Muscle memory, structural coupling and personal development in relation to systems change.
I recently had an insight. Or not so much an insight as a realisation. It feels obvious now, after the fact, but then I’ve never actually seen it as clearly before. So I’m testing this hypothesis, documenting my realisation, hoping that it will stir something in you, give you something. Preferably that it will make you want to help me work it out. This is more like a draft thought than a fully formed one. A curious exploration. Thanks for making it with me.
I’m on a journey of self discovery and self development (as so many of us seem to be these days). This journey has taken me deep into myself and many podcast holes lately. I’m deeply inspired by the meta-modern community, the game B folks, some system thinkers and complexity sciences as well as cognitive sciences. I love this space and my passion in all this is to try to work out how to make it operationalisable. I’m not necessarily the big thinker of novel thoughts. I am rather a synthesist of new ways to operate. My passion at the moment is:
How do we download all these pretty words and big ideas into the human operating system so that we can actually get around to changing the world?
Ok so that’s me setting up the general context. Here’s some more specific context.
One of the things I do in this exploration is being part of a community called World of Wisdom where we aim to playfully co-create the world. Curiously exploring new ideas with the ambition of getting you to act upon whatever you found during that exploration. It’s simple yet powerful. In a context related to this, I was trying to figure out a way to tell my story in a nice, streamlined way. I was trying to show how I had gone from not knowing to knowing, to show people reading my story that I have some answers, that I come bearing gifts, that it makes sense that I coach and advise people. My story telling wasn’t going well. Instead, I was struggling.
During the same period, I was in the daily video meeting frenzy that my current everyday life consist of, and for some reason telling my story there was not hard at all. It seems most of the people I was talking to was impressed to some degree, no resemblance of doubt in my competence or capacity to help. Not only that, whatever block I was struggling with in my writing exercise was just simply not there. I could clearly communicate my experiences and what those had taught me.
Later that day, as my two daughters were painting and creating art in the study, I sat down by the piano and played through some songs. Some new ones and some that I have been singing for a long time, songs that I was singing when I was learning to sing, finding my voice. I noticed something: singing the new songs was easy. I was hitting the high notes, my voice was unconstrained and free with full control, my breath full and powerful. When I went for the old stuff, I struggled where I had always been struggling. Not quite hitting the high notes, or finding the cadence and depth in my breath. I could not help but feel that these two things were related.
Stepping into the kitchen to prepare lunch for my girls I got struck with a word, it just popped into my head: muscle memory.
Wikipedia says that muscle memory is (in Dec 2020): “When a movement is repeated over time, a long-term muscle memory is created for that task, eventually allowing it to be performed with little to no conscious effort. This process decreases the need for attention and creates maximum efficiency within the motor and memory systems.”
The implication is clear, when we have learned something it becomes automated and we loose sight of the process by which it is being reproduced. For instance in in my singing I had already programmed myself from endless repetition with the songs I learned way back when. As I started singing them again I couldn’t access my new learnings. Instead of singing it, letting it flow, I was acting out my programming. No matter how much better I had got or how much better my technique is now I seemed to be unable to access that when I unconsciously just recalled my old programming. All that might be obvious to some of you, however what I had not seen it quite that clearly before.
I also caught sight of it in relation to me trying to craft my story. Starting from the beginning landed me back in old thought, unprocessed trauma and old patterns. I was stuck in the failures and lost access to my new and improved self. The process and insights that I have recently discovered. When I was telling my story in video meetings, I tailored it to the context, playing with different starting points and emphasis. Doing that changed the entire story. It opened me up to new perspectives to my own lived experience. I was recreating it in the context I was in. Getting into the story midway or starting in my current motivation — to work for a collective human development — gave me access to my relatively new found capacities and abundance mindset. From that vantage point I could clearly see what I had learned from my previous failures and what my gifts were to those around me now. Writing it there was no context other than that of my head and without realising it I fell victim to my conditioned mind.
So much of what I see in the world is just that, re-enacting of old programmes. Even though we actually already know better — the muscle memory does not allow us access it.
This is conveyed in a different way in F.Capra’s language “The living system brings forth a world in the act of living, organising itself. Nothing else exists.” The world is that which we see, nothing more nothing less. It is reproduced through the disturbances a system is subjected to (the sensory input) and it is equally dependent on the individual frame of mind, interacting with it. A system in this case could very well be a human being as well as an ecosystem — any self-organising, auto-poetic system.
