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Mind and Motion; by Alain Berthoz Body-Image, Movement and Consciousness; by Carl Ginsburg Case Study: Working with a Young Child; by Lucia Schuette-Ginsburg Alain Berthoz Mind and Motion: The Brain’s Sense of Movement Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, 337pp., $65, ISBN 0-674-80109-1 Translated from Le Sens du Mouvement Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1997 by Giselle Weiss. Reviewed by Carl Ginsburg, Ph.D. (Published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol.8, No.11 (2001), pp. 65-73) As a teacher of movement and awareness for twenty-five years, I have from a practical perspective been working with the relations between movement, sensation, perception, and cognition to guide my pupils and clients to improved human functioning, and increased awareness. I have observed during this time with myself and many others that improvement in one aspect, for example movement coordination, translates to other areas of cognitive functioning such as perception and cognition. I work most directly with attention and sensory awareness, particularly as to how one senses one’s self in moving. To give a very simple example, I might ask what do you sense in your ribs and spine as you shift your weight sitting from one side to the other and how are the sensations different on the right and the left? As an alternative I might just gently bring my hand to the area of interest while the person is moving, which awakens then the sensory awareness for the person of aspects of moving normally unattended to. Something then is perceived in the action that was not available to one’s conscious state. The interesting thing is that these changes have so profound an effect. A person who has difficulty with balance may find this functioning easier. Another person may find a change in eyesight, and another an easing of low back pain. Others may find that un-sensed and unacknowledged emotions may arise. (For more details see Ginsburg, 1999.) It is hard for most people to appreciate how little they know of themselves in regards to these basic aspects of living, or how these simple and apparently uninteresting aspects of ourselves can have an influence on the higher aspects of human life and culture. As Alain Berthoz, in his groundbreaking book, The Brain’s Sense of Movement, points out, “Plato forgot the body.” It is a huge omission that continues into today and affects thinking in all our attempts to understand such aspects of ourselves as perception, cognition, emotion, and that major topic of this journal, consciousness. There is a change happening. One sees recently a revival of interest in thinkers such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty who pioneered in rediscovering the importance of body in philosophy (see Petitot, 1999), and a whole spate of books taking the new buzzword, “embodiment” quite seriously, Damasio, 1999, Lakoff and Johnson, 1999, Lakoff and Nunez, 2000, Port and van Gelder, 1995. Recent issues of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Nunez and Freeman, 1999, and Thompson, 2001 have developed the theme further. This is just a small sampling. Freeman, 2000, contrasts two approaches to understanding such nervous system processes as perception. The approach that he labels materialist and cognitivist sees perception as passive, involving the transfer and processing of information from the outside world that is transduced by receptors into neural activity that cascades through brainstem and thalamus into a sensory cortex. Further processing results in a binding into a representation of an object, and sends activity to other centers resulting in some sort of motor activity. This has been the majority view. Freeman labels his own contrasting approach, pragmatist. Here perception is considered as an active process. Freeman states that humans and animals maintain a stance of attention and expectation where the focus is on the limbic system, which has the neural machinery for directing action in space-time that is in essence intentional. Movement and perception are inseparable. Up to recently most neurological research has supported the materialist – cognitivist view in part because it was historically easier to look at individual neurons and trace neural pathways, in part because in the laboratory it was easier to keep an animal still and often anesthetized while presenting to the passive animal a target stimulus, (one could thereby keep the number of variables minimal), and in part because it seemed reasonable to investigate one sensory system in depth as exemplary of other systems. A lot was found out this way, especially about vision. Much of it fits with our engineering notions and the invention of the computer. It is easy to imagine that cognition can be modeled as one can design software for a computer. In terms of what I understand out of the phenomenon of my own work, this cognitivist view seems incompatible with what I am observing out of my personal first person experience and the experience of my working with others. It can be that as I am not conscious of the inner workings of my nervous system, that conscious experience is simply epiphenominal and thereby irrelevant to understanding the machinery of my nervous system. I think not. The structure of experiencing is ignored at the peril of forming serious misconceptions as to the nature of what we are investigating. There are, however, numerous other difficulties with the cognitivist approach, not the least of which is the binding problem. Where does it all get put together? Even in considering movement, action and activity