Abstract
This final chapter, before concluding, takes us to the intra-individual level and considers the ways in which embodied moves connect to psychological ones. The examples of mind wandering, wonder and acts of imagination as looping in and out of the here and now are offered to support the general claim that mobility leads to psychological development through the exploration of the possible.
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Notes
- 1.
For more details about the use of subjective cameras as part of a Subjective Evidence-Based Etnography (SEBE) of creative action, see Glăveanu and Lahlou (2012).
- 2.
At the time, these small recording devices had to be tailor-made at the London School of Economics. Today, there are many commercial versions used for leisure activities, for example Tobii Pro Glasses.
- 3.
Glăveanu (2015, p. 174).
- 4.
Again, in his words, “Now I am analysing the way I work because you are telling me the way I am working so I am thinking to myself ‘maybe I should wait more before I continue’ because I might have done something at that point [that] when I am standing back I can say ‘I like that’ but I missed it because I haven’t stood back and looked at it. (…) It’s been very interesting for me because listening to your comments has made me analyse the way I work more and possibly your comments might change the way that I work” (in Glăveanu 2015, p. 175).
- 5.
And, thus, overcome the famous ‘Cartesian split’. Descartes, the founding figure of modern philosophy, distinguished between mind and body two types of ‘substances’ (see Descartes 1984/1644). The former is characterised by its extension in space (res extensa), while the latter captures the essence of human as thinking beings (res cogitans). For as inspiring as it was to proclaim that we can only be sure that we are thinking beings (cogitans ergo sum), Descartes' radical dualism between mind and body created a deep divide in our thinking about both and reverberated into a series of other domains such as education, work, politics, and so on. For mobility scholars in particular, this distinction poses a serious challenge.
- 6.
Piaget (1972).
- 7.
Callard et al. (2013).
- 8.
Lai and Arthur (2003).
- 9.
Where we can find titles such as ‘A wandering mind is an unhappy mind’ (Killingsworth and Gilbert 2010).
- 10.
And there are some laboratory findings that link mind-wandering with reduced task performance, especially when the participants lack meta-consciousness of what they are doing (see McVay et al. 2009).
- 11.
For more details see Mooneyham and Schooler (2013).
- 12.
Mooneyham and Schooler (2013, p. 16).
- 13.
And illustrated by titles such as ‘Not all minds that wander are lost’ (Smallwood and Andrews-Hanna 2013).
- 14.
See Gillespie and Zittoun (2013).
- 15.
‘Bodies move within society, accumulating societally patterned experiences, which in turn provide the resources for cultural and fictional experiences. These cultural and fictional experiences are also characterized by movement; the movement of the mind between differentiated experiences; and the narrative structure, just like the structure of an institution, also provides the mechanism for integrating these experiences and perspectives into a meaningful whole’ (Gillespie and Zittoun 2013, p. 528).
- 16.
See Zittoun and Gillespie (2015).
- 17.
“‘Proximal experiences” are primarily anchored in the experiencing body, in a given here-and-now moment, and take place in the paramount reality: they take place there where one is physically located, and that location (the material and social setting) demands attention and impinges upon the senses. (…) “Distal experiences”, in contrast, include all the experiences which transport our experience out of the immediate setting, to the past, to the future, to abstraction or to worlds of science fiction. In distal experiences, people can explore events independently of their bodily location, beyond the laws of time and space, and also, independently of logic and causality. Distal experiences are relatively independent from material constraints’ (Zittoun and Gillespie 2015, p. 9).
- 18.
See, for instance, Edwards (2000).
- 19.
See also the psychology of conduct of Pietter Janet (1938).
- 20.
Wertsch (1998, p. 24).
- 21.
For details, see Mead’s influential ‘Mind, self and society’ (Mead 1934).
- 22.
- 23.
‘The self is something which has a development; it is not there, at birth, but arises in the process of social experience and activity, that is, develops in the given individual as a result of his relations to that process as a whole and to other individuals within that process’ (Mead 1934, p. 135).
- 24.
For more on the development of the self through play and games see Gillespie (2006b).
- 25.
Just like our imagination is embodied. For example, there are well documented relations between imagining movement and muscular activity; see Guillot et al. (2012).
- 26.
For details, see Gillespie and Martin (2014).
- 27.
- 28.
See Martin and Gillespie (2010).
- 29.
‘All organisms are in a perspectival relation to their environment (Mead 1932). Mead describes how grass is food in relation to the stomach of the cow, how places reverberate with the smell of recent goings on in relation to the finely tuned olfactory capability of a dog, and how a wooden table is food in relation to the woodworm. In each such case, the organism is not only in a perspectival relation to the world, but, trapped in such a relation. The cow cannot see the grass as anything but food. Humans, on the other hand, are at the intersection of more perspectives and accordingly are more able to distanciate from any one perspective. Indeed, humans, are unique in the extent to which they can distanciate from any one perspectival relation to the world, and this, Mead argues, is the basis of human agency’ (Martin and Gillespie 2010, p. 256).
- 30.
For more details, see Glăveanu (2015).
- 31.
See Glăveanu (2019b).
- 32.
See Glăveanu (2020).
- 33.
‘We can think of wonder as frozen paralysis, but also as restless vacillation’ (Llyod 2018, p. 16).
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Glăveanu, V.P. (2020). Wandering Minds. In: Mobilities and Human Possibility. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52082-3_6
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