Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes:
embodied skill and kinesthetic memory

Doris McIlwain and John Sutton, with Ed Cooke

John Sutton, Philosophy Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.
Back to my home page. Email me.

This will be the home site for this research project
'Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes: embodied skill and kinesthetic memory', (Macquarie Uni Research Development Grant, 2006-2008).

NEW: 'The Philosophy of Cricket' on The Philosopher's Zone, on ABC Radio National with Alan Saunders, Saturday October 21.

Highly skilled activities like sport and dance are of great cultural significance for participants and audiences. Expertise requires
both intensive long-term training and the capacity to avoid distraction, intrusive thinking, or excessive self-monitoring. Such
embodied skills offer a rare chance to study memory, attention, and anticipation in complex real-world settings.

This collaborative project in philosophy and psychology investigates relations between thought and action, developing both
conceptual and empirical approaches to embodied skill through case studies of two distinctive domains of expertise – cricket batting
and yoga. Mainstream philosophy of mind has long neglected embodied intelligent action: we use these emblematic cases to demonstrate
the theoretical significance of complex acquired skills, and to exemplify an interdisciplinary spirit in studying the embodied mind, in
which phenomenology and cognitive science are natural allies rather than glaring antagonists. Independently interesting questions
about batting and yoga – issues which matter to participants and coaches, sports scientists and medical researchers, commentators
and spectators – show up in new forms when considered in light of our theoretical concerns about memory and skill.

‘Think? How can you hit and think at the same time?’, complained the baseball great Yogi Berra (quoted in Beilock et al 2002, p.1236).
Self-conscious thought can, notoriously, disrupt well-practised actions. Practitioners in skilled domains like music, sport, yoga, and
dance like to entrust well-grooved actions to the body, to the habitual routines of kinaesthetic memory. But they also know that true
open-ended expertise in dynamic contexts requires thought and action to come together, to cooperate instead of competing. A top
cricket batsman, for example – with less than 500ms to execute an ambitious cover drive to a hard ball moving at 140kmh (Muller &
Abernethy 2006) – draws not only on his smoothly-practised strokeplay, but somehow also both on his experience of playing this
quick bowler in conditions like this, and on his awareness of the current state of the match, the series, and his career, to play an
elegant shot with breathtaking precision. How and under what circumstances can embodied skills be so minutely open to memory
and situational awareness? How do we influence ourselves, in practice and in performance? What kinds of intelligence are flexible
and fine-grained enough to influence habits which have become second nature or ingrained reflexes? How can instruction alter
grooved embodied skills? And what are the relations, in particular, between personal and conceptual memory on the one hand, and
embodied or procedural memory on the other?

See - (Sutton, in press) 'Batting, Habit, and Memory: the embodied mind and the nature of skill', in Jeremy McKenna (ed),
    At the Boundaries of Cricket, to be published in 2007 as a special issue of the journal Sport in Society and as a book  in the series
    Sport in the Global Society (Taylor and Francis).
- (Sutton, 2005) 'Moving and Thinking Together in Dance',  in Thinking in Four Dimensions: creativity and cognition in
    contemporary dance, eds Robin Grove, Kate Stevens, & Shirley McKechnie  (Melbourne University Press e-book)
- (McIlwain, 2003), 'Book Review - Yoga and Psychology',  Metapsychology Book Reviews.

Select Interdisciplinary Bibliography

Abernethy, B. (1981). ‘Mechanisms of Skill in Cricket Batting’. Australian Journal of Sports Medicine 13, 3-10.
Allard, F. & Starkes, J.L. (1991). ‘Motor-skill Experts in Sports, Dance, and Other Domains’, in K.A. Ericsson & J. Smith
    (eds.),Toward a General Theory of Expertise. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., pp. 126-152.
Bartlett, R.M. (2003). ‘The Science and Medicine of Cricket: an overview and update’. Journal of Sports Sciences 21, 733-752.
Behnke, E. (1997). 'Ghost Gestures: phenomenological investigations of bodily micromovements and their intercorporeal
    implications', Human Studies 20, 181-201.

