In this section, Noah Riskin shares how the framework for the class was developed.
The body is present as an object of study in many academic fields, such as biomechanics and robotics, but it goes all but unrecognized as a fundamentally important dimension of our individual and collective experience as human beings. This is unfortunate because what we know about the world, individually and collectively—including in the most advanced arenas of science—really begins with our physical experience. It’s the human body functioning in different contexts that gives rise to our concepts of space and time and the most elaborate ideas about the structure of the world and our place in it. More, the level of physical intelligence we possess, e.g., our ability to notice and respond to a nuanced range of bodily perceptions, signals and cues, is fundamentally important to social cognition, such as when we self-referentially infer the intentions and behavior of other people.
This course is about providing an educational opportunity honoring this reality to help students—especially those who don’t have a very strong relationship to their physical experience—find points of access to it. One half of the course is devoted to learning about the concepts underlying our bodily experiences (e.g., our relationship to gravity not only influences our morphology and movement patterns, but our thinking and language: “being on cloud nine” or “feeling low”). The other half of the class is experiential. The experiential component is not specifically about athletics or fitness; it’s about physically experiencing how our bodies shape our understanding of the world to help students make connections between their cognitive strengths and the physical and social dimensions of their lives. After all, working with the body is working with the brain.
The underlying framework for this course was developed several years ago when I developed and ran the physical intelligence initiative at MIT. During this time I worked with students and researchers from a range of academic areas to help them learn how our bodily experience applied to their area of study. A few faculty members noted that the work I was doing with undergraduates seemed to make a great difference in the lives of their students who faced challenges in a physical and/or social realm. Together we submitted a proposal to the Simons Center for the Social Brain to develop a curriculum (the one for ES.S71) that would serve as a means of intervention for students on the autism spectrum at MIT. Using whole-body exercises and innovative activities coupled with mini-seminars, the curriculum was designed to improve bodily awareness by coaxing the powers of concentration, creative insight and problem-solving that many young MIT minds possess into a bodily realm to better integrate mind and body as a single, reciprocal system.
Thanks to a Simons Center seed grant, we devised a pilot study to test whether or not the curriculum might make a difference with some of the physical and social challenges students face. Our results showed that the students made modest gains in physical proficiency and marked gains in bodily awareness, both of which had a discernable impact on their MIT experience and lives. This kind of study and curriculum is important because, culturally, we tend to think of the body as less sophisticated and less important than the mind. We need to reframe how we imagine the profundity of the fact that we’re physical beings in a physical world, i.e., exquisitely attuned and highly evolved organisms. We also fail to understand that we’re doing students a disservice if we’re not working with the whole person in a transparent and engaging way. Along with this new perspective comes the need to rethink how we’re educationally nurturing to meet the needs of students with physical and social challenges so that they can thrive, at MIT and beyond. The curriculum for ES.S71 is one way to begin supporting all students in a more holistic way, as this quote by one of the students involved suggests:
“It wasn’t until the end that I realized that there was something greater that Noah was trying to get at. It’s not something that you feel everyday, like you’re sad or sick—an experience you’re used to. It’s, like, something crazy, like someone who experiences an out-of-body experience. But, this is as if, like, it’s an inner body experience. It’s odd because we live in our bodies our entire lives, even before we were born. But, we don’t even appreciate or question what the concept of a body is. And, it’s an experience that Noah has been trying to explain. It’s something that we have to experience on our own. I think this is why we did such crazy things. It’s something that you are forced to feel so that you can finally experience what it’s like to live in a body or what it means have a body. And, I think that everyone should experience and appreciate their body. It’s like when humans first went to the moon or to space and experienced for the first time how beautiful and how captivating the earth is. I feel like it’s almost the same experience, where we, like, experience how beautiful and, like, all the things our own body can do. So, it’s, like, appreciating where and what we live in, and, I feel like everyone should have this experience.”
