Kinesthesis

12 Key excerpts on "Kinesthesis"

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  The Limits of Expression

  Language, Literature, Mind

  • Patricia Kolaiti(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Kinaesthetic representations in particular are rather rich and complex con- figurations of many concurrent ‘goings-on’. In the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), ‘kinaesthesia’ is defined as ‘the sense of muscular effort that accom- panies a voluntary motion of the body’. It is thus standardly understood as the (internal) sense of one’s own body’s disposition in space. However, in using 1 The word ‘square’ is intended here to represent a shape that a subject can identify perceptually without being aware of the geometric definition. 28 the term, I am interested in both the (internal) sense of one’s own body’s disposition in space and the (external) description of the disposition of some- one else’s body in space. In the former sense, my understanding of ‘kinaesthe- sia’ is very close to what Martin (Sight and Touch, in Crane 1992: 201) refers to as body awareness: In talking about bodily awareness, or body sense, I mean to group together some of the various ways in which we are aware of our own bodies. At present I am aware of my posture, orientation in space, the position of my limbs; I have some sense of the shape and size of my body, and within and on it I am aware of various goings on – itches, aches, patches of warmth. What is interesting about these kinds of ways of being aware of oneself as opposed to seeing, hearing or touching oneself is that one is aware of one’s body in a way that one is aware of nothing else in the world. One might grandly say that the world of bodily awareness is restricted to one’s own body. But there is an important sense for us in which that is false: in our awareness of ourselves we are aware of ourselves as being an object in a world which potentially can contain many other objects. We are aware of ourselves as bounded and limited within a world that extends beyond us. One’s own body is the proper object of such awareness in that anything which one feels in this way is taken to be part of one’s body.

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  Deweyan Inquiry

  From Education Theory to Practice

  • James Scott Johnston(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  73 Inquiry, Embodiment, and Kinesthetics in Education appears in its essential features. All such attempts represent an attempt at solution through abdication of intelligence. . . . The pitfalls into which references to the unconscious and subconscious usually fall have no existence in Mr. Alexander’s treatment. He gives these terms a definite and real meaning. They express reli- ance upon the primitive mind of sense, of unreflection, as against reliance upon reflective mind. Mr. Alexander sees the remedy not in a futile abdication of intelligence in order that lower forces [subconscious or unconscious] may work, but in carrying the power of intelligence further, in making its function one of positive and constructive control. (Dewey 1982, p. 351) If Dewey (and Alexander) is correct, this (re)education of the body/ mind may well be central to the establishment of genuine inquiry into social problems. This education, if it were to take hold early, might allevi- ate the stresses Alexander and Dewey discuss. At least, Dewey certainly believed so. WHAT DOES INQUIRY IN BODILY-KINESTHETIC EDUCATION CONSIST OF The word “kinaesthetic” derives from the Greek terms, kinesis and aesthesia, and combined, these roughly mean, movement-sense. Bodily-kinesthetic education is most obviously distinguished from other sorts of education in its attention to touching, feeling, and movement. However, this is not all: as important as these are, equally fundamental is an awareness or perception of one’s body in space. This is called proprioception, and it is a legitimate sensation. Proprioception is the outcome of the combination of brain, nerve endings, particularly in the limbs, certain spinal nerve tracts, and the vestibular apparatus in the inner ear that controls balance. Competent proprioception demands exquisite attunement to one’s surroundings and this in turn requires practice at a specific skill or set of skills, involving what is in effect, a reflex circuit of body and mind.

