Things we know and have not learned

Bobby McFerrin on implicit rules

I am very fond of this video in which Bobby McFerrin plays an audience as a musical instrument to show their implicit knowledge of the pentatonic scale.

It might well be the case that the pentatonic scale is hard-wired into the human brain but whatever the source of this harmonic knowledge might be, this little game is a wonderful way to make people aware of things they are unwittingly capable of.

The problem concerns an issue that occupied my and Marcel Kinsbourne attention early this century. That was, the uptake of rules and then the performance of actions following rules that we do not seem to know. This is indeed what I imagine becomes visible in the excitement of the public, who seems to vibrate in awe of the mysterious rules that they are performing even across the screen.

Inspired by what I take to be the most fundamental intuitions of the Heideggerian project following Kantian ideas, I wrote a paper about doors and toilette bowls, which attempts to deal precisely with the silent power of implicit rules.