Knowing Without Learning
On learning something I can do but can't explain.
Recently in my dance we’ve been working on this idea that one can do a thing, or know it, without “learning” it in the stereotypical sense. This may seem obvious. It is not a new idea. Plato and Aristotle argued about it. The psychologist Arthur Reber coined the term “implicit learning” in 1967. You don’t teach a baby how to walk or a child how to catch. They figure it out. This is intuitive to us in hindsight. Yet, if I asked you to go learn a skill of any kind, odds are you’d default to studying it like a textbook. You would break it down into steps, attempt to name it, maybe even make flashcards, and learn it piece by piece. All this despite knowing that it may not be the best way for you to learn the thing.
This is in part because an environment that enables this kind of learning often requires someone else’s help. Parents create a safe home for babies to experiment with movement. Coaches build practices around players learning split-second complex behavior. My teachers simply ask me to do a thing that defies words, often by showing me, and then give feedback. Tacit learning requires a context that lets us find the thing and/or a feedback mechanism for when we’re getting closer or farther away.
But this gets more interesting when we start using it on purpose and taking it another level down. My teachers have started teaching me things by having Teacher-A do something very close to me while still not touching. This is so that I can feel what they’re experiencing in their own body as much as possible. Then I replicate. It’s borderline mystical. It is not known or thought about. It’s not even really ‘felt’ by definition. Because to name your feeling requires that you think about and label it. Instead, I inhabit the experience without evaluating it. Then I do, and through the doing, I know.
A few weeks ago, my teacher stood close enough for me to feel their body heat and danced. The assignment was literally “now dance how [they] felt in [their] body”. Then I did it. I couldn’t tell you what “it” was. I still can’t. Did I learn anything?
A week later, I did it again.