very glad you're wide awake after that little yoga session
thank you very much so I wonder my thoughts days about the thinking body which actually was the final slide of Stuart session there and I wanted you to have a thing about how much of your day maybe is spent doing this then walking to me thing to lunch the tube8 be late running a little bit because you're late mine is like this all the time always
winning I'm like I'm walking really fast a to b then you stop and get a copy stop going to do some work down the tube go home and cook some dinner and your body does what your brain needs it to do your body is sort of a vehicle for your brain to do things the real things because we live in this we still live in a sort of Cartesian world of thought where the brain does
the really important work and it's separate from the body the body is the machine that drives the brain and it sort of drips and leeks and we feed and it helps our brain and I think that it can do more than that I think the brain is the body is very intelligent and can think for itself and be responsive the Italian neurobiologist Antonio DiMaggio has done a lot of research into this over many years and conclude it sounds so unsurprising but it's profound that
we are embodied not just them brain we're not just them brained where embodied and our whole body contributes to who we are so I just have a couple of little examples of these so one thing is body language very simple thing our bodies communicate with each other in ways that our heads don't deal with
it some body that communicate so for example if you see somebody who's spine is slumped in their head is hanging in their shoulders of all they're dragging their feet then you might read them as depressed or have received some bad news or their board or whatever as opposed to someone who's - straight their scholars hi
that's fine the feet are planted the shoulders are open their alert positive open ready to go and there are so many body language things that i won't go into but we can meet that we understand that easily and earlier this morning the daniel kahneman book Thinking Fast and Slow was mentioned and i'm going to recommend that as well i'm sure many of you have
read it but there's a study that he shares in it by John bar where he worked with new york university students split them into two groups and he gave them many many groups of words that they needed to fit into sentences they seem to be arbitrary words into little sentences of four or five words and with one group without telling them they weren't aware of it and at the end they were questions and they had no awareness of it whatsoever
he began to feed in words that eluded to old age so things like little gray Florida balls and then both the groups but moved on to another room for another experiment and what the students didn't know was that the experiment was actually the walking down the corridor because John bar and his scientists measured how long it took the two groups
to walk down the corridor and the group who had been given the words about old age that had never been specified war significantly slower down the corridor and the people who haven't been given those words there subconsciously their body had responded to this knowledge by emulating something that we think of his old we walked slowly so their body thought that for itself a very old example is from the philosopher and psychologist William
James writing at the end of the eighteen hundreds who said how would we know if we met a bear in the woods how would we know that we were afraid except that our heartbeat quickens we begin to sweat the hairs on our arms raised on ends our stomach tightens our body responds to the object to fear and tells her head I'm really afraid afraid right now let's go and our head is the second thing to
know it our body does it first so these are just some examples and there's so much research that's been done on this in the last hundred hundred fifty years and kind of rectifying this Cartesian thing about the thinking body now I'm a choreographer I make dances and I dance and there's a choreographer whose work I love and I think you should look up on youtube
Jonathan Burroughs who makes very simple that funny work and he says that choreography is the negotiations with the patterns that the body is thinking so choreography is the negotiations with the patterns that the body is thinking I'm going to expand on that a little bit in terms of dancing so maybe you know this experience had a bad day at work you maybe had an argument with somebody there or you've had some bad news or
something as stressed you out about work you get home your body is full of anxiety and stress and you feel all tight end and your head is going a million miles an hour and you put on your trainers and you go for a run to get some head space you just don't need to go clear my head I want to go for a run so you go and you use your