Hey Elon, what about the body?

How BMIs might affect the physical understanding of our bodies and what we should consider. A comment. 

Imagine you want to share an idea to someone, and you don’t have to say a single word. Your mouth stays closed, you even do not have to address the person visually. Your messages leaves your brain and enters the other one. It doesn’t matter if both of you are in the same room or on the other half of the planet.

This scenario isn't creepy Science Fiction, but the new idea, which one of the most efficient and productive investors of our times - Elon Musk - proposes. Neuralink wants to develop "ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers." (official website) The result: we will be able to enter a completely new stadium of communication, which doesn't need words to share thoughts, but is able to send emotions, thoughts and perception directly from one brain to another. For those who want to learn more about the company, click here! (if you are already lost by now it makes sense to follow the link and dig a bit deeper into the material.) 

Connecting brain to brain, nice! But - what about the body? 

A connection between brain and brain to ensure a more precise and efficient communication, that is the initial plan. Information, which jumps from brain A to brain B, without losing any content. Anyways, looking down on us, we recognize that there is something additional to all neurons inside our brain: a body! A system using all it’s force to ensure walking, digestion, perception and further more – connection. We use our hands to communicate, we smile in order to attract people, we nod to share a feedback. According to Musk all these processes result from the lack of possibilities to connect our brains automatically to each other. Language is just a metaphor for our thoughts and we need interpretation and experience to decode the message we receive. That might be true and as a result a proper brain to brain communication seems useful. Nevertheless, we should spend some thoughts about the question: what happens to our body, if we don’t have to use it anymore to communicate?

As a dancer, I experimented with the possibilities of peripheral vision. Peripheral vision means, you focus another person from all angles you can use. Sometimes it might look like someone stands nearly behind you, but from an angle of your vision you perceive that the person is still there. We experimented to communicate using this kind of perception. Witnessing two people who interact with each other without looking at each other created an imagine of distance. Thus, we all use phones and WIFI, direct communication still requires direct interaction for some reasons.

Reflecting our evolutionary roots, direct interaction is something all humans have experienced from their first day of life. Parents looking down on us to understand our needs taught us early how to attract people with looks and smiles. Young children learn very early how to share a social smile, which invites people to create a positive relationship. All we do is developing a roadmap towards positive affections. First we smile, we focus our opposite with your eyes, we smile again and then we physically approach the other person. BMIs would shorten this process by sending a brain message saying I like you. Sounds very pragmatic, but what it loosens is all the magic beyond creating a relationship to someone. And what also remains on the way is the aspect of time.

If we think about the social structures of the world in 2017 we already can observe some small developments and their results in these directions. Using dating apps allows us to send messages I like you without considering a specific time frame for an adequate approach. Sexuality is everywhere, easy to obtain and available for everyone. Nevertheless, when I ask people if they are happy about these options, most use them for a short duration, but then come back to the “real connection”, they feel more safe and friendly about. People tend to draw a linear line (meeting, talking, interacting sexuality) between each other, instead of an exponential one (texting, having sex).

Nonverbal communication also supports our physicality in general. If we need our body, we are more likely to think about it very often. We receive physical feedback, which invites us to consider our health, our charisma and the way we present ourselves to the world. Direct communicati

“Yes, but since the stone age, the human body has always changed, why is that bad?”

Our front head grew and we lost much hair, while our muscles and teeth are weaker than before. As we invented a proper medical system, we are able to cope with many diseases and clothes keep us warm. Contrary we leak many things older generations were more positive about. Studies show that our grandparents were more sexually active than my generation. We suffer more from diseases like cancer or psychological disorders, such as depression and anxiety. The world we live in, the fast growing and technological development also causes fear, insecurity and dangers for the body.

“Should we stop it and go back to stone age?”

Of course not, but we should be wise and reflect every invention we are planning. What can be the benefits from our curiosity? And what should be considered as difficult? If we are smart enough to build brain machine interfaces, we also should be able to find some motivated people who think about their failures and develop some strategies to prevent us. Years of technological development and industrialization should work as an example for how to do this.

I interpret the possibility to look into someone’s brain as a pathway towards empathy and understanding. Seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. That is a beautiful idea. We can understand the perception of a baby, we might know how old people feel and improve technology supporting them.

