Personal Relationships to Knowledge: Dance, Art and Play

Thinking, note-taking, journaling, photography, listening, remembering, expressing.

Our interactions with the dynamic systems of knowledge, both without and within, are best thought of as art, play and performance within designer spaces (playgrounds, theaters and mini-worlds). We interact with our minds and brains in both direct and subtle ways to help design these spaces and the experiences, creativity, play and expression which occur in them.

Whenever we are interacting with knowledge, information, patterns and order (as a convenience let’s refer to these collectively, and inaccurately, as “knowledge”) we are engaging our minds in a system of relationships. The system includes external knowledge, internalized knowledge, our cognitive resources (attention, memory etc.).

At any moment we are engaged with a large number of channels (streams) of knowledge. Some arise outside of our minds. Some arise from internal processes. Some are ongoing dynamic systems of interactions between external and internal. We are aware of a fraction of these. When we interact with this knowledge our mental resources dynamically orient toward, flow into, unfold into, reflect, take on the shape of, recognize, reflect and imitate patterns of, change. Internally, all of these dynamics are supported, hosted and housed in a large family of cognitive states and processes. These underlying states and processes are usually changed by, informed and (in a sense) designed by the material they are processing. In other words the processes are usually dyonically changed by properties of what is being processes, how and when.

In broadest terms we are describing the things that take place at the active, dynamic and fusing interface between the two vast universes: internal and external.

Of the processes that we are aware of we can choose some to interact with in consciously directed and purposeful ways. When we do, we are creating moments of interactions. We are creating and designing the spaces in which our mental resources flow, unfold, take shape, animate and dance.

When we begin listening to a friend tell us about something happening in their lives our cognitive resources flow toward them. We remove them to some degree from what we might have been thinking about to attend to, understand, perceive and empathize. We try a little to put ourselves in their shoes: to imagine their world, their perspective and experience. We imagine, encode and communicate what they are telling us. In the theater of our minds a stage is assembled in which what they are telling us becomes dynamic, is acted out and performed. Our memory is engaged and informed by what we here. Our mental construct of who they are, what they are those around them are like is actively edited, formed and reformed.

Some of these interactions may be less readily understood in terms of the flow of cognitive resources with designer spaces. Let’s take notetaking. We may be physically listening to a lecture, a discussion or a meeting. In many ways we can see note-taking as a mechanical process of dictation – we want to accurately capture at least some parts accurately, to “get it down.”

Or, metaphorically, we can also be said to be “listening” when we create a note directly in a book, in notebook, record a dream, an experience, a memory. In these cases, we see note-taking as a form of active listening and it is more easy to think in terms of the flow of cognitive resources.  Like listening to our friend above, our cognitive resources flow toward these objects of attention. We create a space in our minds into which flow representation of the knowledge we are observing, the recalled information in our memory, the relationships to other structures and sources of related information. In this space the information convolves together, ramifies, integrates, unfolds, animates, associates and emerges into new things. The spaces allow them to interact in ways that give rise to a dynamic system in which the units of knowledge swirl together, combine, recombine, form, reform, associate, break apart and come together in new ways. The dynamic system flows, moves, … dances.