are integrated and bound into a coherency. Inadequate scientific conceptions often have a life of their own. Consider the long reign of behaviorism in psychology. But fashions do change as new tools and new understandings evolve. It is now becoming more clear to many researchers that perception is multi-sensory, that movement is the essential result of brain activity, and that an integrative dynamic understanding is needed that is more biologically oriented. We need good scientific work to substantiate this view. In The Brains Sense of Movement Alain Berthoz, who is a professor at the College de France, and director of the laboratory of Physiology of Perception and Action, brings together the evidence in a clear, comprehensive, and coherent manor, much of which may be new to even readers of JCS. To put the contributions of Berthoz into perspective I would like to take a very common and seemingly over simple example to expose the complexity of our embodied life. Since we share this with other animals, I chose a scene of my playing with a dog. I am out on the grass with my dog. The dog sees a stick on the ground, picks it up in his mouth, and runs towards me. He stops when he gets near and looks up with his eyes until he sees that we make eye contact. He tips his head and looks up towards me again. I do not respond. He then drops the stick at my feet, runs away from me at the same time watching, and comes back until I pick up the stick and throw it. Now he runs in the direction in which I threw the stick. He stops a moment, perks his ears; the stick falls, and the dog runs in the direction of the sound. He picks up the stick, runs back towards me and drops the stick at my feet. I throw it again. We continue until one of us feels enough is enough and the game is over. I am sure that nearly everyone is familiar with this common scenario. As A human being I have the advantage, or perhaps disadvantage, of being able to describe the event. I can say or write the word, stick, play, game, etc. The dog does not share this possibility with me. Even without language the dog can communicate his desire to interact with me and play the game. Let us then take language and human cognition out of consideration to look at the event in more detail, except in so far as we need language to communicate about the event itself. I mean by this to examine the raw sensory and perceptual experience. This is difficult because how we think, that is, how we make concepts, theories, and models about our selves and the world that we live in is constrained by the mediums in which we must operate and communicate. These include the domains of social activities such as languaging, philosophizing, and making scientific experiments. We are equally constrained by the nervous system itself, and in our ability to sense, and perceive. Thus what can be put into a cognitive mode such as language depends in part on what language we have to use. Even more so how we attend narrowly, or open our experiential space has a strong effect on our conceptual conclusions. One thing that can be noticed by an observer and myself in the event is that the behaviors of the dog and myself are coupled together. The dog looks at me; I look at the dog; our eyes track each other. You could say that our actions are coordinated with each other. We are also coordinated around the outside event of the moving stick. We both watch the stick and listen for and anticipate the sound of the stick hitting the ground. I can sense my own attending and also notice the dog’s eyes and ears and the behavioral signs that he is attending. It must be that both the dog and I perceive the stick as an object in the external space. Otherwise our actions with the stick do not make sense. One some level both the dog and I have an awareness of the stick as a vehicle for the “game,” which is an activity that we both have experienced before and therefore remembered as pleasurable. It should also be clear from our behavior that I perceive the dog, and the dog perceives me. The dog and I may not share language or some other higher cognitive processes, but we must have some common processes, cognitive events, brain and body processes, to produce the common awareness. Perhaps we have even some common feeling of enjoyment. I am going out on a limb here to postulate what the dog is consciously experiencing. Nevertheless, the evidence of the dog’s behavior, his energetic excitement, the attentiveness of his eyes and ears, the way he runs for the stick, and so forth is similar enough to human behavior to make an educated guess. If we look further at the dog’s behavior, there is considerably more to notice. As the dog sees the stick on the ground, he lowers his head, brings his mouth to the stick, opens his jaw and grasps the stick. He then lifts his head and begins his run back towards me. How does he accomplish such a complex series of actions and tasks? Somehow he must put his head at the right distance to take the stick with his teeth. He must grasp the stick and with a complex synergy of muscular actions of his jaw muscles and know when the stick is securely held. Other synergies are involved so that he can lift his head, focus his eyes on me to see where his is to run toward and begin his run back to my position. To do this he must perceive his own action, and anticipate the consequences so that he can match the perceptions of his own body with the stick, the external space of his environment, and where I am in the space. When I pick up the stick to throw it, I do the same thing. I also anticipate the feel and perception of my action before I act and with almost automatic movements and without