The following essay was written in one go probably around December 29, 2021, back when I first started thinking about starting a website for essays and other creative projects.

I was thinking today about the significance of the gait. Gait occupies a particular category in terms of the way the mind and body interact. Imagine, for a moment, that all animals are modular robots, and that the brain is a part that can be inserted into an animal body with equal functionality. (I am aware this is not how brains work.) Inserted into the human body, the brain encounters a variety of components—i.e., an anatomy—some of which lend themselves clearly to a specific way of functioning, and some of which are more open. Many, such as the heart, operate automatically. The heart can pretty much only do one thing, although that one thing (beating) has several steps. The only thing the brain can do is manipulate the rate of beating.

Other components of this anatomy, including much of what we think of as the external body, allow considerably more freedom of use. My arms, for instance, are mainly limited in their use by the physical limitations of the skeleton and muscles. What I’m getting at is that I can put my arms in any position I wish as long as it doesn’t break a joint or muscle. Furthermore, all positions are created more or less equally. Some are more uncomfortable than others, but any position I choose is going to involve partially contracting one muscle and partially relaxing another. My arm positioning is also infinitely gradient. If I seek comfort, relaxation in muscular terms, relaxing one muscle comes at the expense of the contraction of another, so I will be inclined to flow through an infinite series of slightly different positions, although some may be favored over others.

My real point here is that psychology does not seem to predispose me to any discrete positions as long as I am striking static poses or interacting with my surroundings. Skeletal structure does predispose certain uses—for instance, when I grasp something by wrapping my fingers and palm around it, rather than trying to bring the backs of my hands together around it. But any hypothetical modular robot brain can observe this about my various body parts without any prior knowledge. The ideal uses are self-evident.

When the human begins to move, and especially when it moves with intent in a specific direction (as opposed to idly dancing or shuffling around), a peculiar mental shift seems to occur. Suddenly, I am taken by an instinctive habit to select one of a few discrete motor patterns. I am thinking primarily of the choice between walking and running. The two patterns are entirely different: walking is characterized by straight legs, with one leg on the ground at all times, pushing on to one leg and then falling on to the other, whereas running involves using bent knees to spring into the air long enough to get one’s other foot underneath the body. These two gaits are attached to specific speeds. It is psychologically difficult to walk quickly or to run slowly beyond a certain point, and it becomes natural to shift to the other gait. We talk about fighting the urge to break into a run.

While I am physically capable of moving my body through space in many other ways—for instance, crawling on my hands and knees or on hands and feet, walking backwards, cartwheeling, shuffling sideways—none of these occur to me through instinct, and it requires great psychological effort to perform these acts for a sustained duration. In fact, I would argue our use of gaits is accompanied by a distinct psychological state, that of covering distance. In other words, if I resolved to walk backwards for five miles, I would essentially be in a constant state of walking ten feet backwards, at which point I would instinctively feel an urge to turn around and walk forwards (my brain reasoning that I am moving with some speed in a particular direction and so ought to walk in that direction to cover ground), at which point I would have to re-determine to continue walking backwards. Whereas when I am walking normally, I can walk for five or ten miles in one direction without feeling any urge to turn or change my motor pattern, expect possibly to rest. My brain accepts that my movement and my goal are in accord.

This notion of psychological state is important. Most adults are not constantly aware of the individual muscular movements involved in ambulation, and while totally unconscious walking can certainly occur, there are also probably many instances in which we walk with a degree of conscious thought or intent that resides above the individual motions. From personal experience, I propose this intent is central to the psychological experience of movement. What I mean is, the decision to move in a particular direction at a particular speed is accompanied at the highest level of consciousness by a desire to be in a place where one is not currently. I fix my gaze at a spot in the distance and viscerally will myself to that spot. If my will is extraordinarily powerful, probably because of a strong emotion such as fear or anger, my exertion toward that end will be appropriately powerful, and I will find myself running in that direction. I do not think to myself “lift leg-place leg-push” or even “run” but rather, “there, now!” (although I obviously do not verbalize any of these thoughts, truthfully).

This discovery might seem absurdly obvious, but I am trying to highlight a certain pattern of operation for the brain, and to recognize that this is not the only way for the brain to work. It is my opinion, separate from this, that the hands are the seat of active consciousness from the perspective of the brain. That is, that the eyes and ears perceive, and the hands do; when we are psychologically ready to do something, our mind believes itself to be first and foremost a pair of hands or even one dominant hand, and when we are psychologically ready to perceive something, our mind believes itself to be a pair of eyes or ears. The mind, in its own self-perception, moves throughout the body as the moment requires. Of course, the scene is always slightly complex. We cannot do anything of any real intricacy without the constant feedback of visual perception, and we often interact with something physically in order to fully perceive it (“what does it sound like when I tap on it”). Nevertheless this model makes some kind of sense.

So running and walking constitute another kind of mind state, in which the mind might believe itself a pair of legs. But I don’t think the mind ever really descends to the legs; instead, it is probably closer to a full-body or torso-centered experience. Perhaps the most accurate of all would be to place the mind on a sort of tense string connecting the body where it is to the place where the mind intends to be. The stronger the intension, and the greater the distance, the more tense this tether would become. In this way, the need for a particular gait is translated instantly without the need for verbal intermediary or rational consideration. One only feels the tension and responds viscerally.

The germ of this thought came out of a textbook containing a diagram of the various gaits of horses. Horses have far more gaits than humans, I believe there were about a dozen or twenty in this image, characterized by the number of legs involved and the rhythm and rate at which each leg struck the earth. We come to the amusing conclusion that horses are simply leggier creatures than humans. Not only do they have more legs than humans (by a two to one ratio, no less), but they have more gaits as well! And perhaps, if my mind model is at all accurate, they occupy a legged center of mind more often than we hand-creatures do. They respond to more things with leg-focused action than we do. While we respond to danger sometimes with legs (flight) and sometimes with arms (fight)–or hands, as it were– the horse’s every response is a leg-based one.

By that token, we return to the idea of the modular robotic brain. By now I have demonstrated to myself by thought experiment what any idiot might have told me in an instant, that brains are not interchangeable between species but have specifically evolved alongside the body. The human brain comes pre-programmed with two gaits that work exceedingly well with the hardware of the human legs. (It might be worthwhile now to acknowledge that there may be more than two gaits. For instance, the slow backward movement of a human retreating from a threatening predator might be considered one, albeit one that is rarely used by modern man. Could this be something erased by evolution in the long term? So goes “backpedaling.”) The superiority and necessity of these two (and exactly two [-ish?]) gaits are not self-evident just by internal nervous-system observation. Trial and error would arrive at them all the same, or one must assume. By the same token, the horse brain comes pre-programmed with all twenty-odd of their necessary gaits. Would a four-legged brain discover novel ways of using two-legged hardware? Seems unlikely but intriguing.