ferocious joy

a wednesday wander

We’ve all eaten things that tasted like joy, but how do we know that?

I was talking with my friend Aaron about this last night, about how humans interpret abstract concepts in concrete ways – without knowing how we’re doing it. Aaron is a computational social scientist, and so he started to frame the conversation as follows.

If you ask 8 classical pianists to play the same piece with ferocity, you’ll probably get 8 quite different results. But if you ask each of them to play that piece again, with greater ferocity, would you be able to look at that second set of performances and say, “compared to the first playing, these pianists all changed their performance in a directionally similar way”?

Our suspicion – neither of us is a pianist – was that you might find some directionality in this scenario, meaning you’d be able to say that there was some common understanding of what ferocity (or joy, or lassitude) sounds like.

And while we may have been entirely off base about how piano playing works (I’d love to hear from any expert pianists reading this) there are fields where I’d say, from direct experience, that this dynamic holds true.

If you ask 8 experienced aikido practitioners to throw someone and make the throw mischievous, or affectionate, or tentative, what those people do won’t look the same. But if you ask them to make their throw more so, I think you might find some directionality in the changes they make. (I didn’t lead with this example because I’m guessing aikido is probably more challenging than piano playing for many folks reading this to imagine.)

To take this back to food:

If you ask 8 cooks (let’s assume these folks are grounded in the same culinary idiom) and ask them to cook something joyous, you’ll get 8 very different meals. But if you ask them to each cook a second meal, more joyous than the first, and you attempted to code the differences, I suspect you’d see 8 very different sets of changes.

Emotional associations with food are highly idiosyncratic, but this feels like an incomplete explanation. So what else is driving the difference? (Comments are open, and very welcome.)

The other interesting thing happening here is the question of direct biomechanical transmission. The pianists and the aikido practitioners might not be able to explain how they’re making those changes that inflect their praxis with fear/delight/thoughtfulness, but if you hook them up to the medical scanner du jour, you might be able to detect common changes in what their bodies are doing, even if they’re consciously conceiving of these in different ways.

I’m not sure whether the same is true of food and cooking. If someone asked me to inflect my food with more joy, would I move differently as I was cooking? Would you?