forced or narrowly focused attention, match the results of my action against the anticipated perception. I am conscious, but most of what happens is subliminal, and the actual activities of my nervous system itself, unconscious. My conscious perceptions when I attend to them include my self-movement, the orientation of my body parts to each other in my internal space, my orientation especially of my head to the gravity field, the external space around myself and what is present there including the dog, the ground and the stick, the stability of the visual space, the timing of the various actions that I carry out, and so forth. The coordination of all of this is so well learned and organized, so accomplished that it is easy for me to act without reflecting on how I do it or upon what I need to attend to, or even thinking there is any importance to any of the processes involved. And yet the complexity involved is huge. There are philosophical and scientific questions here that have confounded thoughtful human beings throughout history and on into this present time. Even before we tackle the so-called hard problem of consciousness, there are many problems here that have not been addressed. Unfortunately many thinkers have been seduced into thinking that either the problems here are handled by what we already know about the nervous system, the physiology of movement and cognitive processes, or that these are the easy problems of the brain, mind and body. What is not attended to can sometimes turn out to be far more important than what we put in front of our noses. What we do not see or notice is not named, and therefore missing from our conceptual structures, the pictures we make of our selves and the world. Our conceptual notions are then limited by these blind spots, as are the ways in which we act upon these notions. Getting out of this trap is not easy. We are entranced by what we think we already know. Alain Berthoz is out to fill in the blind spots. He has been doing this through the work of his own laboratory, but he also has a grasp of the burgeoning literature in the field. He necessarily opposes those trends in modern cognitive science, such as functionalism (what Freeman labels materialist-cognitivist), in which it is postulated that cognitive functions can be separated from the organism in which they are operative. Although, as he points out, such a tactic can be valid in engineering applications where we can separate software from hardware, biological systems really are different. The computer may be a useful metaphor at times, but it is also a dangerous one. For one thing it obscures the nature of both the way the nervous and corresponding physiological systems function in real living organisms, and the way we understand our own lived experience. I have created the story of the dog and myself to bring out the point, and phrased the story to introduce some of the notions used by Berthoz to grapple with the problems involved. This blind spot about the “body” while not universal has a number of causes. One of which is that for many of us in daily life we are limited in the way we attend to our sensing, feeling and perceiving of our surroundings and ourselves. Another is that once a conception is established and passed through generations, it becomes fixated in people’s understanding. Lastly there is the question of language. For a long period of history only five senses were enumerated. With regard to the sense of movement, proprioception, sometimes noted as a sixth sense, Berthoz asks, “By what twist did language suppress the sense most important to survival?” Berthoz introduces his book with a quote from Kant: “Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to … the understanding and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding.” And, “It is indeed the common fate of human reason to complete its speculative structures as speedily as may be, and only afterwards to enquire whether the foundations are reliable.” Berthoz says, “Plato forgot the body. This book is an apology for the body.” Berthoz isn’t alone in this. As I have pointed out, the concept of embodied cognition is today beginning to be more accepted. What Berthoz does though is to create a more solid ground to stand on. His basis includes neurological studies related to sensing, perceiving, and moving, studies of sensory physiology, the psychology of perception, studies of movement itself, and the relation of all of this to phenomenal experience. He reports on his own scientific investigations and on what he discovers through an overview of the scientific literature on related research. His theme is the relationships between perception and action. This he says is the preferable model for studying the functions of the nervous system. As he points out, “Unlike language they (such studies) lend themselves to analysis of human and animal behavior as well as to the neural mechanisms that underlie them, across the multitude of species that evolution has produced.” A Second point he makes is that perception is more than just an interpretation of sensory messages, and is both constrained by action and involves the internal simulation of action. To put it as J.J. Gibson did some years ago, one must move in order to perceive, but also perceive in order to move. A third point is that the senses need to refer to perceptual function. One needs to notice that there are far more than five senses. Clearly the vestibular senses, and the proprioceptors of the muscles and joints, as well as special senses such as echolocation and the magnetic sense that exist for certain species need to be included. One could also add in relation