Human beings have an amazing ability to read subtle visual cues and predict where somebody is going to move.
Try this out:
The next time you're at the shopping mall or the supermarket find somebody who's walking towards you. Make sure that they're paying attention to you, even if only casually. Line yourself up like you normally would to pass them within a foot shoulder-to-shoulder. Now, here's the experiment... when you're about 10 feet away take one step out of alignment with your direction. Do it subtly. Just move your inner foot toward them a little bit. Or keep moving in the same direction with your feet but twist your torso towards them. Or move only your arms in their direction.
With some practice you'll find that you can change the direction that other people walk with very subtle changes in your own body language. It takes a while to learn your own body as other people see it, but once you do it can be quite entertaining on long outings to the mall.
The extreme example of body posture reading is when two people do that back-and-forth dance trying to get around each other and through a door before their conscious minds take over and give them pause.
The ability to predict movement was critical to our success as a species. We had to be able to guess where the tiger was going to jump... and if we didn't our genes didn't get to continue because we were a puddle of whimpering blood. This skill was hugely necessary when we lived in the wild.
In modern times the skill is much less necessary to survival. It helps us walk around in crowds, but it doesn't prevent us from dying very often, except for the occasional brush with traffic.
But we can transform this skill. We can apply it to sports and predict where the opponent will move next. Even more interestingly, we can apply it to things instead of people. Race car drivers predict where the car ahead of them will move. They do it using the same skill, but key off of different cues... the compression of the tires, the glint off of the rear windshield, etc. They adapt their skill.
I'm sure we use the skill in numerous other places too.
These days, we need the ability to predict the future on a different level. We need to be able to predict not the physical future, but the intellectual one. In business we need to be able to predict how our work mates and partners will react. In our love lives we need to be able to predict when our partner is interested in growing the relationship. When buying a car we have to be able to predict where the salesperson's lowest possible price is.
In the end, I'm constantly reminded throughout the day that modern life has only begun to shape our species... we're still mostly primitive... driven by basic survival instincts.
SufferFest 08 Day 4
