It was about two years ago in Madrid. It was an OCLC conference and that's where I first saw Anna.
And she was speaking about teenage education, basically extracurricular education.
And there was a very interesting topic for us because the idea was how do you get a message
that you would like to transmit to an audience that you have nothing in common with it.
And the channels that you need to use in order to still get your message to them.
It was a very interesting presentation and I thought it would be very useful to have Anna here.
While, in the meantime, she shifted to different topics and she is working at the intersection of Education,
Technology and Arts. She is self-employed and she's in Iasi right now: Anna Mauersberger.
Thank you, Dorin! Thank you for the nice introductory words.
Good morning, everybody! Thank you for having me here.
I'm very honored to speak here. Dorin and I, when we met in Madrid it was a hall a little bit like this one,
so everytime we meet it's seems to be in really beautiful environments.
And it's very fitting because actually what I'm speaking about today is environments:
beautiful, maybe beautiful and not beautiful environments.
I'm going to speak about virtual environments, virtual realities.
And I'm super glad to do so because I think there is nothing more beautiful than really
being able to speak about the things that you're passionate about and this is something
that I'm super passionate about right now.
There's not so much research in the field yet, but it's slowly starting to evolve and that's why
I want to share this with you.
Before I start out I would like to know a little bit about you.
We have the privilege to be in intimate circles, so just to know where you come from or from horizons.
Who of you worked as a teacher? Ok, few hands, 4 hands.
Who works as a librarian maybe? A lot of librarians, ok. Researchers? Aha.
Who of you has already tried out virtual reality headset? 1, 2, 3, 4... only the man? That is interesting!
You have? No, you haven't, ok. So I'm going to tell you a little bit more about virtual reality in a second.
For now I want to start out with you. So without changing your posture,
I invite you to feel the way you are sitting here. Don't change your posture.
Just see how you are sitting, how is your body presenting itself - the only thing.
I already see someone getting a little bit back in the chair. Ok, so just see how you seat.
You may be hancing a little bit, do you have - I can sit too - your legs crossed like this maybe,
this is a very female way of sitting, or are you taking a lot of space… just realize this: how are you sitting.
And now, maybe just through a small movement do something to sit a little bit more comfortably in the chair.
Do that now. So just maybe some of you have crossed legs. Yes, good.
You are so few that I can really see all of you. And we are going to see in a moment that body language conveys a lot.
There's another little exercise I want to do with you. Look at me with serious faces,
most of you are already looking with serious faces, and then you go - you smile.
Ok, and do that again, very consciously: look at me with a serious face and then you smile.
Maybe you realise there is something happening? Did you realize there is something happening?
Who realised there is something happening? Ok, few hands.
So actually what happens when I do this, when I smile, my whole emotional background smiles.
Ok? It's like giving a signal out to my cognition, to my emotional mind, to feel more positive.
Even if it is just this little movement. And I find this super interesting.
And that's why in fact, I'm not so much speaking about virtual reality,
I'm going speak about embodied experiences, about the body.
So I like to speak about virtual reality because it is a fancy topic.
Every since I found it or it found me, I get invited to conferences because it's fancy,
but the reality is that the technology of the body is even more interesting to me than virtual reality.
I look at virtual reality from an educational standpoint, so Dorin has already introduced me.
When we met two years ago I was working in the field of online education.
So I started out in Berlin my career in creative Industries, I was working for a big
production company and we were given a big amount of funding by a very big German foundation
called the Robert Bosch Stiftung and it was back in 2011, so in digital time count that's ages ago.
And they were giving us this founding with the aim to experiment with online education.
Back then nobody was doing that and the aim was to find out by which means we
could find strategies to get teenagers engage in political issues.
So we were super privileged. My team and I, we really like
doing trial and error, and we created rap casting shows online, and we were looking for the YouTube
Chancellor online, and we did animation videos; and we checked what would work and what wouldn't work.
We were also accompanied by a university doing that,
so there was a research background to this whole project.
