Movement, the Mind and the Scientific Method – An Article by Joe Webster

Within a Feldenkrais lesson we often use the imagination to help clarify and refine our self image. An example of this is the guided ‘body scan’ that often happens at the beginning of a lesson: a process in which you bring your attention to sensory feedback (proprioceptive, exteroceptive and interoceptive) to build a clearer idea (‘map’) of your physical self and how it relates to your external experience. 

For example, you may bring awareness to how the movement of the breath changes the shape of the chest, or which parts of you are in clear contact with the floor and which are lifted away, or how your limbs are lying in relation to each other. Details like these make up the content of our physical self image that we rely on when thinking about ourselves in movement, and in the planning stage of movement. Any inconsistencies in how you perceive yourself (consciously or unconsciously) and how you actually are can lead to dysfunctional movement. This is one of the reasons why the Feldenkrais Method aims to help us clarify, update, and refine our self image.

The self image is a complex concept to fully understand: it has physical aspects, neurological aspects, and psychological aspects. It is often connected with the idea of the Homunculus, a term which describes a neural map of our physical self within the brain. The Homunculus exists in two parts of our brain, the Motor Homunculus found in the frontal lobe which provides the blueprint for movement, and the Sensory Homunculus found in the parietal lobe which help make sense of the sensory data that we receive from the various parts of our body. The result of these two systems is a coordinated system that integrates sensory information and our physical movements. 

As mentioned above the ‘self image’ is also related to how we think about ourselves: it has a psychological component as well as the neurophysiological component. Feldenkrais himself gave us a perfect example of the psychological component of the self image.

Feldenkrais suffered from a knee injury he sustained while playing football in his youth. It didn’t fully restrict him and he was able to live an active lifestyle, even training in Judo and becoming the first approved Western teacher of the art in this period of his life. It wasn’t until he re-injured his knee while travelling that the injury began to restrict him. He was bedridden for multiple weeks and was offered a risky surgical procedure that had a 50/50 percent chance of success. He declined the surgery and began his own investigatory process: using his experience as a physicist and engineer he quickly acquired an in-depth knowledge of human anatomy, and from there began exploring how his knee worked and how he used it. It was in this process that he discovered that his emotional state was a contributing factor in how his knee was used and through exploring his attitude to life he could discover the precursors for his injury. As he continued his self investigation he found that when he was angry and in a rush he was more accident prone, and when he was stressed his knee pain would increase. 

Through subtle self-investigation and gentle movements, he discovered that he could begin to reorganise himself to move in a way that was not aggravating the injury. This began to transform how he perceived himself (his self image) and allowed him to act and move in a new way –  a key moment in the formation of the Feldenkrais Method. In using himself as his first case study he was able to validate the effectiveness of his new ideas and techniques. He lived into his eighties, walking and working with his damaged knee, never having had surgery on it. 

This is where his background of studying and writing about Emile Coue became important. 

Feldenkrais’ first published work was a translation of Emile Coue’s book on what he called ‘the practice of auto-suggestion’. According to Coue, we could create real changes in our state of health with the power of positive, affirmative thought. This idea could in today’s understanding be related to the placebo effect – that what we believe about a medical treatment affects its result. Often in placebo experiments a fake treatment is administered (eg. a non-active pill) but the patient’s belief that it is real and will be effective results in the person responding positively to the treatment anyway. Feldenkrais was interested in the idea of auto-suggestion and wrote a foreword with some of his own ideas in his translation of Coue’s work, which he called Thinking and Doing. 

[ I will include a link to a more in-depth exploration of the connection between Coue and Feldenkrais by trainer Scott Clark in the article credits for those who are interested in learning more.]

From Feldenkrais’ study of Coue he adopted the idea that the mind was powerful enough to affect its reality, but he was also a highly practical and pragmatic person. To him this was not to do with magic or faith, it was the result of the subtle power of the mind. He believed it to be a very sensitive measuring instrument; and that thought, imagination, and movement can serve as the scientific test bed for human change and improvement. Due to of Feldenkrais’ scientific background, he deduced that he could use thought and imagination as the hypothesis, movement as the experiment, and sensory feedback to analyse the results of the experiment. This form of action, sensing, and adjustment is the perfect platform for making real, practical changes in how we move and who we are. 

Thought and imagination as the ‘hypothesis’:

“We have a brain for one reason and one reason only – and that’s to produce adaptable and complex movements.”

Daniel Wolpert, a professor of Neurobiology, asserts that movement is the reason we have brains; that they developed so that we can move efficiently and effectively through our environment. It therefore makes sense that thought, which is an advanced function of the brain, is closely connected with movement. 

Evolutionary science also suggests that the very human ability of foresight –  the ability to look forward and use past information to plan future actions or prepare for future events –  is one of the many reasons that human beings have had such adaptive success as a species.

Foresight in this context is our imagination, experienced as thought. I am framing thought as the ‘hypothesis’ because  thought is movement in its planning stage. It’s a preparation for movement that gives the brain a rough estimate of how to move your body to achieve your intention. 

