coordinating bodies, cooperation

There are so many ways that organisms rapidly coordinate their behavior with each other performing the same action at the same time in the same space, and so many reasons for the coordination. The mere presence of others affects our behavior; providing that there is plenty of room for each of you, your actions do not have to be coordinated; like birds flying in flocks, the synchronization of the group organizes and eases the actions of the individuals … perfect strangers fall into rhythm. Rhythm is deeply embedded in our bodies, in our hearts, our breathing, our brains, our actions—walking, talking, thinking, dancing, sleeping, waking—our days and nights. Our rhythms organize and synchronize our bodies and come to organize and synchronize our bodies with the bodies of others.

In humans, coordination quickly turns into cooperation. As early as fourteen months, when a child sees an adult trying to get an object out of reach but close to the child, the child will hand the object to the adult. Both the social understanding and the social behavior are remarkable, all the more so because this intricate set of interactive actions can happen almost wordlessly, without explicit organization

… people have numerous event schemas in their minds, representations of the sequences of actions on objects needed to accomplish a range of ordinary tasks, like making a bed or doing the dishes or assembling a piece of furniture. These representations allow to interpret ongoing action, predict what happens next, and to generate step-by-step instructions to accomplish the tasks.