Every single time someone asks me about what I do and I try to explain what movement practice is, the next thing that follows is unequivocal “ok, I get it, it is like capoeira/yoga/CrossFit” (insert yours). It is not limited to this specific situation. All of us have experienced meeting someone and they instantly point out that you resemble someone they already know. Or you hear a song for the first time and immediately decide for yourself to which genre it belongs, or which other song you are familiar with it sounds like. It happens to all of us because of the way the human brain operates – we cluster objects into classes or categories. This is an adaptive behavior that is a result of evolution inside a hostile environment and is directly correlated with the necessity to survive: in order to be able to protect yourself you must recognize a predator, in order to feed yourself you must be able to recognize food that won’t kill you, etc. When we encounter a new item we classify it in order to accommodate new information and integrate it into what we already know, so we can understand faster how it can be used. Sometimes the consequences of the wrong categorization can be lethal.
Aristotle was the first philosopher who laid down concepts of categorization. He suggested that we assign the category to a thing by analysis of its properties and a comparison with the category definition. For a long time, his ideas were held as the basis for categorization principles and were challenged only in the last 100 years by various philosophers, and just very recently inside the quickly growing field of neuroscience and neuropsychology. The first significant name that emerged within this question is that of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in his work published in 1953 suggested the model of grouping things into categories by family resemblance and not by the properties we can observe. (It is believed that he pulled this idea out of Freud’s work, but Freud never elaborated on this specific topic as much as Wittgenstein did). He suggested that categories cannot have definitions or sets of definitions, but rather subtle shadings of categories with fuzzy boundaries. He used as an example the concept of “game”. There cannot possibly be a clear and precise definition of what a game is, but we will still recognize it when we see one because it shares certain features that we will identify before we classify something as a “game”. The list of features can be dynamic for each given category. Taking Wittgenstein’s example we can see that some games are played as a team, some are played in solitary, some have rules, some don’t, some involve an object, some do not involve any objects, etc. So there is a list of features that might or might not be present in a particular game, but it will nevertheless belong to the category of games. There are many examples of this problem. Is a penguin a bird? Is chicken? What are the fixed features for an animal to be a bird? Often time the question of membership is a matter of debate. However, we still can assign a category “bird” for an animal because of the family resemblance it shares with other representatives of the family, even if a specific specimen would not be a typical representation of it.
Another huge contribution to understanding the way we categorize things was made by Eleanor Rosch in the 70s. She suggested the model of categorization by prototypes - the central tendency, the average. Before her, all the work around categorization was done with artificial concepts and based on logic rather than the real world. Rosch proposed the idea that certain stimuli hold a privileged position in our perceptual system and we build categories around it. In her view, there will be a universal set of physical parameters for something to be recognized by our perceptual system as a color or as a sound. Different shades of red would be recognized as belonging to the same category “red” because of features of physiology of our visual system that will perceive them as such. Experimentation based on this idea lead Rosch to the following conclusions:
1. Categories form around prototypes
2. These prototypes can have a biological or physiological foundation
3. Category membership can have a “degree” to which one token is a better example of it than another
4. New items are judged by their relationship to the prototypes
5. There is no need for any attributes which ALL category members have in common, and boundaries do not have to be clearly defined
Later came Smith and Medin, who in their work dated 1981 found a weakness in the prototype theory. They have pointed out that we need context to create a valid prototype. Contextual information is part of our knowledge about the categories. They proposed the multiple-trace categorization model: a convergence of memory theory and categorization theory. They suggest that we are predicting data based not only on prototypes but also involve constructive memory and the formation and retention of abstract information. We store both abstract and specific information about things and based on that we create the categories. Context is encoded along with memory traces of specific events.
The categorization is a prerequisite for successful cognition. It is an adaptive behavior that is reducing stimulus differences to useable proportions called “cognitive economy” in the field of psychology. It is impossible to sort things out into categories without selecting some of their properties and ignoring others. Otherwise, every single thing we encounter would be infinitely unique and infinitely useless, there will be no way for us to use it or integrate it with the knowledge that we already possess to create a coherent picture of the world (a great example of this pathology is Borges’ account of Funes The Memorious). What we categorize is secondary to how and why we do it. Most of the features by which we group things into categories must have relevance to the physical reality and the specific context in which they are formed. For example, when we pick up mushrooms it is better to understand a category of “poisonous mushrooms” to not put our life in danger, or when you are fighting with your spouse it would be useful to understand a category of “things that make this person mad”. The first one will correlate to the actual physical structure of the world while the second will be more of a conceptual category. This conceptual exercise of creating dynamic and somewhat arbitrary categories on the spot is something that we do all the time. In this case, a category is not created by matching properties, but by the way things ARE RELATED. Another example will be making a list of music that “I like to listen to on a road”. Here the choice of category members will be based solely on the subjective preferences of an individual for whom this category exists, and might not be useful for another person in the same context. A given object can also occupy more than one category depending on its features and the relationships that it forms.
