Working in Movement

I was going to write this yesterday, but I didn't get around to it. Procrastination. Again.

How to cope with it? Just Do It as they say in those shoe ads. Actually the article referred to tackles a particular type of procrastination; writer's block. There were two ideas that caught my interest.

One was a reference to the work of Yerkes and Dodson, two Harvard psychology professors working in the early 1900's. They found that ''both very low and very high levels of arousal interfere with performance.'' This seems related to the Weber-Fechner effect that we see in movement education work. Namely, the ability to perceive differences in physical sensations like weight and effort depends on the ratio of stimulus present. If you're lifting a 50 pound weight and a fly lands on it, you probably wouldn't notice the difference. But adding a 10 pound weight would certainly get your attention. So, in movement work, we generally try to increase sensitivity by decreasing effort. Otherwise, how can changes be detected and then selected? So, if you're trying too hard to perform some activity, or barely trying, it's going to interfere with performance. And procrastination.

The other idea was a home-grown cure for procrastination along these lines, and loosely related to something I wrote about in Letting Go of Memories. The cure is simple: invent a larger task than the one you want to do. The idea is you'll procrastinate on this larger project by distracting yourself with the smaller one. This is not exactly related to the "try to forget what you want to remember" idea, but the idea of setting up a paradox is still interesting.

Unless you forget to procrastinate, I guess.