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  Touching and Being Touched

  Kinesthesia and Empathy in Dance and Movement

  • Gabriele Brandstetter, Gerko Egert, Sabine Zubarik, Gabriele Brandstetter, Gerko Egert, Sabine Zubarik(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  II Kinesthesia Mark Paterson On ‘ Inner Touch ’ and the Moving Body Aisthêsis, Kinaesthesis, and Aesthetics Introduction: The Aesthetics of Movement The idea of movement has been of interest within phenomenologically-influ-enced studies in cognitive science and embodied cognition.¹ But what about the feeling of movement, the subjectively-felt qualitative dynamic, utilizing the so-called ‘ muscle sense, ’ the somatic senses that include kinesthesia and pro-prioception? Explorations of these sensations of movement occur unsystemati-cally across the humanities and social sciences, in areas like cultural studies (e. g., Brian Massumi, Erin Manning), dance and performance studies (e. g., Susan Leigh Foster), philosophical aesthetics (Barbara Montero), even cultural geography. The Canadian phenomenologist David Morris has noted how interest in the philosophy of embodied cognition has met with empirical validation, not only through conventional TMS and fMRI scanning techniques but also through arts – science collaborations in dance and the performing arts, borne out by fund-ed projects like Dee Reynolds ’ Watching Dance: Kinaesthetic Empathy (2008 – 2011).² In other words, the arts and sciences of bodily sensations of movement are coming together in unusual and experimental ways. Yet that divide between historicized idea and qualitative feeling of movement is not straightforwardly bridged by empirical means of measurement, no matter how technologically sophisticated the equipment employed. In other words, the difficulties of articulating felt qualities of movement remains, despite any purport-ed ability to ‘ read ’ brain states in media res. In this short chapter I offer selected highlights of an ongoing research project on developments in the history of neuro-physiology that have informed our contemporary understanding of somatic sensa- Cf.

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  The Self in Question

  Memory, The Body and Self-Consciousness

  • Andy Hamilton(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  4 Proprioception and Self-Consciousness (1): Proprioception as Direct, Immediate Knowledge of the Body

  We now turn from memory to proprioception. This chapter and the following one apply the same treatment to proprioception and bodily identity, involving conceptual holism, as that applied to memory and personal identity. The faculty or capacity of proprioception is both familiar – because it underlies the possibility of action – yet mysterious. It yields ordinary knowledge of bodily position and movement – what is loosely termed “bodily awareness”. Yet in Philosophy it has until quite recently been neglected; indeed, in my experience the issues it raises remain unfamiliar to general philosophical audiences. Hence a rather fuller account of the nature of proprioception is required than in the case of memory. This chapter aims to demystify proprioception by considering both Phenomenological and Gibsonian accounts. There is important common ground between Gibson’s position and that of Phenomenology, both influenced by Gestalt psychology, and a philosophical treatment of the body and self-consciousness should draw on each.

  The varieties of proprioception are complex. The core capacity yields knowledge of bodily position and movement. Strictly speaking, kinaesthesis , often used as equivalent to proprioception, is knowledge of movement of parts of the body, as opposed to their posture or position.1 Other varieties of proprioception include knowledge of fatigue and warmth and cold (as opposed to merely feeling tired, hot, or cold); the inner ear’s vestibular system that gives information about balance and posture; interoception (the visceral sense); and “visual proprioception”, the term coined by J. J. Gibson for the kinaesthetic function of vision, enabling the subject to differentiate between a change of place by the observer, reversible by moving back to the original position of observation, and a change of state of an external object.2 Interoception yields knowledge of the non-muscular organs, blood-vessels, and intestines, and is a function of the autonomic nervous system.3

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  Beauty and Life

  Exploring the anthropology behind the fine arts

  • Rafael Jiménez Cataño(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • EDUSC

    (Publisher)

  In addition, stressing the significance of bodily knowledge in dance practices, I do not wish to underestimate verbal articulation or conceptual knowledge about dance. By ‘articulate knowledge’ I simply mean a mode of knowledge, expressed in words, numbers, formulas, and procedures, communicated in a more or less exact manner. Instead, I want to suggest that kinaesthesia can have a similar kind of epistemic role as concepts have in traditional propositional knowledge. The notion of kinaesthesia as a sense of motion is something that helps us recognise differences and similarities within our own movement qualities, haptic sensations, and moving objects around us. In contact improvisation, moving in contact and leaning on the bodies of co-dancers, I do not just recognise their individual muscular tensions and their potential uncertainty, fear, or courage of sharing their weight, but also apprehend my body weight through their bodies. When sharing my weight with other bodies and reaching a balance, this movement creates an impulse for a dynamic movement, falling down or lifting up. In contact improvisation, weight sharing creates a state of weightlessness and lightness, similar to a fish swimming in water. With this example of contact improvisation, I argue that when we find indwelling in motion, we can reach the capacity for bodily reflectivity that allows kinaesthetic understanding to develop. In this way, bodily movements can appear fundamentally intentional and ‘mindful’ in themselves without the need to translate this experience into forms of verbal expression. 52 Through our bodily movements, we evaluate other beings in their environments—their size, shape, texture, speed, tensions, personal rhythms, affective states, intentions, and desires—while becoming aware of our own bodily features and affective intentions. These judgements are not always correct or real—only our best guesses

