The name Art Clokey might not ring a bell with most people, but I’m sure the smiling, pliable green character he created would.
Yes, I’m speaking of Gumby, the subject of a series of film shorts produced by Clokey (rhymes with "Pokey") starting in the early 1950s. Using a painstaking process called Claymation, Clokey would bend Gumby and other plastic figures to form a series of poses and then capture each pose in a single movie frame. When the frames were spliced together and played back on a movie reel, Gumby and his pals would magically come to life on the screen.
These days I’m sure there are many times when the Daily Improviser feels like Gumby – bending, stretching, being pulled this way and that, either of his own volition (out of necessity or preemptive choice) or at the hands of an unseen animator called Continuous Change. And as Dan Ariely points out in his book The Upside of Irrationality, we humans have a remarkable capacity for adapting to change – more so, perhaps, than we often recognize.
As Ariely demonstrates, our ability to go with the flow is not a matter of our acting as human supercomputers, inputting and processing all of the data that surround us and spontaneously kicking out the right response. Rather, our internal “change machines” operate in a very different way:
"We only have a limited amount of attention with which to observe and learn about the world around us – and adaptation is a very important novelty filter that helps us focus our limited attention on things that are changing and might therefore pose either opportunities or danger. Adaptation allows us to attend to the important changes among the millions that occur around us all the time and ignore the unimportant ones. If the air smells the same as it has for the past five hours, you don’t notice it. But if you start smelling gas as you read on the couch, you quickly notice it, get out of the house, and call the gas company."
Ariely’s example provides yet another instance of a useful structure that the Daily Improviser employs to come between him and his environment in order to make sense of the world and deal with it appropriately. As I’ve pointed out in earlier articles, just as the performance improviser doesn’t sketch in his performances on a totally blank slate, neither does – or should – the Daily Improviser interact directly with the raw stuff of his environment, process the millions of changes that occur every second, and make up a new response on the spot every time. Rather, as Ariely, Steven Pinker (in his book The Blank Slate), and several other recent researchers have demonstrated, we humans are hard-wired to utilize intervening structures (or “novelty filters,” as Ariely calls them) to come between us and our world to help focus our attention and guide our actions.
In fact, as Ariely’s example illustrates, if we didn’t use these intervening structures (which I’ve previously described as The Layer), we would be incapable of making in-the-moment adaptations to changes in our environment. Instead – like the performance improviser who tries to run through all possible scene options in his head before making his next move – we would be frozen in place by Analysis Paralysis.
Unlike Art Clokey, we don’t have the luxury of freezing reality second by second so we can sculpt each moment as we might like it to unfold. Fortunately, we can draw on The Layer as a short-cut to help us get in touch with our Gumby Nature.
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