If you watch the World Series tonight, you'll notice that if Matt Harvey, the Mets pitcher, reaches a two strike count against one of the Royals batters, the whole stadium — as if with a single mind — will rise to its feet and roar with excitement and encouragement.
Their shared interest in the action, and their understanding of it, unites them and brings them into coordination. No doubt the impulse to jump up and scream is also caused, in part, by the fact that so many people around you are doing it, too.
What unifies the fans, what organizes them and brings them into coordination, is their shared understanding and shared attention.
Compare this with a different kind of case of human coordination: I saw a performance once — Heiner Goebbels' Surrogate Cities, with choreography by Matthilde Monnier — that involved people of various ages from the Berlin area. You can view the performance here. In it, several hundred non-professional dancers, spread out over a great hall, moved in exact unison. The perfect harmony of movements, combined with the obvious fact that these were not dancers but ordinary folk, was astonishing to see — and puzzling. How did the choreographer pull it off? How did she train them so well?
The secret, it turned out, was that there were monitors positioned, teleprompter-like, around the room in such a way that the dancers could see them — but the audience could not. Each dancer was imitating action on one of the screens.
While they were unified by a common task — to do what the person on the monitor was doing — there was no significant cross-coordination among them. Each person would have done whatever the person on the screen was doing, whatever anybody else was doing.
Here, in contrast with the baseball spectacle, there is no shared understanding, or shared attention. True, all the dancers are paying attention to a monitor. But for all that it mattered, each dancer might have had his or her own private monitor. They were, in effect, acting alone together. Which is an interesting idea. Surrogate Cities was originally commissioned to celebrate the history of Frankfurt and is a work about urban life. Alone together captures part of that, no doubt.
Consider another well studied phenomenon: When people talk, they tend to take up similar positions, postures and tilts; they settle on a shared volume, and they are likely to adopt a shared dialect. Talking is like dancing. It is spontaneous and, yet, it is also habitual. It is organized in all sorts of subtle, not-quite-conscious-nor-yet-fully-unconscious ways. (See Shockley, Richardson and Dale 2009 for an excellent survey of research in this area.)
This is one reason why talking to someone while you are driving is not particularly distracting, although talking to someone over the telephone while you are driving is. You and your passenger organize yourself in relation to your situation; your passenger's movements, crucially, like your own, are sensitive to what is happening around you. Talking on the phone — whether using a handheld device or not — forces you to split your attention. It's interesting that radio doesn't distract in this way. This is because, owing to the passivity of our attitude to radio, it doesn't entrain us in a conversation-like way. It is background more than shared context.
It is astonishing to realize how — and in how many different ways — we are coordinated.
That's one of the things I'll be looking out for as I watch tonight's game.
Alva Noë is a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, where he writes and teaches about perception, consciousness and art. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015). You can keep up with more of what Alva is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe
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