Like many parents I find I have feelings of guilt because of the amount of time my children spend on their Xbox 360, not so much because of the lack of cardio-vascular exercise that this implies but more because of the bad kinesthetics they are picking up from it. And what is kinesthetics? It is the body's sixth sense (forget 'seeing dead people'). Kinesthetics is "the sense of muscular effort that accompanies a voluntary motion of the body" or, as the great intellectual Jacob Bronowski put it in his 1965 essay The Identity of Man, "the kinesthetic sense is an inner signal that runs parallel with our own outward action". Bronowski, for anyone who hasn't seen The Ascent of Man, was intent on unifying both art and science - the world of meaning and the world of mechanics - in the whole man (or woman), and kinesthetics was central to his task.
So kinesthetics is the sense responsible for our desire to play the air guitar or air drums, or to tap our feet or dance on hearing music (or, more specifically, rhythm), or to punch the air or make a clenched fist on experiencing victory. It's what makes us squirm when witnessing someone else struggle through Total Wipeout. It puts us in readiness on the edge of our seats when watching a 'thriller'. And ultimately it's what teaches us the meaning of effort.
My children not only lack cardio-vascular exercise, but the bad kinesthetics they are picking up means they are inevitably learning to associate actions that require physical effort with simpler feelings in the thumbs and index fingers only. Want to sprint across that compound and throw a grenade? That's push left thumb forward and pull right index finger back. Want to skateboard down that near vertical incline in a crouch and hit the horizontal at max speed? That's right thumb and left index finger. Want to go pee? Ah, that's a bit trickier...
In recent years makers of such 'toys' have recognised a problem here and injected some kinesthetic content into the technology. I quite enjoy playing Ten-Pin Bowling on the Wii because in the swing of the arm and the flick of the wrist I get a sensation that almost corresponds with the result. (If only the Wii remote weighed as much as a bowling ball!) The Xbox 360 Kinect has tried to take this a step further with its whole-body motion-sensing, but there still seems a dis-Kinect between the effort required of the body and the effort required on the Xbox. More often than not you'll bash into your living room walls before you bash into an object on screen.
The lack of kinesthetics is a problem in schools as well. I am convinced that children are learning to read slower than they did in the past because they are not learning to write in quite the same way. The letters that children must sound out are not being associated with the kinesthetic sensation of pushing and pulling a pencil along a piece of paper. Each letter written has its own kinesthetic feeling, which is lost when children use keyboards to write, and so children must rely on sight alone to identify the letter before them, making it all the harder. But that's a topic for someone else's blog...
This somewhat chilling article in the Daily Telegraph highlights a more dangerous consequence of the world losing its kinesthetic sense. Controls in some Airbus planes are now so computerised and simplified that pilots can no longer feel the manoeuvres (literally, 'the work of the hand') they are initiating. "Pilots cannot sense the power setting by touching or glancing at the throttle levers. Instead, they have to check their computer screens." In other words, they have to rely on one of the five traditional senses. But in using only these senses we are essentially passive receivers of information. Man and his five senses are made active through the kinesthetic sense.
The crucial element of kinesthetics is the feeling of using our muscles to overcome the resistance offered by the external world. To traverse distance we must move the legs, overcoming friction on the ground, in the air and even in our legs themselves. As the world pushes back against our will we are able to moderate our effort, to increase or decrease it accordingly, so that the resultant net movement is both smooth and controlled. If we did not have the world pushing back at us in this way we would be quite unable to calibrate our own self-consciousness, and we'd be unable to distinguish our waking from our dreaming. Everything would be either impossible or impossibly easy. So the harder the world pushes back, the greater the kinesthetic sense and the greater the sense of being alive to the earthly possibilities that exist.
The next time you run, my advice is this: feel your feet in your shoes, feel your legs, feel the ground, feel the incline, feel the wind, feel your breathing, feel the cold, feel the sweat, feel the beat, feel everything that is working with you and at the same time against you. What you are feeling is yourself in the world but changing the world. That's life; that's kinesthetics.
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