Beilock, S.L., Wierenga, S.A., & Carr, T.H. (2002). ‘Expertise, Attention, and Memory in Sensorimotor Skill Execution’.
    Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 55, 1211-1240.
Beilock, S.L., Wierenga, S.A., & Carr, T.H. (2003). ‘Memory and Expertise: what do experienced athletes remember?’, in
    J.L. Starkes & K.A. Ericsson (eds.), Expert Performance in Sports. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, pp. 295-320.
Calvo-Merino, B., Glaser, D.E., Grezes, J., Passingham, R.E., & Haggard, P. (2005). ‘Action Observation and Acquired Motor
    Skills: an fMRI study with expert dancers’. Cerebral Cortex 15, 1243-9.
Carr, D. (1987). ‘Thought and Action in the Art of Dance’. British Journal of Aesthetics 27, 345-357.
Casey, E. (2000). ‘The Ghost of Embodiment: on bodily habitudes and schemata’, in D. Welton (ed.), Body and Flesh.
    Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 207-225.
Chaffin, R., Imreh, G., & Crawford, M. (2002). Practicing Perfection: memory and piano performance. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Crease, R.P. (2002). ‘The Pleasure of Popular Dance’. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 29, 106-120.
Davids, K, Glazier, P.S., Araujo, D., & Bartlett, R.M. (2003). ‘Movement Systems as Dynamical Systems’. Sports Medicine 33, 245-260
Downey, G. (2005). 'Educating the Eyes: Biocultural Anthropology and Physical Education'. Anthropology in Action 12, 56-71.
Dretske, F. (1998). 'Where is the Mind when the Body Performs?', Stanford Humanities Review 6.
Ericsson, K.A. (2003). ‘Development of Elite Performance and Deliberate Practice’, in J.L. Starkes & K.A. Ericsson (eds.),
    Expert Performance in Sports. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 49-83.

Gallagher, S. (2005). How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gallese, V. (2005). ‘Embodied Simulation: from neurons to phenomenal experience’. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4, 23-48.

Glazier, P.S., Davids, K., & Bartlett, R.M. (2002). ‘Grip Force Dynamics in Cricket Batting’, in Davids, K., Savelsbergh, G., Bennett, S.J.,
    & van der Kamp, J. (eds.), Interceptive Actions in Sport: information and movement. London: Taylor and Francis, pp. 311-325.
Gordon, S. (2001). ‘Reflections on Providing Sport Psychology Services in Professional Cricket’, in G. Tenenbaum (ed.), The Practice
    of Sport Psychology. Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology, pp. 17-36.
Hagendoorn, I. (2003). ‘Cognitive Dance Improvisation: how study of the motor system can inspire dance (and vice versa)’.
    Leonardo 36, 221-7.
Land, M.F. & McLeod, P. (2000). ‘From Eye Movements to Actions: how batsmen hit the ball’. Nature Neuroscience 3, 1340-1345.
Michaels, C.F. (2000). ‘Information, Perception, and Action: what should ecological psychologists learn from Milner and
    Goodale?’. Ecological Psychology 12, 241-258.
Moe, V.F. (2005). ‘A Philosophical Critique of Classical Cognitivism in Sport: from information processing to bodily background
    knowledge’. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 32, 155-183.
Morris, D. (2002). ‘Touching Intelligence’. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 29, 149-162.
Muller, S. & Abernethy, B. (2006). ‘Skill Learning from an Expertise Perspective: issues and implications for practice and coaching
    in cricket’, in J. Dosil (ed.), The Sport Psychologist’s Handbook: a guide for sport-specific performance enhancement.
    Chichester: John Wiley, 245-261.
Preston, B. (1996). ‘Merleau-Ponty and Feminine Embodied Existence’. Man and World 29, 167-186.
Sebanz, N., Bekkering, H., & Knoblich, G. (2006). ‘Joint Action: bodies and minds moving together’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10, 70-76.
Selinger, E.M. & Crease, R.P. (2002). ‘Dreyfus on Expertise: the limits of phenomenological analysis’. Continental Philosophy Review 35, 245-279.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (1980). The Phenomenology of Dance. 2nd edition, New York: Arno Press.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (1999). The Primacy of Movement. John Benjamins.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2000). ‘Kinetic Tactile-Kinesthetic Bodies: ontogenetical foundations of apprenticeship learning’. Human Studies 23, 343-370.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2003). ‘Kinesthetic Memory’. Theoria et Historia Scientiarum 7, 69-92.
Stevens, C., Malloch, S., McKechnie, S. & Steven, N. (2003). ‘Choreographic Cognition: the time-course and phenomenology of creating a dance’.
    Pragmatics and Cognition 11, 299-329.
Stevens, C. & McKechnie, S. (2005). ‘Thinking in Action: thought made visible in contemporary dance’. Cognitive Processing 6, 243-252.

Stretch, R.A., Bartlett, R.M., & Davids, K. (2000). ‘A Review of Batting in Men’s Cricket’. Journal of Sports Sciences 18, 931-949.
Stuelcken, M.C, Portus, M.R., & Mason, B.R. (2005). ‘Off-side Front Foot Drives in Men’s High Performance Cricket’. Sports Biomechanics 4, 17-36.

Sudnow, D. (2001). Ways of the Hand. 2nd edition, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Williams, A.M. & Davids, K. (1995). ‘Declarative Knowledge in Sport: a by-product of experience or a characteristic of expertise?’,
    Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology 17, 259-275.
Williams, A.M., Davids, K., & Williams, J.G. (1999). Visual Perception and Action in Sport. London: Spon.

Last updated 26 January 2007.