And to me, the most important finding from that time is actually one that today sounds pretty banal:
it's that relationship and experience matter, in every sense!
So in learning context, relationship and experience matter!
And for me back then, as I was working in Online Context, it was like "aha!"... Ok!
I thought it was about reaching quantities of people, about reaching high numbers of people
but in the end when I looked at our projects the ones that really worked out
the best where the ones that involved relationship: with each other, with us and with each other,
with the users, with content and experience.
So I found this when I was preparing for the speech and I really like this pyramid;
I'm not going to go into the details; I drew it myself, so don't really focus on the exactness of the levels, right?
But what I like about this pyramid is that you see that the higher the level of abstraction,
the more difficult the learning process. Ok?
So in the top we have the degree of abstraction which is high and, in the end, on the foundation,
we have a low level of abstraction, so it gets very concrete.
And when we look at this we see that text, pictures, audio,
even motion pictures are pretty abstract to the learner.
They don't involve that many senses. Maybe they just involve the eyes, they involve cognition,
and the more we get down, there more senses are involved, and the deeper the learning process.
I think for us as educators, also as librarians, because you have an educational... how would I say?
Auftrag
This is my love, sitting here, but he's failing to help me! So you have an educational...
I don't know the word, but you were there also to educate people, right?
So when we look at this, the interesting finding is that really we forgot about the body!
So till exhibits, we're doing the job as educators and everything that comes afterwards,
experience, experience, experience, we tend to forget about it and
we don't integrate it into the learning processes.
Why? Because it's pretty difficult. So I was super-inspired by this thought, I took a sabbatical.
I said "I'm not going to work for the company anymore". I went to Chile,
I studied with a very famous shaman and coach, and I studied a personal growth,
which is nothing more than learning about yourself and about the world through relationship.
To me this is the definition of personal growth. So this is what I did for nine months and
the body played a major role in this educational understanding of the world.
So this is the framework I learned, it's called "ontological coaching" and I like this graphic
because it shows us very well what I am going to lay out to you in the next thirty minutes.
So we have three channels of learning, three areas in witch and through which we learn.
First we have the cognition, which is linked to language.
This is the area we all know, this is the area we all address as educators,
but then we also have the area of emotions and the area of the body, which are areas
that maybe in education we tend to put to the private, because we are only addressing to their minds, yeah?
But if you look at this figure is shows that this areas are really intimately intertwined with each other,
so the one cannot function without the other!
And it doesn't actually, does not function without the other!
And the small experience we just made with the smiling,
you see how this works: so the body is doing a small movement, giving out a que,
which is an emotional one, than later on maybe enabling you to do something that involves your cognition.
And you can find multiple examples of this, in yourself, when you observe yourself.
So what I want to do is tell you two experiences that have been made by big Ivy League Universities.
We always have to cite the important people to prove that something is really so.
So the first experience I want to tell you about it an experience from Yale University,
where actually what they did was to give an ice cold cup of water to somebody and then
introduce that somebody to a stranger.
And what would happen is that the people who were holding the cold water would interact
with a stranger with a lot more mistrust, they would rate them as someone
being further away from them, more distant.
And then they did the same experience giving them a hot cup of coffee and what happened
was that the person would introduce a stranger and have a lot more trust towards this person.
So isn't that amazing that just the feeling, the temperature of the body can
have an influence on how I react in the world later on?
I think this findings are super important for us to take into consideration.
The second experience I liked, maybe even more, is Amy Cuddy from Harvard University.
What she found out is that if you spend two minutes in a power position,
so which can be like this, like the little boy does, or like this, this will be a power position, yeah?
Or when you are sitting... this is a power position, ok?
As opposed to an inferior position, which can be like this or also like this, or like this, so you get smaller, ok?
So she found out that people in the power position, witch is the Wonder Woman position
- this is what she got famous for - if they spend only two minutes in this power position,
actually on a psychological level, their levels of cortisol, which is the stress hormone, drops and considerably,
by 50% I think, where is the level of testosterone, which is the dominance hormone, raises...
