid Krol spoke about in more detail here. So the posture, clothing, landscape before your eyes are no less important for making the right decisions than other introductory ones. And summer is the best time to practice “thinking with the body.”
1. P. Brinol, R. Petty, B. Wagner «Body Posture Effects on Self-evaluation: A Self-validation Approach». Online publication on the site from 25.02.2009.
2. Lawrence E. Williams et al. «Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth». Science, 2008, 322.
3. K. Voigt, M. Yates, T. Loetscher, A. Ma-Wyatt, M. E. Nicholls «Eye Movements Influence the Magnitude of Randomly Generated Numbers». Perception, 2013, № 42.