"One thing that happens in a live context is that we aren’t in isolation. We’re all experiencing it together. There is something inherently interpersonal about musical experience. It isn’t just an object to be received in isolation. [...] 

What I hope I can remind people of is the embodied nature of it, that it really comes from action. It comes from people. And that’s where this emotional content emerges in a sense of empathy, but comes out of this process of understanding that a person did this. That this is the mark of a hand or this is a gesture or a breath. That it was an embodied action."
-- Vijay Iyer, interviewed by Visi Tilak in the New York Times (October 31, 2013).

What Iyer describes for music is true for other forms of learning as well. We learn together; propinquity -- the physical or psychological proximity between people -- matters.

We cannot learn if we cannot empathize. Without empathy, we might gather facts, hoard details, skate on the surface of what Grotowski called "beautiful lies," but nothing more.

Above all, learning comprehends the whole: a mind embodied and a body in turn situated within physical space. We have always known this, but we yield nevertheless too often to ideals of abstraction that attenuate and disembody our thought. Let the piano and the drum and the bass curb that temptation, center us again in the communion of mind, body and soul.

Daniel Rabuzzi is the Executive Director at Mouse.