I think it was like 20%, 20%-15%.
This is amazing what the body does! And also what she found out was that this people
that were spending two minutes, just two minutes, in the power position were more likely to get risks...
they could risk and took risks more frequently. So just think what that means...
like if you work as a teacher, you could do this with your students two
minutes in the classroom and then see what happens when they take an exam, right?
So... what I want to come to is a quote from Guy Claxton, who was an embodied cognition expert.
I like the term of "embodied cognition" because it means that it doesn't mean to get read of cognition,
it just means to include cognition and transcend it by using the body, right?
So he says: "The body, the gut, the senses, the immune system, the lymphatic
system are so instantaneously and complicatedly interacting that you can't draw a line across the neck
and say above this line it's smart and below this line it's menial".
And then look at our classrooms. So what do you see here?
You see - it's a very ugly term - you see heads on sticks.
We don't really work with the body at all. You see a teacher in a power position,
she's like this; then you see pupils bending, writing.
You don't see any eyes meeting, you don't see any interactions, no smiles.
So this a learning environment that is not very inspiring, right?
And of course, this is an old picture and things have changed,
but they haven't change that much if we are honest. So now we will have maybe this kind of situations,
maybe we will even have a tool like a tablet, but still we are working a lot with our minds,
all the time with our minds, only!
And I don't want to get rid of minds, I just want to include the other two areas of learning as well.
So we are not smart and have bodies, we are smart because we have bodies!
And for me this in Chile was like an "ahh" moment. It really meant a turn and I said:
"Wow! Now I am just approaching education from a completely different standpoint;
after this finding I can not do as I did before!" So I employed myself.
I didn't go back to the company and I started to experiment with embodied experience situations.
So I created a body-base seminar, which is called "8 weeks of freedom".
It's for adults and it works with bodies to enhance their freedom, it's a classical personal growth seminar.
Then through technology I found love! He is sitting there and what I learned from him is really how to love, I have to say.
And together we started experimenting with teenagers and teenage educational settings with the body.
So what you see here, he is going to speak about it later on, Anselm at 11:45,
and show you a little bit of our projects as well. But what we did was really
engaging the body in learning situations.
And I must say I think it works magic. And then, of course, virtual reality headsets crossed my way!
So, what happened there? Virtual reality found me, rather than I found it.
I was at a conference and I put on a headset and tried it out and immediately it suck me in.
And I was like, ohh! What is this? So the thing is speaking about virtual reality
doesn't really work that well, because you have to try it, otherwise you won't really realise what I am saying.
I am going to try to convey what this is about. So imagine that you put on the goggles,
that you see here behind me, and then you are not looking at a screen like you are used to,
but you are inside of the environment. Which means that if you look around like this or if you turn even,
what you will see is a 360° of your environment. And the environment can be anything:
from a documented reality, like someone filming an actual situation, so you would be in Time Square
or you would be in Syria, in a refugee camp, or you would be below thousand metres in the deep sea,
or it can be an animated environment, whatever is possible... technically can be
possible in the virtual reality!
So you can be diving, you can be sensing as a blind person, for example,
this is a sort of blackness, a experience when you are in the skin of a blind person.
Or you can be balancing on a tiny piece of wood on the floor, one thousand feet above the ground in New York;
which is an experience that I did and it really freak me out! I put on this headset and I was
standing on a wooden thing that was actually on the floor - they lay out a wooden thing
so I knew... there were friends of mine, I knew that I was not really on this tiny piece of wood,
but at the moment that I started to balance on this wood I really... like my whole body reacted to this!
I got sweaty hands, I was shaking… so what does virtual reality do?
It really fools our body into believing that what we are experiencing is real... and that is... revolutionary!
Yeah! I think that is really revolutionary because it goes so fast! You put it on and bam!
You are there! I am going to show you an experience, which of course is nothing like
putting on the goggles yourself, but it will give you maybe a little hint on what it could be.
Florin, maybe you can switch off the lights?
And I need sound, please!
There is no picture, so what should I do?