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  Psychology, 6th Australian and New Zealand Edition

  • Lorelle J. Burton, Drew Westen, Robin M. Kowalski(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  (2012) were able to induce directionless vection in their participants. Dysfunctions in the vestibular system have been associated with vertigo (loss of balance and nausea), motion sickness Pdf_Folio:326 326 Psychology and Ménière’s disease — a relatively rare disease caused by fluid build-up in the inner ear (Candidi et al., 2013; Nakashima et al., 2016; Yale Hearing and Balance Centre, 2017). The other proprioceptive sense, kinaesthesia, provides information about the movement and position of the limbs and other parts of the body relative to one another. Kinaesthesia is essential in guiding every complex movement, from walking, which requires instantaneous adjustments of the two legs, to drinking a cup of coffee. Some receptors for kinaesthesia are in the joints; these cells transduce information about the position of the bones. Other receptors, in the tendons and muscles, transmit messages about muscle tension that signal body position (Neutra & Leblond, 1969). Part of the ‘thrill’ of amusement park rides comes from our vestibular sense becoming confused. This sense is used by the body to maintain visual fixation, and sometimes to change body orientation. Thrillseekers use their vestibular sense to recognise that they are defying gravity, albeit temporarily, on a ride. The vestibular and kinaesthetic senses work in tandem to communicate different aspects of movement and position. Proprioceptive sensations are also integrated with messages from other sensory systems, especially touch and vision. For example, even when the proprioceptive senses are intact, walking can be difficult if tactile stimulation from the feet is shut off, as when a person’s legs ‘fall asleep’. (To see the importance of vision to balance, try balancing on one foot while raising the other foot as high as you can, first with your eyes closed and then with your eyes open.) INTERIM SUMMARY The proprioceptive senses register body position and movement.

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  Sensation, Perception and Action

  An Evolutionary Perspective

  • Johannes Zanker(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Somatic senses are crucial to maintain the integrity of the body, both in a direct physical sense, and in a psychological sense of ‘ownership’. PROPRIOCEPTION AND VESTIBULAR SYSTEM When you are closing your eyes, how do you know which direction your eyes are looking, where your foot is in space, or whether your thumb is extended or bent? All over your body, in the muscles, in the tendons connecting muscles with bones, and in the joints between bones, there are hundreds of mechanoreceptors that provide the brain with information about position, or angles between parts of the skeleton that define posture, and about changes in the muscoskeletal system or movement (see Chapter 20 of Roberts 2002). These receptors are called ‘proprioceptors’ because they are picking up the body’s own position and movement (from Latin proprius , which means ‘one’s own’), and are sometimes distinguished as inward-looking receptors (‘interoception’) from all major sensory systems, which are directed to the outside world (‘exteroception’). Proprioceptors are responsible for getting into an upright position in the morning and maintaining balance for much of the day. They trigger the stretch reflexes (such as the knee-jerk reflex), which clinicians use to test the function of the central nervous system (Sherrington 1907). Proprioceptors are monitoring the muscle tone that controls general tension and relaxation of the body when it is involved in differ-ent levels of activities (from lying in the hammock, or doing yoga, to lifting weights). By measuring the tension in abdominal connective tissue, they tell you when your stomach has reached capacity limits and you should stop eating. Proprioceptors are instrumental in putting in differ 126 Sensation, Perception and Action together into a uniform coherent image by letting the brain know in which direction your gaze has shifted at any time (Wade and Tatler 2005).

