Active and Passive Posture

So, there's the theory that your posture is one of the main indicators of your mental engagement in a situation.  In an active posture, one is leaned forward with the head pushed forward of the shoulders, and generally looking forward or down.  This is indicative of engagement in something that requires interaction: a game, a conversation, a piece of work, whatever.  And then there's the passive leaned back posture, where your shoulders are generally above or behind your hips, your head most likely leaned back.  This is indicative of a spectator role in the situation, and is generally the posture adopted by movie-goers, spectators at speaking events, and the less important people at meetings the world over.

Generally, the active posture is associated with work and activity.  Not necessarily the employment kind of work, but something that's definitely an outpouring of effort and energy in the cognitive sense.  Passive posture is associated with leisure, rest, and relaxation, i.e. the absence of work and activity. 

Now, let's think about this for a moment.  "Good" posture is generally upright, and balanced between these two extremes of being leaned forward, propped on your elbows, ready to howl your solution to the problem across the table, and the relaxed, head-back posture of "go ahead, you can have it".  Consider then, the lifestyle in which one or the other of these two things is engaged in with more vigor and force than the other.  Whereas one is engaging muscles to support the head up and back (passive posture), the other engages the mirrored posterior muscles to support the head forward and down (active posture). 

Given the proclivity to one or the other, a person's posture can be said to be the representation of the cognitive proclivities of a person.  I.e., people who are more upright and relaxed are often less engaged and focused on cognitive tasks, while people who tend to hunch forward have a tendency to focus their energies on specific tasks with great concentration.

All of that was to explain that my neck hurts.  I should watch a movie or something.