ABSTRACT
The term ‘psychomotor skills’ sounds both grand and mechanical. It is simply a way of drawing attention to those matters we tend to take for granted, like the relationship between the mind and the body. If the brain can reinterpret what we see, what is so palpably there, then it can affect the very physical habits of the everyday, and vice versa. There are so many things we take for granted in reading, like the way our eyes move, or the assumed correlations between visual symbols and meaning. We are complex creatures. We are not just cognitive learning machines. We are, to use the old-fashioned term, ‘instinct’ with instincts. The term ‘psychomotor’ is grand, drawing attention to this complexity. It is also mechanical in so far as we do so many things without thinking. It is not just habit, but something taken for granted.