But BMIs could also create disorders, we do not have to deal with today. What happens, if someone doesn’t focus on the perception of someone else and ignores his own sensations. Can we develop an identity disorder by ignoring the signals from our own body? And would it be possible that people in the future forget how to read and interpret their own physical feedback? Thinking about many disorders such as anorexia or obesity, we can identify these processes already.

Another aspect I want to add is motivation: Once we do not have to read a book anymore as it is displayed to our brain, we will never increase the motivation to learn or read any more. What motivates us is the underlying process of learning, not the achievement itself. Reading, as an example, teaches us multiple aspects: it allows us to gather knowledge, but additionally to that, it requires concentration and invites us to experience joy and curiosity. We can’t read faster than a certain timeframe allows us to. The idea of “not knowing yet”, the desire we experience fosters imagination and creativity. What we can learn is patience, listening and waiting. If all knowledge is transmitted to our brains, all the joy and desire expires. Einstein said, that imagination is what drives research, not intelligence or knowledge.

According to current researches, future inventions are viewed as the most complex and perfect built machines, which might eliminate us due to its perfection. Nevertheless, we should not forget that yet we possess the strongest weapon of all humanity: physical intuition. Neurons merging in your stomach and expressing the feeling of fear. Pheromones signaling attraction. A smile allowing connectivity. What I want to foster is: whatever happens, we should stay aware!

Neither Google. Nor Wikipedia. But your heart.

    on how intuitive learning concepts could shape perspectives in education

When a child starts learning, there is no concept of teaching or explaining – and still each of us transforms into a master of walking, speaking and interacting. As a child we learn the most complex things: directing our physical being, outsourcing our thoughts and dealing with our own and other people’s emotions without attending a single class. What this may prove is that the complexity of life is not illustrated in any single book but nevertheless humans are able to capture it using one inborn skill: intuition. 

Intuition, described as “the ability to require knowledge without proof or conscious learning” incorporates reproduction and creativity on the same level as failure and discovery are attached. It shows that everything a person needs to know is already there, inside of us. But once we witness the society we live in, we start feeling surrounded by perfectly developed curricula and many people who teach you how to follow prescriptions without thinking. 

Entering a school describes the opposite of what we have practiced as young children and as many of us, I also experienced disillusion. In my therapy training I had a boss who kept saying that we all have to wait. “You have to wait until you know how to treat people. You have to wait until you understand psychology.” Now is nothing but a blind moment in the queue towards understanding? I remember another moment in which a friend tried to teach me climbing. He precisely explained me the theory behind the movement, but still I kept falling of the wall. Another day, I went climbing by myself with only one task: trying to listen to my body’s actual movement in order to understand its mechanism. Then I would observe those who climbed already high and tried to process what their movements were about. Sometimes I also asked people to explain me their specific movement and from there I continued learning. I understood that in climbing the biggest muscle we use is our brain.

When I started to be a teacher on my own, I experienced that my joy in teaching resulted from learning what my students would share. Every group I taught on the same hand became a teacher for me. I realized that teaching is learning, and learning is teaching. There is no border between a person who teaches and a person who learns. When we add this thought to our idea of intuition it shows that all the skills we need to learn things are already within us. The idea I follow now is to ask why we do not open more spaces which allow intuitive learning as its main concept.

Which aspects do we have to change? And what does it require?

As many of us I grew up in an environment which described learning as a long and infinite way. There are two aspects I view as critical in this approach. The first is, that many of us are frequently remembered to just have started to learn, but as we proceed no one ever tells you when to succeed, which may cause frustration but also an ongoing orientation towards the future but not the present moment. The second thing is describing learning as a process in which people start and others are experienced we create hierarchies among humanity. 

Today we live in a world in which all our knowledge is gathered in the pockets of our pants. We can use our mobile phone in order to answer any question, whether it requests the amount of cells inside a body or how to build an electronic car. The last thing we need to learn is how to fill our brain with even more facts and knowledge. What our society yet leaks is to provide an approach towards intuition. Even young children do not experience anymore a playful relationship to their own body which should encourage us to dedicate our educational system in this direction. Experiencing the unknown allows the creation of new ideas in a free mind. 

How do I imagine intuitive learning?