Do you know how to help me this time? Ok!
So I take the opportunity while they are fixing this, to explain
that there is different ways of producing VR content.
So what you are going to see here now, you are going to see people wearing their
goggles and having commanders in their hands...
Just hit pause, yeah? Thanks!
They have commands in their hands, so what they can do is really interact with their environment.
So you could paint, you could maybe - how do you say? - shoot an arrow, yeah?
There is this game where you shoot arrows.
You can do things with your hands and interact, you can even interact with each other in the virtual reality.
And then there are VR films, where you put on the goggles and you can't really
do anything with your hands, but you are a spectator in an another environment.
What I am going to show you now is really a proper experience, so I just have to hit…
Ok. Just look at them! Look at their faces! This might seem banal and entertaining, but look how they are…
look at their faces, look at how they are in all...
They are admiring, they are doing things...
from my point of view, when I look at this I can really see how they are discovering something
about themselves that they didn't discover before.
Ok? So they are really interacting and what they are doing is highly creative, it's highly creative!
They are inventing a new world! This is what they are doing! Through VR!
And they have this trance music with it, which is very... putting you into a present moment as well.
So what they're doing actually is experiencing presence! Yeah, we can stop it.
Ok, you go back to it.
I'm sorry about that. So, they are experiencing presence. What is presence?
To me, presence is the moment when you forget that there is something else.
This would be my way of describing presence. Are there any meditators here?
Do you meditate, maybe? Meditators? Ok, yeah...
There are many other ways to achieve presence, but actually what VR does is to bring you instantly into presence.
And this is really interesting because presence seems to be what we
need in order to address complex issues of our times.
Presence trains the opposable mind.
And "the opposable mind is the ability of constructively facing the tension between opposing ideas".
"The ability of constructively facing the tension between opposing ideas".
We're living in a world that is very complex, with a lot of ideas, which are not so easy to address
with our either or logic and what we need is an opposable mind that can find creative solutions.
So VR for this could be a very interesting tool. And it's not a coincidence if we have meditation
mindfulness seminars in Silicon Valley and companies.
Everybody's doing that now. It's a hype! Why?
Because neuroscientists found out that meditation really triggers your creativity and your… your opposable mind!
So mystics have told us that for ages and then came scientists, they all tell us:
be present, experiment, stay curious, because it seems to be something very tiny,
something that we need, a quality that we need!
Now, when comes to VR research, there's already some good amount of research
on VR and a very interesting assistant Ford Human Interaction Lab.
They do an incredible amount of research. And what they found out, for example,
is that you can actively train empathy throw VR, by letting someone walk in the shoes of someone else.
So you are put into the skin of someone else and you get more empathetic.
Or that you can influence conservation behaviour, like the use of paper or the use of water.
So they did these experiences for people after having a VR environment where they were chopping a tree,
for example, would use less paper than people who had read a text about chopping wood.
And they do many of these things, if you're interested in this just check out the website because it's really;
I find it very passionate in what they're doing. And then there is a higher rank organisation like,
for example, the United Nations that started their own VR series.
And they use it to influence people with power and money.
So they're not even screening these VR experiences that much online, but they're using it in their...
in their high rank meetings.
They put on and then people will have a better understanding of the realities of the people.
So I'm going to show you a second experience. I hope it will work now.
Do you have to come back, maybe? I don't know.
And this experience you will see is one where it's more about a documented reality that was
filmed before hand and so you put on the goggles and you will be inside the world of a little girl,
living in a Syrian refugee camp.
And I suppose this... as VR experience what I am going to show you now is one of the best
known experiences that exists right now; it is called "Clouds over Sidra" and what you can do,
I can not show you now, but imagine just you have the goggles on and you
could turn around and you can see everything.
We had to download the film before and so I can't even show you how that will look.
If you look it up online, you will have a hand where you can look around on the video screen, yeah?
Right now you can only see this. So is there sound? I think it starts now.
My name is Sidra. I am twelve years old. I am in the fifth grade.
