You Move I Move

Several days ago I filled an afternoon with a thrilling compilation of Ted Talks. For those of you who may not know what those are prepare yourself to be amazed. TED can loosely be defined as an ideas showcase in which the worlds best and brightest present topics they are experts on. TED stands for technology, entertainment and design, but the subjects covered far extend this original framework. From the intense to the obscure, the entertaining to educational I promise that an afternoon with TED will leave you more conscious about the world you live in....

I recently watched a TED talk with Steven Strogatz. Steven is a mathematician and biologist who researches ways in which mathematics and biology intersect. His TED topic of discussion was synchronization and how creatures seem to take pleasure in synchronization void of being told to do so. This means that in nature creatures tend to synchronize without intention and in doing so share some sort of collective peace and pleasure. I thought the topic was interesting and his talk was well done (as all TED talks are), but I didn't think much more about it after the fact. That was until today....

I have been battling a credit card/debit card cluster fuck of an ordeal that has left me penniless and hungry for the better part of a week now. In doing so I have found activities that are free to keep me engaged in society. Today's free activity was people watching on the main street in Lund. There is a pedestrian mall where people seem to stroll all day from one end to the other. The street is only a few blocks long but it always seems to have people wandering its length. I sat in the middle of the street for a bit on a small bench in front of a 7-11. I hadn't sat there for more than 5 minutes and Steven's talk about sync hit me like a two ton truck. People were moving in exactly the same fashion. Their movements were in symbios with one another. The pace of their steps and the movement of their feet were identical. Now, I know what you're thinking...so what...people are not too different from one another and therefore they walk similar, and the fact that they are walking similar is not a coincidence at all, in fact, it’s the way you would expect it to be so what’s the point.....

Here is what is interesting. The movements of the people were manufactured. They were unnatural ways of walking. The typical person when walking walks with their head in one of two positions (typically)....head facing forward, eyes basically straight ahead, or their head at a small downward angle viewing the ground in front of them. This leaves our weight distributed in a equal manner across our feet and creates a solid base. Watch people on an icy day in the winter....you will never see anyone walking with their eyes to the sky...it would be suicide to do so...walking with your eyes looking up at the sky shifts the weight of our bodies on to the heels of our feet rather than keeping our weight over the balls of our feet which is more stable and reactive (especially on ice). A less exaggerated version of how we walk on an icy day is how we walk everyday. These people on the main street weren't walking like we typically walk. They were walking as though they were snubbing their nose at society. They had their heads at a small upward tilt looking at the world around them. Their pace took on a slower movement and their gate moved more in a sashaying side to side manner rather than a forward one foot in front of the other movement. Ok, so what right...these were holiday shoppers out for a stroll.....right?

I decided that I wanted to split the street up into three parts. An entrance, the middle, and an exit. I had been sitting in the middle portion of the street where sync was definitely occurring. What was happening at the ends?....how were people entering this street and how were they exiting it? I changed locations....Now I sat at the far west end of the street. There is a disorganized park there with a host of criss-crossing paths that cut through it.....I was only there for a few minutes and could tell there was no pattern whatsoever to how people were coming onto the street. Most were coming at a brisk, all business, head down typical Swedish way of walking. It was unorganized chaos compared to the sync in the middle of the street as they funneled onto the thoroughfare. The initial parts of the street as they funneled on proved as an organizational strip. The actions of people in this space resembled jockeying for position in a car race in which the faster cars take a line through the slower cars and prepare to pass them. What was simply amazing about this is that just a few steps past this transition strip of cobblestone the people would slowly sync their pace to that of their neighbors. It mainly happened where those who were moving fast slowed down. In doing so they repositioned their heads and strolled....in perfect sync. Let's move to the other end of the street...the exit.

The exit to the street gives several choices. You can cross a main north/south street and enter a small city square or you can go left or right on that same main street. One option requires you to pause (and check for traffic), where the other two options allow you to simply turn and keep going. There was no real pattern to the way people moved when they exited the street. It was similar, yet more precautionary than the way they entered the street from the west. So, that being said, it was clear through my observations of the 'ends' of this street that the people were independent of one another. Meaning that they weren't all shoppers out for a lovely stroll...they were different people that expectedly would move with different intentions while they walked. What was simply amazing however, was that when they were in the middle portion of the street they moved like one another. In perfect sync. Now, how does this relate to happiness? Is it that as the people moved together they felt happiness, or is it that the ambiance of the street made them feel happy and therefore they moved together by showing 'happiness' in their movements? That's a question for another time I guess...at this rate I don't think my new debit card is showing up anytime soon so I should have plenty of time to fish for the answer.