In my teaching I first tell all my students that I actually have nothing I could really teach them. In contrast to that we all create a space in which impulses may shape new ideas. The real thing we learn is the interconnection between us learners and teachers. Failure is a part as compassionate learning requires the fall. There are many ways of moving towards a goal and every one of us needs to find his individual approach in there. I remember how frustrated I experienced the drawing classes in my therapy education.  I’ve never been skilled in drawing and trying to foster this only caused disappointment. One day I discovered finger paint. I took a huge blank poster and started painting. The movement which shaped the painting resulted from my belly, my feet and my hands as my body worked as a whole. I just did what I have done so many times before – I used my entire body to navigate myself over the surface of the poster. Yet, I wasn’t a drawer, but I’ve always been a great mover. This situation inspired me to ask my students always one question: What do you already know?” If we all ask ourselves, we will find all the answers we need. 

I imagine learning as a concept which does not require a certain outcome but allows the mind to freeflow in given material. Learning happens everywhere, we just have to be ready and see it. We are all experts of the unknown, equipped with all resources we need to move on. Anyone of us can become an expert while considering himself as a professional in beginning, which allows him to grow even stronger.  The most fruitful of this aspect is the active attitude towards learning, which is more encouraging than passive copy and paste of passed ideas. So better ask yourself right now!

the black and white of our feelings

“fear is bad and love is good!” – why taking our feeling out of the boxes could improve our understanding of life.

Go to a forest. Pick up a random piece of wood and look at it carefully. You will observe a unique texture, shaped by nature which is the result of a complex process in growing and adapting to a specific environment. This individual piece of wood does not exist a second time. Once you zoom out your micro perspective, you will be able to see an entire forest, composed by millions of individual pieces of woods and plants. This observation always taught me to understand how complex the world we live in actually is and how much energy it requires us to understand and listen to our environment.

In order to organize all the information in our brains, humans developed a strategy to simplify everything around us. We put our perception in categories. Therefore: a tree remains a tree, but seldom a tree which grows towards the sun, hiding smaller trees in his shadow or hosting a bird.

Putting things into categories helps us to simplify our lives, but it also makes us loose our focus and our awareness to allow individualism. A tree is a tree, but many of us would not take their time to carefully identify the uniqueness of a certain tree. Nowadays this is what we call ‘mindfulness’.

Beside nature there is something else most people would describe as “fuzzy” or sometimes hard to understand: feelings and emotions. All of us sometimes struggle with the outcomes of our inner processes and therefore book shops are packed with books teaching us on certain emotions and people go therapists in order to approach the unknown inside of their souls. The complexity of our emotions brings us to the point also to sort our feelings into categories. We usually use two different ones: good feelings and bad feelings.   

I learned about good and bad feelings in my early childhood. Education consisted concept of “you should not be angry” or “always be happy, otherwise no one will like you”. This kind of education is also gender based – men are supposed to hide sadness while girls should not deal with aggression. Our way of conceptualizing emotion provides the foundation for generations of humans who are taught to ignore one of their key instincts: basic emotion, such as sadness, anger or aggression. 

I observed the dissolving of the “bad feelings” becoming a trending movement in the past years. 

People attend classes in order to leave anger or sadness behind and there is a huge industry growing in order to promote infinite happiness and the distance from anger and grief. Many times I am confronted with people who try to tell me: “Look, I joined this course and then I lost all my aggression and my hate. And yes, I do love everybody.” Listening to these kinds of thoughts, I have the impression of talking to a robotic version of a human prototype, but not to a real person.

But imagine a world, in which no one would have any impact on someone else. You might be telling your best friend how someone fooled you and she would respond with a friendly smile. Are these the moments which create boundaries? Instead, I remember evenings after break-ups and failures, in which we sat together, drinking wine and gossiped endlessly about every boyfriend we ever had and will have. I remember situations in which I allowed my emotions of jealousy, aggression or sadness to take part of my actions – and my surrounding responded with compassion and openness towards my weaknesses. It is an amazing experience to be loved for your ‘bad parts’. If I would live in a world in which I could never have an impact on anyone with my feelings – I would feel useless. Feelings and emotion is a tool to communicate the insights of our heart, which is more honest than expressing our ratio.

