WK1 Reading - Bike Seats and Boxes

These first three chapters immediately make me think of a concept I was taught long ago, and that's the concept of 'schema'. A schema is generally perceived notions about things. The human mind is bombarded with millions of bits of information per second. The only way the CONSCIOUS (and sober) mind can handle all of this information is to attach info to preconceived notions about the world. For example, if I were a Native American Indian on the beach of San Salvador around 1492. I would not be able to fit three huge ships sailing onto the coast with white people with loud, bangy sticks, shiny armor, and huge dog-like animals that they ride into my schema. This is because I've never seen anything like it...at all. If I was a contemporary, I would know exactly how to process this information, because I know what a ship, a horse, a rifle, and armor is. In this context, a schema would be 'the box'.

So, it makes sense that when the first bikes were constructed, the builders wanted to come up with a seat design. The first thing that came to their minds first was the design for a saddle, what they were already using to ride horses. The bike designers never bothered to ask themselves, 'hey...do we HAVE TO emulate this saddle?..and for decades, right up until today, we have to endure riding seats that look like this:



This applies to most everything. In order to think outside the box, we must first reinvent our schema towards what we're trying to do. Now, look at this picture:



This is an arm bar. Jiu Jitsu submissions moves like this work!!...trust me. There is an entire world of ass-kicking out there. People have studied this world, perfected it, reinvented it, re-styled it, but at the core, we really can't think outside this box, because this box is the human pentagram (a head, two arms, two legs). This entire art is based and completely limited to the human body. If we were to sprout an extra appendage. This Jiu Jitsu box would shatter and would have to reinvented. This art is strictly for the human form and would be ENTIRELY different if we were created differently.

I would say, in my limited mathematical knowledge, that math is the only universal language and the only universal box, as it were. Everything else we know about the universe is theoretical and we build a box, or schema around what we know and find out, but this box can be reinvented, re-designed, re-styled once we find out more information about the universe...just like a jiu jitsu class would be completely different if we all sprouted a prehensile tail tomorrow.