The Tango-L mailing list archive
Digest from 22 Jan 2000
to 23 Jan 2000
Reply-To: Discussion of Any Aspect of the Argentine Tango <TANGO-L @MITVMA.MIT.EDU>
To: Recipients of TANGO-L digests <TANGO-L @MITVMA.MIT.EDU>
Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 03:00:10 -0500
Sender: Discussion of Any Aspect of the Argentine Tango <TANGO-L @MITVMA.MIT.EDU>
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Subject: TANGO-L Digest - 22 Jan 2000 to 23 Jan 2000 (#2000-22)
There are 4 messages totalling 170 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. Any Milongas in Aix les Bains (France)
2. Long Quotes
3. Thinking and Feeling
4. Thinking and Feeling (and inner tango)
Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 04:45:48 -0000
From: Di Terlizzi Flavio <belluno @IPSNET.IT>
Subject: Any Milongas in Aix les Bains (France)
As next month probably I 'll be for the week-end in Aix -les- Bains
(France), is there anyone that can tell me about any Milongas
or possibilities to practice Tango in that town or in the neighbourood?
Thank you in advance
Flavio
Visit my web-site at: http://planetall.homestead.com/tangotorino/index.html
Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 20:12:08 +0000
From: Larry Carroll <larrydla @JUNO.COM>
Subject: Re: Long Quotes
I wrote
>It's very thoughtless to include long quotes in your email
>of messages we've already received. Please don't do it again.
I got two replies:
>Even more thoughtless, to chastise someone publicly.
>You could have sent your thoughts to [X] alone, as I do now.
>It's very thoughtless of you to send this to the list and not the
>offender in private e-mail ;).
Normally I do send private email messages. However, this was an
especially thoughtless example: not just one but several long
quotes. Further, there have been a lot of such long quotes lately.
It's about time to deal with this issue publicly, rather than
piecemeal.
Larry
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Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 20:38:35 +0000
From: Larry Carroll <larrydla @JUNO.COM>
Subject: Thinking and Feeling
Some of the disagreement in this discussion comes from using
"thinking" in several different ways.
Often when we say "thinking" we mean conscious, analytical
thinking. This kind of thought is most useful when LEARNING to dance
(or fight, play music, speak, etc.). Breaking complex activities
into simple parts lets us master the activities quicker, making them
less confusing. It also lets us work intensively on individual parts
without the competition of all the other parts, much as a body builder
will concentrate on one muscle or muscle-group at a time.
When DOING an activity, however, this kind of thinking can get in the
way, rather like the caterpillar that couldn't walk when it thought
about what it was doing. That's because analytical, logical thinking
can only handle about 7 plus or minus 2 individual concepts at once.
And this kind of thought is primarily serial: one-thing-at-a-time.
It's best used to handle very high-level issues, not low-level ones.
Actually dancing (as opposed to practicing) mostly uses creative
thought, synthesizing all one's learning -- including emotional &
social & esthetic as well as physical learning -- into a seamless
whole. It's no less thinking, but it's primarily unconscious, & it's
a highly parallel process. Many dozens (or even thousands) of
problems are being solved all at the same time.
There's also a THIRD kind of thinking that's needed when doing
something, called conation or decision-making. It works by producing a
vector sum. That is, we decide something by adding dozens of competing
considerations. We're tired but exhilirated but hungry but a little
hung-over. We like someone's personality but consider them physically
unattractive but fear their husband but think they might help get us
promoted. All these considerations pull or push us in many different
directions in a multi-dimensional decision space.
Decision-making, like creativity, is a parallel & mostly unconsious
thought process, usually producing a decision in an instant, so fast
that we rarely have any idea why we really made that decision. (Though
if asked we'll usually come up with a reason -- or two. One of them is
the publically acceptable. The second is the secret REAL one we only
admit to ourself. And we come up with these two rationalizations so
quickly that we actually think they are the ONLY considerations.)
Nor are these three kinds of thought the only kinds. There seem to
be separate processes each for esthetic, emotional, social thought.
That is, things like CAT scans show different parts of the brain being
used in each, or the same parts used in different ways.
So the next time you use the word "thinking" you might want to be at
least a tiny bit more specific about what KIND of thinking you mean!
Larry de Los Angeles
http://home.att.net/~larrydla
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Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2000 21:59:55 -0800
From: Jonathan Thornton <jnt @EFN.ORG>
Subject: Re: Thinking and Feeling (and inner tango)
On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Larry Carroll wrote:
> Some of the disagreement in this discussion comes from using
> "thinking" in several different ways.
Participants in the discussion have also argued about the word
"feeling". Often not noticing that they were using different definitions
for the word. Feeling can refer to emotions, to the physical senses of
touch and kinesthetic of muscle movement etc., as well as a synonym for
intuition, or educated guess.
English has a confusing array of multiple definitions for these
words, and I hazard that science has a long way to go before we can
sort out internal verbalization and visualization and the various sensory
and motor functions of the nervous system.
In his book INNER TENNIS, Random House 1976, Timothy Gallwey uses
the concepts of Self 1 and Self 2. Self 1 refers to the inner dialogue
that uses words and abstract concepts and judgements to order life. Self 2
refers to the sensory motor system. Gallwey finds that Self 1's
instruction are often an impediment to learning to play tennis well, and
his method tries to distract and bypass it in order to allow Self 2 to
experience the effects of its actions and modify them to produce more
effective results. Self 2 could also refer to functioning with the
feedback of actual sensory awareness so that one notices the actual
effects of what one is doing, rather than pursuing a constructed
conceptual model which is likely to be flawed in one more important ways.
If I wanted to learn tennis I would like to have Gallwey as my
teacher. I am struggling with trying to find ways to apply his learning
approach to tango. If anyone on this list has ideas, or is interested in
"inner tango" I would appreciate hearing from you, either on the list or
by private email.
Thank you,
Jonathan Thornton
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End of TANGO-L Digest - 22 Jan 2000 to 23 Jan 2000 (#2000-22)
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