An attractor describes a state of balance
Driving on the left or right, or where?
If you have been driving for many years, you probably don't even think about it when you indicate and probably don't search for the indicator either. Nor do you worry about the braking distance or the distance you must keep from the car in front of you.
Your behavior while driving is stable. You press the clutch, you accelerate and brake without thinking about it. That does not necessarily mean that you are a good and safe driver it only means that all the hand movements and reactions are automatic.
Have you ever driven in England, Australia or Cyprus?
They sit and drive on the other side, the left-hand side over there. Even such a small change can throw us out of our stable driving behavior. Our driving becomes fault-prone, especially when we are supposed to react by instinct in tricky situations.
All of a sudden we have to concentrate totally on driving. Our attractor that was once so stable has become an unstable fragile construction.
Balancing on one leg is unstable!
»Standing on two legs is more stable than on one«.
The Balance on one leg is unstable!
»Therefore standing on two legs is easier than on one.«
An dieser Aussage dürfte wohl zunächst kaum jemand Zweifel hegen.
But what kind of a balance is the one that hold us on our two legs, is it static and stable or dynamic and unstable? If you are able to stand on two legs without shaking, you might overhastily think it is static and stable.
Wrong, position yourself on one leg and try not to fall. If one is not trained, then this is not an easy exercise. Or just try to put on your socks without holding fast to something. Many of you probably will be shaky.
It is not so easy to keep the balance in a position one is not used to. To position yourself stable on two legs - even though we trained it since we have been toddlers – is much more then putting two same weights on a scale.
Thousands of signals are part of the compuation that caculates our body's position and our posture is steadily corrected. You may realize how complex this process is if you try stand on one leg on your toes.
Think of a person who has had a stroke or a cerebral injury. How difficult or impossible is it for him to stand firmly on two legs? Or imagine a child, taking its first steps. It wobbles around, always in danger of falling.
Now imagine an acrobat or a dancer. For him one leg is just as good as two. So in the end things are ending up to be not quite as simple as they seemed.
So what comes naturally on two legs - our usual position - is not at all the same with one. We must then constantly correct our position. This position is calculated in the central nervous system by thousands of pieces of information. It comes from the periphery of our body such as the soles of our feet, the pelvis, the head, the joints and their relations to one another.
So we are definitely talking about a dynamic balance of a complex system. For some stable dynamic, for others unstable dynamic, depending on the amount of practice.