to perceptual functions, the sense of movement, space, balance, effort, self, etc. What is given to the senses is actually sought out in relation to the needs of the organism in terms of where it is going and what it wants to do. The brain filters sensory information picked up by the sensory surfaces according to its own plans. A fourth point is that survival depends on movement that is commanded or controlled in relation to anticipation with extremely fast and dynamic processes. It is something that is vital for both predator and prey in nature, no matter which one succeeds in the end. Berthoz puts it, “The brain is above all a biological machine for moving quickly while anticipating.” In order to carry out functions in this biological sense, a nervous system cannot process sensory information independently. Berthoz emphasizes that there is a necessary factor that has barely been identified let alone studied and discussed. This is coherence. Without it perceptual and motor disturbances are the consequence. Coherence is a strange, hard to define term. Yet it is to be seen as fundamental to understanding biological systems. Varela (1986) contrasted two modes in biological thinking. In what he designates as the standard current view, living organisms are conceptualized as if they were a collection of independent parts, where each part contributes to the overall functioning. The emphasis is on understanding the components. Varela calls this a logic of correspondence. The alternative is to recognize the autonomy of living organisms and notice that an organism will act in its environmental medium according to its own internal structures, and its sense of regulation and balance. Varela designates this as a logic of coherence, where coherence emphasizes the interconnectedness, internal consistency, and unity of the living system. Berthoz points out that sensory inputs are in essence ambiguous. For example the vestibular sensation of accelerating is the same as the sensation of braking in the opposite direction. Sensory inputs are also staggered in time. If you try to move your finger in synchrony with your foot the signals from the foot arrive at the cerebellum in twice the time it takes for signals to arrive from the finger. For the tongue the delay is by a factor of ten. And sensory inputs are often fuzzy. Yet through perception we can move finger, foot and tongue to the same beat. Or we can view a pointillist painting and perceive a scene even though the painting consists of small points of color. We can detect our accelerating or slowing in space. Sensation is necessary, but not enough. Coherence is essential and the loss of it devastating to functioning and stability. Let us examine some details about proprioception as revealed in experimental work in applying a small 50 to 100 Hz vibration to a muscle of the arm. In a number of laboratories, including that of Berthoz, two phenomena are observed. If the arm is free to move, there will be a reflex contraction or activation of the vibrated muscle. If the arm is placed immobilized on a table as the vibration is applied, the subject in the experiment will experience an illusion that the arm is moving without being controlled along with two different perceptions. These are a feeling of change of position of the arm in space and a perception of the velocity of the illusory movement. Now the opposing (antagonist) muscle is activated rather then the muscle to which the vibration is applied. Berthoz describes this as, “The brain activates the muscle, perceived to be in motion, as if it were the perception (and not the sensation triggered by the receptors) that leads to the contraction.” Note also that it is the perception that is consciously experienced and not the sensory signals. The myotactic or stretch reflex, that had been discovered by Sherrington at the beginning of the twentieth century also turns out to be much more complex than was first understood. The reflex, which is triggered by the spindle receptors in the muscle, allows the arm, for example, to resist a force exerted on the arm, say the sudden weight of an object placed in the hand. The spindles when stretched emit nerve signals proportional to the elongation of the muscle and the velocity of the stretch. Muscle tissue actually contracts slowly. If the reflex were just a simple reaction to the stretch, the reflex would not be able to match the force. There would be no coordination of holding the object. The spindles as it turns out are also responding to velocity, that is the first derivative of the force. This allows for a dynamic anticipation such that the timing of the muscle contraction matches the timing of the stretching. Anticipation here is preconscious. Yet it is built into the nature of the sensory receptors in the muscles. What I didn’t know myself before reading Berthoz is that nearly all sensory receptors detect the derivatives of the variables that activate them. Berthoz notes, “Evolution obviously selected receptors capable of predicting the future.” We have moved a long way from stimulus response models of how sensory systems work. The vibration in the experiment simulates stretching, but what about the illusion? Illusion must involve activity at higher levels of the nervous system and they have their place in resolving sensory ambiguities. Different illusions are created, depending on whether the subject of the experiment is seated or standing or leaning on the arm. From the activation of the receptors and the context of the global state of the body, the cerebral cortex works out a perception of displacement and activates the muscles that correspond to the perception. Berthoz