We also have the tendency to work against feelings we judge as “bad”. These could be aggression or anger. I met people who take this challenge very serious which leads them to a point to ignore all the bad feelings someone ever experienced. I have one friend who truly says that he never practiced failure. According to him, his life was filled with happiness, loving parents, friends, health and a good education. All of this sounds lovely and should be everyone’s dream. Nevertheless – if I ask this person if he is happy about his life, he always mentions that there is something missing. This helped me to understand, that the ‘bad’ is a caring pathway towards reflection and learning.

I love to compare the feeling of my friend to the illusion of a life-long holiday. Imagine your life would only consist of free days, in which you always decide what to do. Sounds like a dream? Yes, but most of us would conclude, that we typically enjoy our free time, if we have worked before. That shows us – we need the bad in order to understand about the good and vice versa. Sometimes love needs to be taken away to show us how important it is. Sometimes we need to fail in order to change our perspective. Everything we judge as “bad feelings” can actually have a very positive impact on us. Our saddest moment allows us to learn about vulnerability. Moments of anger can guide us towards our wishes.

However we need to distinguish between actually having the feeling and about how much we allow them to take over our decisions. Dealing with controversial emotions in a compassionate way doesn’t mean that we are open and allowed to express them. Our fear of communicating ‘bad’ emotions also results from our bad experiences we have observing others expressing them in an inappropriate way. 

Most of us witnessed someone getting very aggressive and expressing himself by shouting or using any kind of violence. And these examples are always mentioned to teach us to delete aggression from our list of emotions. Still, most of the people who express aggression belong to those with the biggest troubles of accepting it. Aggression is a tool for many people to hide the current feeling of sadness or loneliness and therefore is not used correctly. Compared to that, someone who really feels angry and still is able to communicate his perception straight but not hurting, allows his environment to understand and correlate to him. 

In the end we all belong to the same species, able to express anger and love, grief and harmony. All of these are part of us and tools to orientate ourselves in this world. What would help us is to open up towards our so called bad sides and treat them with compassion and kindness. Maybe this is the pathway towards real happiness.

60 days in bed for science

Imagine tomorrow morning your alarm goes and – you just don’t get up, you stay in bed. Most people will be like: “awesome!!!” Imagine you do that for 60 days, and you’ll even get payed for that! Super awesome!!!!

This scenario is not a nerdy daydream, but real science - if you participate on a so called ‘bedrest study’.

Regarding the current study at the German Aerospace center, we have 12 people, staying in bed for about 60 days, head tilt down in a 6 degree angle to simulate zero gravity and the impact on their muscles.

The most interesting aspect for me is the psychological one: who is the person laying in that bed for 60 days?

The thing is: We can learn a lot from people living in extreme environments, because they teach you about the most important aspects in life. If it comes back to basic, you learn about things, you might forget in your everyday life.

yes or no – the question of autonomy

„Imagine your house is like a public space. Everyone can walk through and you have no power to prevent someone from it. I was afraid, it would be like this.“

What was the first the first thing I realized during our study? The fact, that each participant’s room started to transfer into a small and unique universe. People would hang up posters and pictures, and start to organize themselves in the rooms. I learned how important it is for everyone, to have your own space, to define privacy and decide about connection to a group or solitude. The main factor is, whether you have the possibility to decide about this or not.

“I thought about the astronauts who are stuck in the Soyuz for about two days in a really confined position. Compared to them, I have many possibilities to move.”

being bored!

Once I asked my participants what would motivate them to continue the study.  They said two things: 

First: the support of our team, conversations, consolations and more. I learned that wherever we go, we need people to join and go with us. 

Second: projects and small successes they would achieve every day, like conducting an experiment, learning a new language or designing a webpage. 

„Sometimes I feel bored.

  It‘s Saturday and you can‘t go out.  

  And whatever I do,

  I need much more time for it.

  Going to the bathroom

  becomes a planned action.

  On the other hand, I become

  aware about everything I do.“

perspective and hope

That brings us to our next point: every human being needs a perspective. One of my participants said:

“Being here, I imagined how life must be for someone who is really stuck in bed. Someone old, or sick. I mean, I can leave after two month. Knowing that, helps me a lot.”

We all live, because we have a hope, a dream or a goal we want to reach. What influences us, is our past, but what guides us, is our future. 

„I am looking forward to

  feel the rain on my skin.

  To enjoy the smell of

  fresh boiled coffee.

  To see colours and to listen to

  the sounds of the city.“

this is an outtake of a presentation @SpaceUpNL//october 2015