Math, Ballet, and Affinity
By Peter LloydWhile teaching physics at Kenyon College, science fiction author Catherine Asaro heard one of her physics students complain, “I’d really like to do physics, but I know girls don’t have as good spatial perception.” Let me try to help shut down that nonsense, with Catherine’s help, right now.
Asaro and her student were also taking ballet classes at Kenyon, so Catherine asked her classmate about her final ballet exam. She learned that her reluctant physics student was choreographing a three- to four-minute piece for eight dancers. “I wish my physics majors had that good of spatial perception,” Catherine replied.
In the Big Think video, How Ballet Is Like Math, Asaro observes that dancers and athletes have to possess keen spatial perception, which she says, “translates very easily into physics... Everything we do in an exercise, for example, at the barre, is an algorithm.”
Dancers have to learn, not only how to execute complex patterns beautifully. They have to learn them quickly, be able to reverse them, and be ready in rehearsals to start from any point in the work. “That means you’re incorporating not only the spatial perception aspects, but the ability to quickly see and make patterns or algorithms in your mind.”
So what made the dancing physics student think she lacked spacial perception?
The cage of affinity. It’s the cage of context that aligns your thinking with those groups to which you belong. Your nationality, regional location, ethnic identity, religious and political affiliations, and in this case, the physics student’s gender, limit creative thinking. Why else would Catherine Asaro have to remind a ballet dancer of her keen spacial perception?
While your affiliations give you valuable support and many of the resources necessary for productive work, success, and survival, they also tend to enclose your thinking in a kind of cage. Women like Asaro’s student need to be reminded of the abilities they possess, only because they’ve been convinced that people in the group that includes them lack those abilities.
When solving problems, you can’t help but bring with you the prejudices of your affinities. But if you keep in mind how they limit you, you can use them rather than the other way around.
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.