Dear One and All,

Please consider yourself most cordially invited to the 16th in our WHAT Talks series, this coming Sunday, 12th February, at 9 pm West Australian Time, when our guest, Andrea Andrews, will give her talk: The Patient Ape: How Aquatic Insight Ratchets Up
Adaptability.

(Feel free to forward the invite to anyone who you think might be interested in human evolution.)

The Zoom link to the meeting is at the end of this email.


Note the link specifies a start time 15 minutes earlier to allow the guest speaker & a few others to prepare. A "waiting room" system will be in operation so if you do join early, please be patient while we test everything before allowing people "in".


We are expecting attendees from around the globe, so please pay attention to your time zone and any local daylight-saving alterations that might be in place.

The Worldtimebuddy web site is not a bad web resource to check this kind of thing.

A N D R E A A N D R E W S

Biography

Andrea received a BSc (Hons) Geography / Geology Degree from College of St Paul & St Mary, Cheltenham, UK in 1986 & MSc in Hydrogeology & Groundwater Chemistry from Reading University in 1993. She worked as an engineering geologist in the UK until 1998
when she became a mother of two girls and then returned to work as a fully qualified swimming teacher in 2003.

She had grown up with an idyllic childhood exploring waterscapes inside and outside in the Isle of Purbeck UK and lengthy summer holidays with her younger brother visiting the water bodies of Europe; mainly France. Her deep interest in a career as a
swimming teacher first came to the fore in 2002 when her eldest daughter swam spontaneously towards her and she has been on a long journey ever since to try and reveal why some people appear to have a natural affinity with water and others really
struggle to cope in swimming lessons.

To cut a long story short, she has spent many water hours teaching all ages to swim in mainstream lessons & owned and run two small swimming businesses:

· Adult & child lessons, as Starfishes at Trinity Trainer Pool in Henley-On-Thames, Oxfordshire, UK.

· Courses for fearful adults, in partnership with Zoe Cheale, as A2Z Swim in Cheltenham, Glos & Didcot, Oxfordshire, UK. Now it is only a Facebook page.

· She has written lots of published articles since 2011 on the nature of ordinary human engagement with water:

· 27+ articles for Aquatic industry magazine ‘The Swimming Times’ & ‘The Leisure Review’.

· ‘How to Help People Float’, International Journal of Aquatic Research & Education, Https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/ijare/vol11/iss4/1

· ‘The Challenge of Water Entries’, International Journal of Aquatic Research & Education, Https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/ijare/vol13/iss3/2

Now:

· A director of the Lifesaving Foundation of Ireland CLG since 2021.
· Tutor, trainer & research advisor for the Institute of Aquaphobia.
· Seeks, mentors & supports aquatic professionals with an ‘aquatic mind set’.

In 2013 at the Human Evolution, Past, Present & Future Conference in London Andrea produced a poster titled “Shaped in Water?” and met some of the other presenters on the WHAT talks. (See PDF of the poster)

Recently Andrea was invited by Milton Nelms & Hilde Hansen to give three forty five minute presentations at the World Aquatics Development Conference in Lund, Sweden from 12th-15th January where she spoke about the critical role that safe aquatic
curiosity plays in the Learn-To-Swim & Drowning Prevention sectors.

The Talk: The Patient Ape: How Aquatic Insight Ratchets Up Adaptability

Sensing how to survive & thrive in water space demands significant unconscious computational time & energy but once accomplished the nervous system is more responsive & adaptive than before. The subconscious processing structures that the nervous
system builds for survival through spontaneous training in water (‘inter-animation’) are ready for sensing perpetual change & are ripe for co-adoption. This means that the significance of the increased readiness for safely engaging with water caused
by learning how to survive & move in its new and responsive milieu may have been hugely under estimated.

By developing effective physical inter-animation in water our human ancestors benefitted significantly from a much more adaptive nervous system which was trained to drive and be ready for patient thought. For the first time our ancestors had more time
to internally predict, plan, reflect & explore whilst free of the need for faster internal processing which is required on land. Patience is the mode of the nervous system that has adapted to the slower, more thrifty and concurrent movements that need
to made in water. In other words the nervous system needs to have successfully integrated myriad subconscious impulses from its own and externally generated movement sources to develop physical patience. This is likely to have been a very powerful
internal ratchet of evolutionary adaptation.

A flexible nervous system can choose to go fast, slow, wastefully, thriftily, concurrent or against the environment it is engaging with.

Inter-animation is not a consciously led process and effects of the movements it draws upon stay distributed inside the body of the learner as memorable emotional impulses rather than conscious reflections. This means that it is hard to describe what
happens during aquatic learning because the verbal system is not involved.
Those who are afraid of water have not yet been able to use inter-animation and they will not be able to do so until they feel safe enough for their bodily hypervigilance to slow down to a calm stop.
Modern swimming instruction can really hinder inter-animation and negative experiences only serve to compound fears. Once afraid of water the thought of being immersed in it generates a terrifying feeling of powerless isolation and even entrapment. The
talk will explore how crucial our personal internal states (emotions) are for successfully understanding all aquatic conundrums because water made reflective emotions our most powerful hidden survival tool.

Future Talks: Request for Future Speakers

The WHAT talks programme has provided consistently fascinating seminars & discussions with some really well known & respected guest speakers.

Remember, all talks are recorded for posterity. You can find the videos on our WHAT Talks web site or the YouTube channel.

However, the program for 2023 is still looking a little thin. If you have any recommendations, or would like to give a talk yourself, please let me know. I want to try to invite as many different guests to the platform before requesting previous
speakers to give a 2nd or 3rd.

Here's the full program as it stands now...

Thank you for your support.

---------------------------------------

I N V I T E


Algis Kuliukas is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.


Topic: WHAT Talk #16 - Andrea Andrews

Time: Feb 12, 2023 08:45 PM Perth

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83999867856?pwd=VjNCb0I0cGFCc0NCTTA4K1oxbThtUT09

Meeting ID: 839 9986 7856

Passcode: 844896

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--------------------------------------
Dr Algis Kuliukas
Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology

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