says, “The brain assigns a status to sensory information based on its assessment of the general state of the body. We are very far from a simple potentiometer.” Berthoz also details the functioning of the vestibular system and its relation to visual and spatial perception particularly related to the detection of body movements. It is now known that the sensory receptors here are capable of detecting the second derivative of angular displacement and some receptors are even sensitive to the third derivative of movement or jerk. Evolution has enabled the nervous system through the receptors to simplify the creation of perception by the nervous system by reducing or eliminating the need of calculating in the senses that we commonly understand it. Again coherence is the consequence, for example, that in our visual perception of the world the world stays still rather than moves, as would be the case as images move on the retina. All of this relates to the movement of the eyes, the balance in gravity, and the body image itself. The loss of this coherence or its lack of development can be seriously disabling to those few individuals who have this problem. I mention these examples to point out how little we know about the integrative activities of the nervous system, and how little we understand about perception. I find that in working with individual persons that I must explore what is happening at the phenomenological level since there is so little good theory to rely on. Or perhaps that is a blessing, since in my exploring with a person I have so few preconceptions. Berthoz is humble enough to point out the many areas in which we are ignorant. Although he devotes a whole chapter to coherence, even pointing out that such conditions such as autism seem to involve disturbances in the development of coherence, he notes, “A genuine theory of coherence has yet to be constructed.” Or at another point he mentions, “The neural basis of the sense of effort remains to be discovered.” On the other hand he shows how detailed investigations of the colliculus have revealed how the brain handles spatial and temporal coherence of messages from different senses, or how different senses are combined despite the neural time shift that I mentioned before. This book then is a treasure of material relating to my complaint in my previous paper (Ginsburg, 1999) that “reductionism is neither a pragmatic nor effective approach … to understanding the integrative aspects of the nervous system.” How much this book contributes to the field of consciousness studies depends upon how one sees the relation of nervous system processes to experience. Berthoz is not only cognizant of the importance of phenomenal experience, but shows how his laboratory science relates to what is experienced as conscious perception. Merleau-Ponty is an important resource for him. I believe that this is an important book, filling a gap that has needed filling for a long time. There are areas that Berthoz skirts such as the emotions, or does not include such as learning and development. A book that covers as much ground as this needs to limit itself at some point so as to be accessible to the reader. There is more than enough here to challenge our thinking. I thus highly recommend it. I particularly recommend it to those already committed to the opposing camp. It should at least bring some to question the already established view. References Damasio, A. (1999), The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace). Freeman, W. (2000), How Brains Make up their Minds (New York: Columbia University Press). Ginsburg, C. (1999), ‘Body-image, movement and consciousness: Examples from a somatic practice in the Feldenkrais Method’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 6(2-3), pp.79-91. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999), Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books). Lakoff, G. and Nunez R. (2000), Where Mathematics Comes from: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (New York: Basic Books). Nunez R. and Freeman W. (1999), Reclaiming Cognition: The Primacy of Action, Intention and Emotion (Thorverton, U.K: Imprint Academic). Also published as Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (11-12). Petitot, J., Varela, F., Pachoud, B., and Roy, J. (1999), Naturalizing Phenomenology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Port, R. and van Gelder T. (1995), Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) Thompson, E. (2001), ‘Empathy and consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (5-7), pp.1-32. Varela, F. (1986) ‘Laying down a path in Walking: A biologist’s look at a new biology and its ethics’. Cybernetics 2 (1) pp..6-15. Body-Image, Movement and Consciousnness: Examples from a Somatic Practice in the Feldenkrais Method By Carl Ginsburg,Ph.D. (Published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, No. 2-3, 1999, pp.79-91.)Abstract: We think of consciousness as a thing. Observation of our experience indicates that we are actually consciousing, and that experiencing is closely related to movement and the muscular sense. The position of this paper is that mind and body are not two entities related to each other but an inseparable whole while functioning. From concrete examples from The Feldenkrais Method, it is shown that changes in the organization of movement and functioning are intimately related and that one cannot change without conscious experience. Implications for the resolution of controversies in the field of consciousness studies and the neurosciences are suggested. Introduction: The Importance of Movement It is odd that we have made the