I am from Syria and there are province in Helicity. I have lived here in the Zaatari Camp
in Jordan for the last year and a half. I have a big family: three brothers, one is a baby. He cries a lot.
I asked my father if I cried when I was a baby and he says I did not.
I think I was a stronger baby than my brother.
Ok. So I'm just going to cut up the volume. So what happens here is that right now, of course,
it just gives you a glimpse of what it would be if you put on goggles; it will be completely
different because right now she's like stretch, to see this 360° angle. It's not really that.
You put that on and she's sitting right here. Ok? You have to imagine she is sitting
right here and she's telling you her story and it is very touching, really!
So... many times I have tried out VR experiences I found myself crying in the end because it
can be very, very intimate and very close.
And I think what VR films mainly do is that they offer us are the narratives.
This is very interesting: me coming from the creative industries,
I'm very adapt to the concept of narrative; and even if you look into political sciences and into
how society is changed and what they need for a change, you see that it's not so much determined
what they need, so the things that will happen and everything
is going to go wrong, but they need the narratives!
So I think what VR can do is really let us experience different narratives without
taking a big amount of risk, because it is just a virtual environment.
So we can step into that virtual environment, experience it for ourselves, and then step out again.
And then we have another way of judgement.
I think this is really, really interesting when it comes to VR.
So we have to stop the movie again.
Yeah… So the power of narratives - of course, maybe you already thinking about it, while i'm talking about it...
of course there is a big downside to this.
So it's a technology that is coming. I think It's not so much a matter of if it is coming,
but rather a matter of when is it coming. It is coming. This is why I'm speaking to you about it.
Because I think we should get started to know what it is.
Some people speak about VR as the next big digital revolution, something like the Internet,
that it's really going to affect our lives and change the way we work, maybe even the way we learn.
And from my point of view, I also work with libraries in Germany, I work with teachers and so on,
I think that very often educators are the last in the row to know what is technologically possible.
And I think that we should start seeing the options, yeah?
We are going to speak about the dangers in a second, but I deliberately
chose to tell you first about the potentials.
Because when it comes to technology, especially in this old fields of labour, like libraries, like teaching,
very often I see this. It's like: no! Yeah? People are very sceptic about technology and then it's
also a generational thing…
So I chose to first lay out the potential, before showing you the dangers.
And the potential for me is that in the society that we are living in today, virtual reality
could be a way of bringing us into another understanding.
Why? Because we're living in a society that is facing fear or that is moved by fear.
Yeah? We have climate change, we have crazy politicians in very important positions,
we have lot of racism, we have so many challenges, that we don't really know how to face.
And a lot of societies are really moved or not moved by fear. So what I think VR can do is convey courage.
As I said before, showing us other ways possible by bringing us back into our bodies, out of our minds,
by bringing us into the present moment.
And I think this is a super interesting tool as well for libraries maybe.
Maybe for libraries it is even a super interesting tool to bring people into the libraries, can be a new medium;
it's not that expensive and I think that we should start at least exploring it.
When we think of the little drawing I showed you in the beginning, from my ontological coaching
framework, what VR really does is enable learning at the core.
Yeah? So not all of VR, but a good VR experience could do that.
It could integrate cognition, emotions and the body in a way that we
really in the center connect to something that I would call our souls.
So now everybody can have a different understandings of what soul can be,
I think that soul is something that you can not grasp with words, so I will not even to try,
but a soul for me is the "ahh" moment, "ahh"... I understood something…
I don't even know how I did it, but I understood something. I titled my talk "Discover the soul of science"
"Dis-cover the soul of science" because I think that everything we need, we already have.
So we have super good scientific research that we can base ourselves on, we have narratives to tell,
we have a technology that is developing in a fast-pace, so all we have to do is find other ways of narrating
all this.
And this is what VR can do. It is a very good tool for discovery, for dis-covery, yeah?
Taking away the cover from things, because things are there and they are very beautiful,
you just have to take away the cover.
Ok. I already said VR is coming and we don't know how it is coming.
