behaving predictably

"...cyclists whiz through crowds of pedestrians in the town square. If the pedestrians try to avoid an oncoming cyclist, they’re liable to surprise him and collide, but the cyclist can steer around them just fine if they ignore him and keep walking along at the same pace. “Behaving predictably, that’s the key,” Dr. Norman said."

To what extent is the mere usefulness of behaving predictably a cause of socially-enforced homogenization?

And then there's mirroring.

Nobody ever studies these things, but sometimes I feel the most amazing connection to the people with whom I do the old back and forth dance on the skinny sidewalk. Sometimes it can get pretty silly. But I always wonder; is my connection to this person merely an accidental product of chance? A snit in the fish school flow? Or is it a mark of some underlying connection? And if so, is this connection a highly agreeable one, or a highly disagreeable one? You might say that it is the second, for, after all, we are failing to accomplish the task at hand, namely walking by each other in a smooth and debugged fashion. This does not bode well for the possibilities of us jiving well in other areas. But then again, there is something charming about the fact that we can't help but move in syncopation, as though our bodies were trying to get some really basic fundamental message through to our wildly preoccupied 21st c. brains; "This one is special - this is the one!" And I seem to remember that many of these interactions end with an embarrassed smile, but a genuine one, and an acknowledgement of a shared experience. But then again, if you really consider the nature of the syncopated movements you see that the two bodies, being not mirrored but actually facing each other in real space, are actually performing exactly opposite movements, a dance of mistaken suppositions, disagreement of a noteable perfection. But this point of view might well ruin the logic behind a thousand forms of formal dance, and the physically undeniable law that opposites attract (and attune themselves to each others' vibrations) cannot be ignored. I suppose that in the end the feeling of syncronicity is all that matters and the old dictum that rational thought is 99% rationalization holds true.

I don't really think nonsense questions such as these have answers, but I do think that as all the larger nuggets of truth have already been culled from the gravel of nonsense that surrounds our known world, tinier and tinier truths become all we have to deal with. That is to say, a string of nonsense is still a string, and while the words may be complete gobblety-gook, the grammar of the string is a truth in itself.