As we’ve recently been told, hearing is not listening. And now for chapter two, seeing is not noticing. In one of this weeks readings by Mason, J (2002) Researching your own practice; The discipline of noticing, Pg no. 29-37, the notion of noticing is orbited. Many of us become accustomed to our everyday surroundings and tend to not notice them the way we could. What Mason talks about is different layers of noticing, these are; noticing, marking and recording. He speaks about posture as being such a fundamental part of how we communicate.
Humans, from a very young age begin to develop an understanding of communication through posture and gestures before they learn a language. He speaks about the perplexities one can encounter if when the nature of posture, gestures and speech are mixed when communicating. Now, we have noticed this because we read it, now we have to mark it.
Included in the reading are exercises that we can do to make proper use of noticing the world we live in. One I particularly noticed , see what I did there, is the posture exercise. It goes like this, take something you enjoy and create a sentence out of it. Then, using multiple different postures and gestures, say the sentence you have chosen. Note how some sentences deploy a different message because of your posture and gestures.
Now it’s marked, we need to record it, understand why different messages are sent each time we shift posture. Communication is multi layered, when speaking with someone we are not only interpreting their spoken words, but their body language as well. So this is why our message changes when our posture or gestures do. Having such an advanced method of communicating is how we have evolved into the intelligent species we are today. Now that’s over I wonder, are there differences in the way we smell?