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  The Bodily Roots of Experience in Psychotherapy

  • Ruella Frank(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Through varied kinesthetic qualities of experience, or movement in awareness, the body reveals its potentiality for affective capacity, and we immediately and directly experience the situation we are living. We listen or attend to our self-movements and feel the subtleties of our creative and spontaneous adjusting within the evolving situation. Our kinesthetic capacity allows us to attend to ourselves and to others. It is, in fact, a most unique sense that provides the subject with greater awareness of its own and the other's body. Husserl describes this process as “kinesthetic consciousness”; this is not a consciousness of movement but a capacity to move freely, spontaneously, and responsively. It is the experience of subjectivity. That is, a bodily disposition that enables us to apprehend the body of the other as we apprehend our own: “My feeling in the other's presence… says something about me, about the other, about the situation, about the atmosphere, about our encounter” (Robine 2015, 41). Kinesthetic experiences, continuous internally facilitated sensitivities to moving, cannot be suppressed (Jeannerod 2006). They are always already and irrepressibly part of self-experience. We can, however, either bring them to awareness or obscure them. And when brought forth, valuable information regarding our condition and the state of our world becomes available. Conversely, when the potentiality of kinesthesia is diminished, the possibilities of the environment remain concealed. What can be decidedly obtained from the other is lost. Through affective experiences, we directly and immediately consider the situation we are living in a pre-reflective, pre-conscious, pre-personal way. Such evaluations are aesthetic by nature in that they enfold what we experience into aesthetic assessment (Paterson 2012). That is, the situation unveils itself to us through a variety of felt qualities and combinations of quality; aesthetic evaluations that are experienced through moving

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  Feeling and Hurting

  • Edward C. Carterette, Morton P. Friedman, Edward C. Carterette, Morton P. Friedman(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  The term also includes those sensations best described as effort that are experienced when judging the heaviness of weights or squeezing a dynamometer. Kinesthesis, the appreciation of limb and body movement, is also a part of the proprioceptive system. Some have also included the righting reflexes as well as the vestibular mechanism in the proprioceptive system, but these are considered to be outside the scope of this chapter. A. Kinesthesis Detection of passive movement of the joints appears to be remarkably good. Of all the joints, the hip is by far the most sensitive (subjects detect a change in angle of .2°), and the metatarsophalangeal joint is the least sensitive (rotations of .7° were detected at constant rates of 10° min -1 ). Between these extremes, in order of decreasing sensitivity, are the shoulder, the knee, the ankle, the elbow, the first three metacarpa-phalangeal joints, the wrist, and the last two metacarpaphalangeal joints (Laidlaw & Hamilton, 1937). These measurements are in general agreement with earlier ones made by Goldscheider (1889), although detec-tion of passive movement of the metatarsophalangeal joint has been reported to be as small as 4.5° and as large as 15° in some normal subjects (Browne, Lee, & Ring, 1954). It is clear from these results that rotation of the major joints such as the shoulder, hip, and knee are more readily perceived than those of the finger, wrist, or toes. Detailed examination of passive movements of the elbow has led to the discovery of some complicating factors (Cleghorn & Darcus, 1951). As might be expected, movement detection improved as the degree of dis-placement increased, but the improvement was greater between .5 and Γ displacements and less between 1 and 2°. The proportion of movements detected increased as the rate of movement increased from 3 to 12° min -1 , but decreased at a rate of 15° min -1 . Extensions were better detected than

