YET ANOTHER TYPE of motion with the capacity to improve the way we think is self-referential movements: movements in which we bring ourselves—in particular, our bodies—into the intellectual enterprise. Though it may seem “unscientific” to place oneself at the center of the action, scientists themselves frequently use their bodies as instruments of exploration, imagining themselves as the object of their investigation. In so doing, they cultivate a kind of “empathy with entities they are struggling to understand,” notes Elinor Ochs, an anthropologist who has studied theoretical physicists at
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