Bodily awareness during skilled action

Prominent theories of skill acquisition posit that the performing body is absent during ‘habitualized’ or well-learned action. This chapter challenges this position by arguing that the body is never forgotten during skilled movement. Instead, it possesses what might be termed an enduring presence. Drawing on Colombetti’s (2011) taxonomy of the bodily self, the chapter shows how skilled performers may experience either a reflective or pre-reflective mode of bodily awareness depending on what they attend to during online skill execution. It proposes that while the body is always lived through as the subject of experience, performers will often have little choice but to take the body as the intentional object of their awareness. The chapter concludes by arguing that it is the dynamic interplay of various forms of bodily awareness that facilitates optimal performance and allows skilled performers to confront the challenges (e.g. injury, performance slumps) that are a ubiquitous feature of competitive environments.

Is optimal performance really ‘mindless’?

This chapter considers whether optimal/peak performance is as automatic or ‘mindless’ as many accounts of expertise suggest. It starts by exploring the phenomenon known as ‘flow’ which is typically presented as evidence that peak performance is mindless or automatic in nature. It then reviews recent literature in this area which reveals that the mind remains online during skilled action and especially during ‘clutch’ performances or when athletes are seeking to ‘make it happen’. It proceeds to discuss how ‘mindedness’ and bodily awareness are integral features of peak performance. It then uses this argument to uncover the potential perils associated with ‘non-mindedness’ or automated performance. In particular, the chapter discusses how excessive automaticity prevents athletes from exercising attentional control and results in a number of undesirable outcomes including slips, lapses, and in extreme cases, ‘choking’ under pressure.

Continuous Improvement

How do great athletes defy the power law of practice, according to which improvements in skill eventually plateau? To solve this puzzle, this book presents a theory of ‘continuous improvement’ which emphasizes the role that conscious processes play in maintaining and advancing skilled performers’ movement capacities. It argues that continuous improvement requires the use of processes such as abstract thought and bodily awareness in order to strategically alter and improve habitual movements in response to contextual demands. The book also elucidates a number of strategies that might be used to improve an athlete’s attentional control and help them switch their focus when they realize they have adopted task-irrelevant thoughts. Finally, it presents a range of methodological approaches that might be used by researchers to better understand the attentional flexibility that characterizes skilled action across training and performance contexts.

The Paradox of Virtual Embodiment: The Body Schema in Virtual Reality Aesthetic Experience

"New technologies implied in art creation and exhibition are modifying the traditional landmarks on which aesthetics has always focused. In particular, Virtual Reality artworks call the body into question when it comes to living a bodily experience within exhibitions accessible through technological tools that expand the human body’s capabilities and motor potential. The body's status is challenged in its traditional unity, that of a subject of experience living in a world where the spatial configuration is relatively constant. Conversely, in Virtual Reality, the spatial aspect is novel to our body which needs to adapt to unpredicted and disorientating motor schemas. Therefore, the Virtual Reality aesthetic experience takes place into a novel configuration for the human body: hybrid and split into the virtual realm. Keywords: Aesthetics; Virtual Reality; Embodiment; Digital art; Bodily awareness "

Auditory feedback on proprioception increases bodily awareness

Multiple studies have shown the importance of movement and physical exercise like dance for human wellbeing and mental health. Yet, factors influencing proprioception and body awareness in the context of exercise remain largely unexplored. This is mostly due to the lack of tools and techniques to record, manipulate and intervene on body awareness during real-time movements. To this end, we designed FUGA, a wearable device delivering continuous real-time auditory feedback on human gestures. Here we tested whether we could manipulate bodily awareness during physical exercise and dance using auditory feedback on proprioception. Following a within-subject design, we tested the effects of the device using different sounds in three populations of dancers: novice, amateurs and professionals. We found that across populations the wearable had a significant effect on the participant’s rating of feelings of bodily awareness, reward, immersion, embodiment, and self-efficacy. We discuss these results in the light of recent theories of predictive coding and active inference, emphasizing the role of action, proprioceptive and auditory sensory feedback in human behavior. Building upon these results, we suggest future studies to explore the potential of auditory proprioceptive feedback for mental health.

Amplified salience of somatic information in persistent depression

Disrupted bodily awareness may reflect mechanisms which drive both symptomatology and disorder maintenance in clinical depression. We investigated attentional capture by somatic signals in clinically depressed individuals and healthy controls as one aspect of bodily awareness. Attentional performance in a cross-modal covert orienting task was globally disrupted when depressed participants attempted to ignore uninformative somatic cues, in a largely modality-specific manner. In a subsequent study employing a similar paradigm, attention was disproportionately captured in depressed participants by informative somatic cues, in a similarly modality-specific way. Taken together, the results suggest that the salience of somatic signals is amplified in clinical depression, and that attempts to ignore them may have a disruptive effect on attentional processing more generally in this population.

Residues of History, Affect, and the Resonance of Revolutionary Spirits in Two Cuban Forms of Spiritism

The figure of the Revolutionary or independence fighter, or indeed the Afro-Cuban maroon, is a fundamental trope of efficacy in Cuban Spiritism. But the question of the vestiges, or residues of resistance and ruin in bodies is an interesting one to ask in the light of Cuba’s socialist Revolution and its obvious traces of trauma in people’s bodies. I will look at two cases, in different historical periods, that understand Revolution as a material dimension of the body; in the first case as a molecular structure of the body enmeshed with the dead — which must be necessarily disentangled; in the second case, as an attrition, a worn-out ideal, which, when manifest as the disenchanted, pragmatic street-wise spirits of a post-1980s Cuba, perpetuate the remnants of something “lost” in people’s sensory experiences. In both cases I will follow Kristina Wirtz’s proposal of applying the concept of “chronotopes” to Afro-Cuban religion, as well as looking at affect as an intensive force that manifests as a bodily awareness of Revolution modulated through states of possession.