Peripersonal Space
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Our “body schema” is our sense of our body and where it stops: which portions of what we feel is “us” and which portion of what we’re sensing is “not us.”
Another way of thinking about the body schema is that it’s a postural model consisting of information from our central and peripheral neurological systems, which makes us aware of where our limbs, digits, chest, torso, and head are located in what’s called “peripersonal space.”
The combination of that subconscious awareness of bodily location, along with sensory information from tactile fibers like nerve endings, and visual and olfactory information collected by our sensory organs, aggregates into a mental model of our bodies, the environments in which our bodies exist, and how the two interact—including the location of the barrier between these two seemingly (but not literally) isolated spaces.
This sense-of-self model takes somewhat different shapes based on whether we’re considering it through the lens of psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, or anatomy.
There’s good reason to think of our bodies as clouds of intertwined organisms rather than cleanly delineated entities when thinking about the human body from a biological perspective, while a sociologist may be more inclined to think of human bodies as conceptual inventions: what we consider to be “us” has less to do with cellular components and more to do with ideology, upbringing, and the norms to which we have been acclimated.
Considering this concept through the lens of zoology, an animal’s threat response behaviors can be defined, in part, according to their individual and average “flight zones.”
The flight zone is an invisible boundary around an animal that, when breached, will trigger a flight response in that animal.
Some creatures have a fairly wide flight zone, which means they’ll run or fly or swim away when another animals get within, for instance, twenty feet of them. Other creatures have a tighter flight zone, not becoming alarmed in the same way until another animal gets within, say, five feet.
Such instinctual radii can be carved up into more specific zones, according to work published by the Swiss zoologist, Heini Hediger, who introduced the concepts of flight distance, critical distance, personal distance, and social distance, which represent the fleeing boundary, the boundary that, when crossed, will cause an animal to attack instead of flee, the distance allowed between the animal and another individual of the same species, and the distance between the animal and another of the same species when they are communicating, respectively.
Variations are found in the boundary ranges of individual members of any given local animal group, and those variations are even more substantial between members of the same species living in different areas.
One explanation for this is that there are different environmental and social variables in different regions, so a flock of swans living in one region might have a smaller flight zone than those living in another, because the first group has fewer local threats they’ve needed to learn to avoid than the second.
Variations in social dynamics can also lead to the expansion or contraction of these boundaries, as can the changing of the seasons, population expansion or contraction, or more dynamic and unpredictable variables, like disease spread within, or adjacent to, a population.
Human social mores have been analyzed in a similar fashion, and both homo sapiens and other primate species have been shown to demonstrate complex boundary dynamics that vary wildly from group to group, region to region, and culture to culture.
The study of this concept in humans is often referred to as “proxemics,” which divides our sense of personal space into similar categories as those found in zoological studies of other animals: public distance, which is what we’re comfortable with when speaking to groups of strangers in public; social distance, which is how close we stand when speaking to a group of acquaintances; personal distance, which is the distance we’re comfortable with when engaging with close friends and family; and intimate distance, which is how close we get when hugging, whispering, or touching someone with whom we feel incredibly comfortable and safe.
As with flight distance, our proxemic boundaries expand and contract based on our environments, and that includes relatively transient variables, like, for instance, the emergence of a new, temporary threat, like a contagious disease.
Historically, these distances have expanded in the face of pandemics, with the effects sometimes lasting years, or in some cases decades, because norms and societal infrastructure shift alongside practical realities.
If you have to stay further apart to avoid spreading a disease, the spaces we share and habits we perform change to accommodate that new, temporary reality, and our future behaviors are shaped by those spaces and habits even after the threat upon which they were based is no longer present.
In this way, our peripersonal senses can be altered long-term, or even permanently, by temporary adjustments to our environmental variables, and those altered senses can go on to change the scaffolding upon which norms for future generations are built.
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