Yesterday I watched ‘The Fastest Gun Alive’ with Glen Ford. There was a very good , if out of place, dance sequence with Russ Tamblyn.
Perhaps now would be a good time to record my own contribution to the knowledge banks of Psychology. So to start could you imagine that you are Wyatt Earp about to draw your gun in Dodge city. Draw your gun fast and shoot and then hold it there. Now look at your gun and remember what you see.
Now imagine that you are flying a Lockheed Lightening jet around the room – off you go. Now freeze , remember the position. – and as Harry Hill would say , “and relax”.
Playing cowboys and Indians and flying a Lockheed Lightening dates my childhood terribly I know.
Think of the gun – had you extended the first one or two fingers like the barrel of a gun ? Or when you looked at your hand was your index finger curled around the trigger of an otherwise invisible gun, as mine always was.?
Think of the plane were your arms swepped back like the wings of a Lightening jet or was your aircraft, as mine was, totally invisible with your hands clasping an imaginary joystick.
I think there is a significant difference between the two modes of imagining.
Pointed, gun like fingers and swepped back wing like arms are signals to the world outside of the personal imagination whereas my way of doing it seems much more a ‘private world’. I wonder if there are two groups distinct groups in the populace displaying these characteristics.
5 comments:
oh, imaginary gun and imaginary joystick everytime...defo!
That..and gravitarse, too...a kindred spirit!
How do you mime a phone? Thumb sticking up little finger sticking down and the other fingers clenched...or simple holding the imaginary phone??? I know what my money is on..
I've given this some thought and I wonder if it's a girl/boy thing - because I would definitely make the gun with my hand/make wings with my arms. Becoming the gun or the plane requires imaginative empathy (which is more of a female characteristic), whereas remaining yourself (egotistical), while imagining the existence of the gun/joystick, requires a synthetic imagination - one empathises, the other creates. Just a theory.
Neutron - you are right but I would be wrong in that case because because miming is a form of communicating with the outside and so should use the best understood means.
Phiz - I don’t think it is a boy/girl thing , apart from anything else in a primary school playground of the 1950’s while we boys were evading a posse or a German fighter you girls were playing ‘mothers and fathers’ and wouldn’t have dreamed of shooting anybody or attacking them from out of the sun. (I feel I can safely say that as you are 6,000 miles away).
And it's only because I'm 6000 miles away that I'm not coming flying down there with my arms outstretched to gun you down with my extended index finger.
point taken
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