It is the beginning of movement – a movement of the mind before active initiation – and therefore a plan or a hypothesis for an actual movement. The movement that follows, then creates a set of sensory feedback results  to which the brain listens,  and adjusts to in a process of learning.

Movement as the ‘experiment’

When you imagine (or ‘think of’) a movement you create the hypothesis for what you would like to  occur – -the speed, quality, or effort that you believe you will feel in the action. Then in the action that follows you have a ‘baseline’ to which you can contrast or compare your actual movement experience. The point when a movement is initiated is the first place you can start to judge its effectiveness. You can start to track the quality of this movement: is the movement smooth or jerky, is it fast or slow, is it intense or gentle, and so on.

In this way you can find if you are moving in a way that matches with how you would like to move in this specific action and, over time, whether you are moving in a way that matches with your idea of how you would like to move through life. 

We often use this process during Feldenkrais lessons, guiding the student to think through the movement first, imagining how each body part would travel, how it would feel. In this way the student creates an initial map of the movement that is then updated and improved in response to the sensory feedback that comes with repetition of the action. With each cycle of imagination, performance (movement), and comparison, the student updates how they think of themselves, improving the accuracy of  their ‘Self Image’ for other actions in the future.

The ‘Self Image’ is not a fixed experience; it’s plastic in that you have the ability to learn and improve. Examples can be found in any physical activity you do: initially you may not be good at all in the physical skill needed, and then through practice and effort you learn how to organise yourself more effectively for the activity and improvement follows.

Let’s take skipping (jump-rope) as an example. There is a spatial component of the physical activity – how high do I need to jump to avoid the rope, how high do I need to have my arms to avoid my head at the height of the swing;  coordination component – how can I time my jump to coincide with the swing of my arms and the trajectory of the rope; and a stamina component – how can I organise myself for energy efficient movement so I don’t get tired so quickly. 

Less coordinated or clumsy movement is also less energy efficient and therefore will tire you out more quickly (the same experience can be clearly felt with swimming and learning to swim). The more you train in these three areas and your self image improves becoming increasingly accurate, the more your movement efficiency improves. 

This is why many sportsmen and women use imagination (‘visualisation’) prior to performance to help them organise their movement to hit peak ability when they compete. Current neuroscience provides credibility for this type of training with the discovery that the neurons / neural connections that fire in our brain when performing a movement also fire when the movement is performed in our imagination. 

Another important stage in the journey of a Feldenkrais lesson are the rest periods. We often take periodic rests within a Feldenkrais movement lesson, these periods help the student to orient to a calm and attentive attentional state, as well as providing muscle rest and time for sensorial comparison after different physical movement combinations. 

Rest as time for ‘experiment analysis’ and ‘updating our hypothesis’

In relation to the brain, rest is a sorting and discarding stage, where the brain processes the information it has received through sensory feedback during the prior movement explorations. It’s a useful phase after action that helps embed useful learning, or remove unnecessary and inefficient habits that have been identified during the movement experimentation.

Rest is also deeply connected to harnessing the creative possibilities of the brain. Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Salvador Dali all used the hypnagogic state (the mental state just before sleep) to come up with new ideas, or novel approaches to existing problems they were trying to solve. Edison famously held a small metal ball when drifting off to sleep while contemplating a problem to which he needed a solution. When he actually dropped into sleep and left this useful liminal mental state, the ball would drop and he would be awoken. Rest periods can be viewed as a potent stage as when used in scientific processes; they give the possibility for connections between previously unknown aspects to be made, and realisations can emerge that would not have arisen within the more organised periods of mental activity. 

Feldenkrais also appreciated the famous hypnotist Milton Erikson, who used the hypnagogic state to work with patients as part of his hypnosis therapy. The Feldenkrais Method is not a hypnotic method that offers suggestions to the unconscious, but it does use the rest state and imagination to work with what we are conscious of, and try to upgrade and improve our self awareness. 

We consciously use attending to our movement to gain insight through experience. This can lead to discoveries of connections between distant body parts that seemingly have no logical connection, but through attending to movement some felt connection becomes apparent. After such discoveries it is important to rest and let your brain and nervous system process what has been learnt.

In a Feldenkrais lesson you are given a rare opportunity to bring your attention back to yourself and your subjective experience. You are encouraged to pay attention to yourself in movement and in rest. As you are guided through an ‘Awareness Through Movement’ lesson you gain self-awareness by paying attention as you go through various movement puzzles, all of which provide sensory feedback and form the basis for clarifying and updating your Self Image. Then, in rest, you learn through comparison of difference in sensations which help you to observe the changes that the lesson has provoked in your system, so you can let go of what is not important and hold on to what is. Through this process you develop an advanced awareness of yourself, which serves you well outside of the movement lesson, as you move through life.  

Sources

Moshe Feldenkrais & Émile Coué – By Scott Clark

Thinking and Doing: A Monograph by Moshe Feldenkrais

The Real Reason for Brains – Ted Talk by Daniel Wolpert

The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans? – By Thomas Suddendorf

Autopilot – The Art and Science of doing nothing – By Andrew Smart

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