Levelling up, participating in new contexts, learning new things and practices is all good and well, but as long as we do not direct part of that towards the past — i.e. the thoughts we are already identified with, that which we already ‘know’ to be true —or hack the process, it will not necessarily allow us to actually become that better version of ourselves that we sometimes get a glimpse of. To revert to my operating system metaphor and put in different language.
I have for my own mind drawn the analogy of human development as upgrading the operating system. What I had not fully realised is that there is such a big difference between an upgrade and a clean install.
To look at this from an additional perspective and really underline that this also makes biological sense I would like to bring in Fritjof Capra again and his “Systems view of life”. One of the key biological concepts in learning is structural coupling. It basically means that every interaction with the world leaves an actual physical trace in our mind and body. Every memory created is an actual reconnection and rewiring of the goo that we call our brains. Every sensory input is a restructuring of the nervous system. That means that the reason for a system (a human for instance) reacting differently to stimulus at different times is because the system has physically changed since the last disturbance — it has learned. This has deep implications. Changing oneself or ones behaviour means actually physically rewiring your body. It would also mean that even if we rewire the outer layers with new experiences and new ways of being, we are still stuck with our deep programming or deep code. Unless we find ways of unveiling our deep programming and reprogramming it or unlearning that which we have already learned, we are not fundamentally changing our automated behaviour. We need to find a method for breaking the automaticity of thought and getting that innate sense of meta awareness in every waking moment. Or create processes or scaffolding that allows us to access our new knowledge more often so that it becomes the pathway reinforced by our “muscle memory”.
While I am writing this it dawns on me the arrogance in imagining that I can ever easily re-program my whole system and rewire these synapses through superficial changes to my behaviour. It is likely a task fit for careful, conscious contemplation for a large part of the rest of my life as long as I am focusing on changing the things themselves. Ironically I have a sense that I have better things to do, like acting from my newfound clarity and be a small cog in the large wheels that are unrelentlessly pushing us towards either systems change or system collapse.
There also seems to be a path here where we can keep on practicing through doing. Instead of focusing on the things and changing them we can re-invent the process of discovery.
If we can find consistent new ways of accessing the information that we are trying to retrieve, we can recouple ourselves as we go — re-learning by doing.
Writing these lines I get a cascade of insights. Could this perhaps be what I have heard from indigenous thinkers when they describe their wisdom/knowledge centered around method, around the how rather than the thing itself? What Nora Bateson means by saying that we have to get over our stories and learn to live the questions beneath the stories? What John Verveake is pointing towards with his theory that relevance realisation (rather than relevance itself) is at the center of our cognitive processing? What Fritjof Capra means by saying that life is metabolism, it is chemical imbalance that finds structural stability yet it requires the imbalance to keep a consistent flow of energy through the system? Is this how I am supposed to understand the statement that life is no thing, it’t simply process?
If we can cultivate an ability to make the process by which we are knowing salient that would allow us to short circuit the automatic re-enacting of old programming. Entering into the story from a different starting point if you will, this allows us to tell the story in a completely new way. Without being lead astray by the thoughts we were already identified with before we had arrived where we currently are. It could also allow us to access more ways of knowing. In Krishnamurtis language (if that is familiar) it would mean access to intelligence — that which is just present and perceiving, not confused by thought.
I personally love Verveake’s four ways of knowing: propositional, participatory, procedural and perspectival. Bear with me as I am trying on my insight in that framework. What I am proposing here is some sort of perspectival knowing in relation to oneself. The ability to reframe my old experience in my new self’s language, emotions and interpretation capabilities. Challenging and stepping beyond my initial interpretation. That requires quite a lot of practice however, probably some sort of mindfulness meditation or other rigours study of the mind. It will hopefully ultimately make some of the otherwise implicit processing salient — like different physical manifestations of thoughts. An ability to notice the process allows us also notice that which is participating. Does a thought bring you into the stomach, or the throat, or makes you tense up? What is that physical sensation telling you? On a side note: I have recently been speaking with entrepreneurs on how to support them in their mission to change the world, several of them have expressed how the most stressful times have been embedded in their body, in the worst cases making them sick. I think that might be true for other people too, not just entrepreneurs.
If we lower the bar somewhat and do not expect all of us to become expert meditators instantly, a shortcut could be to design a robust process by which we do this. In Verveake’s framework it would be accessing the insight through the procedural knowing. If we can access the perspectival and participatory clues through our procedure that can potentially bring us significantly further in accessing ways of reframing and deepening the propositional knowing. Or in other words it might allow us to break the circular automaticity of thought, unlocking new perspectives by simply changing the starting point through which we access our knowing. Changing our frame of mind we are changing the knowledge itself.