Categories are subject to hierarchical structure: the basic level would be “chair”, superordinate “furniture”, and subordinate “kitchen chair”. We can call this process zooming in and out, going from micro to macro and vice versa. Seeing different overlapping categories that a thing belongs to can help us understand better what relationships it forms, therefore studying the essence of the thing and the place to which it belongs inside the structure of the world. Alan Watts pointed out that “you cannot study the river by taking out a bucket of water from it.” Of course, it is useful to study parts of a thing, at the end of the day without understanding what water is, you cannot understand what a lake, a sea or a pool is. However, you can only understand fully what a river is by looking at it as a whole and looking at what kinds of relationships it forms. “Natural source of water”, a category to which the river also belongs to, would not be sufficient to understand what we are talking about. A river and a pond are both bodies of water, but the river flows downhill with the force of gravity, it has a starting point and an ending point that is usually connected to a bigger body of water, etc. There will be certain features of its relationship to the surrounding elements of the environment that will allow for it to be called a river. Then within the category of rivers, there will be more specific categories based on specific features: permanent rivers, periodic rivers, mountain rivers, subterranean rivers, etc. A thing must be studied as a whole and within the systems that it forms in order to understand it fully. We should zoom in and out and not just look at it in isolation. The scientific approach that we rely on so much in modern times often removes us further away from this holistic view (we should be grateful for the existence of science, however). To validate research there should be a rigorous control of variables, which is impossible in the real world. Many situations described in science are so isolated, and so far from reality, we cannot count them as practical in relation to real life!
We can see now that it is absolutely normal to label new things when we see them. This happens constantly with everything original and novel. However, as useful and necessary as this feature of our cognition is, it can also trick us because we often get stuck with the categories we already formed. We end up blind to the new possibilities that arise, so we end up not expanding our knowledge. Movement practice constitutes a completely new category in itself but consists of very familiar to most people elements. It results in constant attempts to put it into an existing category and assign it a place in a hierarchy that doesn’t correspond to it. Zooming in, we will first see it branching into the elements of broad lines of human development like cognitive, emotional, and physical. Going further in each of those we find big particles of movement that will be clustered into categories like coordination, rhythm, athleticism, attention, focus, etc. Each of these categories can be divided further into smaller micro-units: spinal movement, ipsi and contra-lateral connections, groundwork, elasticity, meditation, and so on. This is a fractal structure, and in theory, we can go in and out to infinity. Each of the smaller categories will overlap with others depending on the context and because of the common features they share. If we zoom out, movement practice DOES NOT belong to the category of different disciplines and trademarks as it can be Crossfit, Animal flow, Yoga, basketball, capoeira, or any other. Because of the similarity of some features, the tendency is to clump movement practice into the known categories that we already understand on some level. Anything that cannot be categorized is confusing, so our brain insists on placing it into an existing structure. Nevertheless, this is the wrong approach, because it does not allow us to see the bigger picture and does not help to relate to this practice in a way that corresponds to its complexity. We need to zoom out even further and place it apart from the categories that we already know, so we extend the rhizome of our knowledge instead of shrinking a big idea into the existing structure. Zoom out even further and you will find that movement practice belongs rather to the modes of living, philosophies, or perspectives category than one of a discipline, conjunction of disciplines, or a training methodology.
To go against the natural tendency of our brain we need to do an enormous conscious effort. Otherwise, all our decision-making will be controlled by impulses we cannot even recognize. A constant exercise in creating dynamic conceptual categories for different objects in the world, observing different relationships and schemas that they form, will help break down the existing categories that might have been imposed by us externally and form newer and more useful ones. It does not mean we can live in a subjective world with our own language and our own rules. There is a physical reality and shared social landscape that we form part of and must participate in. But a fresh angle, a different perspective from which to look at the world offers us the possibility to understand deeper the essence of things and how we can position ourselves better in relation to them.