I don't know how it is coming. I don't have a clue. What I did in Germany:
I united some educators and we were speaking about the potentials and the dangers of VR.
So we kind of exploring the question, but we don't really know and there are some potential dangers,
with the most important question being: who is going to control the switch? Who is owning the technology?
So this is a very important question: who is owning this technology?
Facebook is already owning Oculus, witch is one of the biggest VR production companies,
Google is highly investing in the matter. Than of course we have governments, we have the marketers,
marketing companies, we have porn, we have all sort of people very interested in the use of VR.
And I think also this is a responsibility to us as educators, as librarians, as people of reason,
as scientists, as researchers to engage in this dialogue about: what is good VR content?
How are we going to ensure that VR is not used for the wrong purposes?
How are we going to ensure that VR is properly accompanied if we work in educational settings?
Is it really ok to put on goggles and then bam! and then you take them of and nobody works with you after that?
So I think there are a lot of questions that we can discuss as educators on how we want this VR revolution
if it's coming - how we want this to happen?
So I think it's really important on conferences like this one that we speak about this topics.
This is why I brought it to you.
Then the good news is we don't have to wait for VR goggles to arrive in our hands, we can also say:
"Ok. I don't have a VR goggles for now, I can start experiencing in with the body."
Because everything I told to you doesn't have that much to do with VR only.
It has to do with embodied experiences.
So just imagine in your settings, witch ever setting that may be, you could start to explore the body,
in your way, in the way that suits you as the educator, in that sense,
you could start to use the body with your students.
Just see what happens! Just aproach it with the scientific mind of trial and error, just see what happens!
I can promise you there is a lot of things that are going to happen.
Ever since I used the body in my things, everything I do, stuff happen!
Why? Because I give control of my brain and I give it to the body.
So… what I would like to do for the closing session is to end this talk with silence.
So I invite you, if you want to, to shut down your visual sense. Close your eyes.
See what that does to you, if you want to do that. Just shut down your visual sense.
And is pretty stunning what can happen once you shutdown your visual sense.
I am going to stop talking in a minute and I want you to feel the togetherness in the room,
the company of the other people next to you, and just see what it does and if you can feel something
else when you close your eyes, than you can when you have them open and look
at me when I am talking and presenting.
"And if you let go of the wish to hold reality and then instead, let reality hold you,
you are always in an appropriate place."
Thank you!
That was an interesting closer for a session. So, who wants to start with a question?
Hey! Excellent presentation, really! I think I loved it especially because even though we've been
through some of kind of the same experiences, I mean not the shaman thing, but definitely the
VR, my conclusions were almost on the opposite side.
Because you started by talking about embodied experiences and I think there is a general
agreement that we are embodied spirits, as that's the term in philosophy, mainly for this one.
However experiencing VR it's kind of the... brings you the argument that we are exactly not that.
I mean that the traditional distinction between mind and body is at play surprisingly in VR.
Because what happens, what is very weird when you fly over New York, as I also did also did myself,
is after a few seconds of being confused of where is my body? Where are my legs?
How am I standing up here? What's going on? I'm going to die? I'm gonna fall?
After a few seconds, witch is very little in terms of the mind, you get accustomed to actually not
having a body, of being merely a dot somewhere in a space that you can't even figure out what
that is, and flying very bodiless through a something that is probably just an illusion of your mind. So…
But at the same time, I think, while you are flying, you are going to experience something in your body.
In your actual body, even in the virtual reality you don't have a body because you're flying and you
don't see yourself, you are going to feel something in your body, it's going to be something like "uhh! I'm flying!".
Yeah, but that feeling is still in your mind. This will be... My problem, let's say, will be with the word...
because you had that chart that said, the one that you discovered the soul in the middle. So, it was… what was it? The first circle…
Yes, yes! You mean this one. I'm going to switch to it… This one.
Because you make a distinction here between cognition and emotions, which is a valid distinction,
but they are traditionally conceived together as being a mind, so it's... I don't think it's...
and nobody here would argue that these need to be separated. I mean, the problem as you described
about kids staying and being just minds is actually, not being just minds, because they are
just cognition in your term here.