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  Aristotle's Empiricism

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Parmenides Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Three points are important to note at the outset. These will be devel-oped in the rest of this chapter. The first point is that kinesthetic aware-ness is not inductive knowledge, as induction is usually conceived. It is both a more immediate cognition than the formation of a universal from many particulars and too little conceptualized to qualify as induction. Kinesthetic awareness issues immediately in action. Insofar as an appro-priate kinesthetic response—avoiding falling on an icy sidewalk—comes out of a previous occurrence under similar conditions, success in parrying a bad outcome could be considered a result of induction, but the notion of induction would have to be broader, suited to non-intellectualized knowl-edge and possibly appropriate to memory in animals as well. The second point, then, is that kinesthetic awareness, though understanding of a state of affairs and not grasp of an object, is non-propositional knowing. This non-propositional understanding may be vague by the standards of clear propositional expression—that is to say, hard even to put into a cogent proposition. It may not yet be fully realized in consciousness. In spite of that, kinesthetic response is usually highly effective, even efficient-ly targeted. Thirdly, this knowledge is important, in spite of its initial vagueness, because it is perception of what is later clarified as a necessary property of some subject. Subject and property are not separated in kin-esthetic awareness, but a particular kinesthetic response takes the form it does, because it includes a grasp of a necessary attribute as part of a state of affairs. For example, someone who learns to parry a blow from behind does so, in good gymnastic style, by moving with the blow and enhancing his movement in a backward arc. The completion of that action would be a stable landing on his feet.

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  The Neuroscience of Creativity

  • Anna Abraham(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  2 5 2 Kinesthetic Creativity 252 or kinesthetic forms of creativity a distinct category. We need to be cog-nizant of the fact that, following the definition of creativity ( Chapter 1 ), the components of “originality” and “relevance” must be present for a performance to be viewed as creative. This means that the mere act of physical performance in dance or sports in and of itself is not necessarily creative. This is also true of musical performance ( Chapter 8 ). Having said that, the simple answer to the question at the start of this para-graph is “yes,” and that is because these activities afford real forms of creativity that are distinct from other instantiations. For instance, unlike verbal or visuospatial forms of creativity, the kinesthetic forms of dance and sports involve sensations of whole body movement or “kinesthesia,” which refers to the integration of information from the vestibular system (the sensory experience of balance and spatial orientation) and the proprioceptive system (the sensory experience from forces within the body – muscles, tendons, joints). Some accounts of kinesthesia include not only proprioception but also exteroception (the sensory experi-ence – visual, auditory, tactile – from stimuli outside the body), making kinesthesia integral to multisensory and active perception (Reason & Reynolds, 2010 ). The immense constraints imposed by the physical limitations of the body itself means that bona fide instantiations of creativity in perform-ance may be few and far between. But the impact of those creative instants is momentous. In sports, it can make the difference between winning and losing a game, breaking records, and even achieving eminence. We see these moments in every sport. They are the ones we crave, enjoy, and remember best as spectators. In any sport, the best players are those who can be relied on to make optimal use of unpredicted opportunities or indeed create opportunities that lead to a successful shot.

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  The Cognitive Aspects of Aesthetic Experience Selected Problems

  • Andrej Démuth(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  In choreographing the dance and in learning the dance, Cunningham was kinesthetically at- tentive to the flow of his own movement: its amplitudes, its shifts in direc- tion, its modulated intensities, and its singular manners of projection. His motor cortex was involved, but it was certainly not his motor cortex that he attended to. In fact, what was happening in his motor cortex in the process the motor task preserves its regulatory role, the highest responsibility is transferred from efferent to afferent impulses“ (Luria 1973, 249). Kinesthesia is thus of immense significance to voluntary everyday movement as well as for dance performance. 175 S i l v i a G á l i k o v á • T h i n k i n g i n t h e F l e s h of his learning the sequence of movements was contingent on how he actu- ally chose to move in the first place, that is, on the particular qualitative dynamics of each sequence of movements that came to constitute his cho- reography, and on his rehearsals and learning of the sequencing of those qualitative dynamics until he wore them “like a suit of clothes”. A proper use of the term “embodied” is apparent in this context: in wearing them “like a suit of clothes”, the kinesthetically learned qualitative dynamics of the dance came to be embodied. Dance is creatively open-ended because the “parameters” of movement, the qualitative dynamic structure of the movement, are endlessly variable. One can recognize the degrees of freedom in the mere initiation of move- ment, for example, raising an arm overhead – a familiar everyday move- ment. For a dancer, not only are its degrees of freedom apparent but they also constitute a fundamental aspect of the complexity of movement. From a standing position, the movement may be initiated from the shoulder, the elbow, the wrist, or, supposing one’s elbow is flexed and one’s forearm ex- tended horizontally etc.

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