A robust process for entering into the discussion is important but not sufficient in my experience. We have to complete it with the ability or method for holding uncertainty or staying curious, for being truly ‘not knowing’.
I would like to zero in on the curiosity, as that is the word I tend to hear a lot these days. Here is my take on curiosity that is sometimes overlooked:
One cannot be curious from a place of knowing.
As soon as I have an answer there is no more curiosity. To me curiosity is defined by finding more and deeper questions as the result of each piece of knowing we are able to attain.
Staying in the questions is hard. My own misconception was that, as long as we are asking questions nothing is getting done. That was my excuse for stepping out of curiosity and into knowing. I write misconception because I was stuck in thinking that the only way to ask questions was from the propositional knowing.
What I discovered in my work with World of Wisdom is that if we ask and explore questions through participation rather than proposition, that give us an enormous capacity for testing and experimenting and doing without ever leaving the curious, not-knowing mind.
Another part that has helped me stay in uncertainty is an increased focus on the procedural, the process, the how. My capacity for refraining from answering questions grows as I commit to a pre-decided process. I got one of the better hacks from a friend of mine, Mayra Kapteyn at INK, she aptly labeled the uncertainty “the Fog” in an upcoming podcast on innovation (World of wisdom podcast). I felt it first hand, the stress of not knowing decreased significantly by putting a label to it and making not knowing ok, we were actually exactly where were supposed to be at this time, i.e. in “the fog”. I would say labelling is a form of procedure or scaffolding. It calms the brain by calling the space in between by a name — at least we know where we are even if that ‘where’ is full of confusion for the time being.
When you cannot see, you have to rely on your sensory capacity to piece together as much of the world as you possibly can. Hopefully there are people there with you. If you can communicate well, you can source their sensory data and enhance your understanding.
Using communications as a tool for explicit-making (making sure that as much as possible of what is visible is actually also seen by all the members of a group), to test ones ideas and reading the landscape with the full sensory and processing capacity of the whole group is a critical skill when manoeuvring in “the fog”.
The final part of the insight that I would like to underline feels like kicking in an open door at this point; this process of discovery through remaining curious is inherently collective. It can theoretically be done by an individual but it will be greatly enhanced if it is done by a group of individuals. If we have a well designed process of sourcing the input from all the participants and enough of a common language to understand each other, that will create the conditions required for true emergence — to me that means an outcome that was generated in the process that did not exist before the process begun (think of the potential (!) if more actions originated in this space…).
To circle back to where we started and to try to operationalise this. Since we cannot control for individuals own state or developmental stage, and doing these processes well requires quite a lot in both those regards, we need to take a different approach. If we are aware of the concept of “mental muscle memory” that will unlock a capacity for almost anyone to participate in emergent processes and complex ideation by going through a process. First and foremost focusing on creating a conducive, calm and open state of mind. This is the focal point on which everything else hinges. Then allowing the group to share experiences and thoughts using for instance active listening techniques with the ambition of making the knowledge both visible and seen to all group members. If the space we are holding is big enough and we have been able to generated trust, it will allow us to access intelligence rather than thought, in other words to fully access the groups potential as a whole, not as separate parts. After entering that space, we can go into almost anyone of the many conventional processes for ideation or problem discovery / solving and still keep the sense of wonder which will allow us to reach deeper, curious co-exploration. If we make the space stable enough we might even get to co-creation.
So how does it relate to systems change? The way that I see that, expressed in somewhat more complex language. If we can cultivate and establish the humility and responsibility that true curiosity requires in combination with a meta-awareness of how our relevance realisation process takes place as the very center of the culturally desirable currency. Motivating the population that has the capacity for it, to strive for creating those spaces, using processes as scaffolding for creating these types of spaces in different context. I am hoping we can then leverage the socialised minds (Kegan 3’s, if you will) to mimetically adopt these traits and hence levelling up the entire group. If I’m right that would unlock a potential for any group to access emergence and co-creation. Given what I have seen from my work, I think once people have participated in such contexts, that sparks a desire to re-enter those collective states.
If we expose a part of the population to these states we could cultivate “muscle memory” for how to enter into co-creative, emergent states, regardless of the individuals’ capacity to reach them on their own.
This shifts the focus from a thing like adult development, joining a specific community or abandoning everything you think is real to helping people feeling better in whatever they are currently doing. Counting on that shift of method to generate a feedback loop that will gradually allow us to actually be. I believe that is the key to setting us up for complexification, i.e. allowing the system to transcend its current imbalance, rather than collapse in this coming paradigm shift.