So the problem indeed would be how to get their minds to be a connection
of emotion and cognition, because this is what we, humans, are.
But I would argue that we are definitely not bodies or, if we are talking about bodies, they are
just one of the vessels in which we can put our minds.
And the VR is a fabulous example that we can basically move our mind to a different vessel,
which is a VR space, a virtual reality, and we can leave it there just as fine.
And that's for me... it was an immense shock. I had to think about it for weeks after that.
What does that mean for us? Because I always thought that we are kind of this whole,
this togetherness of mind and body. But apparently we are not.
I mean Descartes was right and the whole 19th century and 20th century philosophy was wrong.
In a way, in a way, of course!
Interesting! Did you try it out yourself? Yeah, I suppose, otherwise you wouldn't… Yeah… Ok...
It's not only that… there is a second experience that - I will stop after this - I was in a hospital for
whatever, so I had a trouble with my hand and I was looking at my hand and I... it was a way in
which… it was pain or something with an allergy, right?
And I was looking at my hand, and I had the distinct feeling that I am something that is looking at my hand...
I thought of my body, in that moment, as a property, in a way, and I was kind of feeling sorry my hand,
not for myself, but for my hand, something was happening to it...
So this kind of experiences, I think, they are telling that there is an actual difference between
mind and body and we are just about, in a way, to overcome that by being able
to move our minds into different spaces.
And VR is a fabulous example. That would be my opinion...
Yeah, thank you! Very interesting contribution!
I think actually that what may happen when we look more into VR environments,
that we have to rethink our notion or our concept of the body.
Because I wouldn't agree that our body is not in the experience.
It is just not our body.
And of course you are right, afterwards is the mind acting,
but how do we get out of our brains by our bodies?
So if you look at any mystical tradition and also at VR, what they all do always using the body,
as you said, as a vessel.
If it's just sitting down and meditating, and not moving, I'm not really doing anything with my body,
but I use my body as a vessel to get out of my brain.
And I think that VR does it in a kind trick sense, because of course it takes away our real bodies,
but it gives us a new one, which is not there, witch is virtual,
but which has a response to what we are feeling. You see what I mean?
There is a lot of very interesting, very nerdy VR research on how... how we can apply
the body in the experiences, for example, I watch the top of a woman that is really researching body motion.
So she says that she is working on a project called "Luna" project and it's...
it's about taking something from the Universe.
So it's about walking around and picking grapes like... and she wants to be in a very lightweight,
she wants to be like this... so her researches really it's like: how can I do this?
So it's not going to be like this, but I don't have the power grip
but I have the precision grip or I can move like this.
So this is the body… is in VR research it's super important topic...
They speak about the body a lot, like how can we do this so that what does to the mind will be this...
and this is what I find interesting, so yeah, thank you for the... for your remark...
Do you find yourself in what I'm saying? I think we agree, actually, yeah!
Anybody else has a question?
I am curious about one thing: the discovery thing.
What's the age when you should give the kids the opportunity to dis-cover like this,
so they can still grow up and make a clear difference and actually learn everything that you said,
without getting addicted or without wanting to stay in a world that is virtual.
Yeah… it's a good topic. I think there is not so much research on VR for kids
like the small ones, yet… so I can not really respond to your question in terms of number, age.
I don't know.
But from my point of view, it's just like with technology in general.
I think what we need to do always is, no matter the age...
is to teach ourselves first, maybe, and then others...
on how to use technology for the better and when to know when to stop.
And I think for this again you will need presence and an opposable mind which tells you...
so, you know, I think what we need is to train ourselves better and knowing what is good for us.
So we will not fall into this trap of getting addicted because, yes!
There is a lot of addictive potential in this and it might keep us from
living the live we have to live in the real world. Yeah! Does this respond to your question?
Yes. It does. It does. Thank you!
One last question if there is anybody? If not, Anna, thank you very much!
Thank you so much! Thank you!
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