activity of sentience into a noun. We say consciousness and not consciousing, implying that consciousness is a thing. Yet for other related activities we say we are sleeping or that we are dreaming. The specific activities of a conscious mind are, however, verbs. We imagine, look at, think, listen, observe, feel, bring attention to, meditate, etc. We speak of consciousness as a state. Yet everything we know of consciousness is connected to movement. In order to see the book on the table across the room I must make an act of attention. I turn my head and eyes and focus at the distance. Whatever impinges on the retina is not what I see. This may be of a particular size shape and produce a certain color, but I see a book. That means my perception is organized to see a particular thing. If I fix myself so that nothing moves and the image stays on the retina for so many seconds I will no longer see. But this is hard to do. My eyes naturally move all the time. If I watch my own process, I find a continuous shifting. My attention moves; my thought moves; there is an arising and falling of each distinct thought or moment of where my attention is directed. And as this activity continues, I have the ability to also observe the activity, the mind watching itself. Do we confuse ourselves by making a noun, consciousness? As I continue I will use both the noun and verb form. I take a walk with my dog. My vision puts me in spatial flow where the movement through the landscape is my walking itself, and at the same moment directing my path. A rock wall comes into view and I skillfully step over it. I know in my sensation of my moving when I have lifted my legs high enough so that my feet come over the wall. I do not have to stop and think about it. It is all part of my immediate conscious experience. And yet I am surely not consciousing all the workings of my biological system. I stop to look for a rock to sit on in a dry arroyo. I find what I seek. Sitting, I am facing the sandy bed of the arroyo, and about twenty yards away a twisted mountain oak sprouting out of the rocks of the arroyo wall spreads its branches over the arroyo. I feel my breathing become easier, a flowing in my chest. I am enjoying the beauty of this view. My dog approaches. He sits looking at me. I lift my hand to pat his head and he licks my hand. I am attending, intending, interacting in sequence, and continuing that activity until I sleep again. I can describe all this (another activity of consciousing) through the movement of my breath, palate, voice box, lips and tongue, or through the movement of my fingers on the computer. I can describe it because I experienced it. We say it is now in my memory. My experience was not, cannot be, raw sense data. On the contrary I was perceiving space, flow, my self in moving, objects in the landscape, the dog, sounds of birds, the feel of myself that I describe as aesthetic enjoyment. My moving itself is irreducible because it is coordinated, flowing, integrated and not separate from what I am perceiving with my other senses. When I am remembering, I am not re-experiencing exactly, but bringing forth fragments of the experience. From this I rapidly make sentences. When I write my fingers hit the keys in response to the rising words that at the same time I am sub-vocalizing, and the corresponding letters are struck without stopping to think which letters match the word. My finger awareness includes their orientation to the keyboard. My consciousing is shifting with each moment in time. The overall effect is a coordinated moving flow in time. My activity is organized and integrated. So are the perceptions that are essential for this integration of action and activity. At the same time I am oriented in the space of my environment, and oriented in the body space so that when I lift my hand I know where my hand is relative to myself and relative to the environmental space. How precise this is can be tested by closing one's eyes and moving one's hand in front of one's face. You will see in your mind's eye some sort of image of your hand. It need not be very distinct but the image will correspond to a position in space. Open your eyes and check the correspondence. For almost everyone the image will correspond exactly to the position of your hand. In the activity of my normal consciousing I am also oriented in time. I situate myself between past and future. I am aware that I have a history. I need not bring this up at any moment, but I can bring it up immediately when needed. Imagine yourself waking up from sleep in a hotel in a foreign country. At first you may be disoriented. You wonder where you are located. You might imagine yourself in a familiar space only to realize that that is not where you are and you do not even know what time or day it is. You have an uncomfortable sensation within yourself. As you come more awake you then orient yourself. Now you are awake and consciousing. You know where the bathroom is. You can step on the floor, erect yourself in gravity and not trip over the chair. I am gradually making an inventory of some of the mundane activities of consciousing and deliberately leaving out such issues as symbolic thinking, subjective qualia, etc. that take attention away from the biological roots of what we put under the heading of consciousness. Many of our activities are not in the realm of consciousing. When I erect myself in gravity, I normally direct myself to do so. I might on the other hand be in a somnambulistic state. I can still do so having previously organized this activity. In addition much of the muscular activity to accomplish this action is not under conscious control, but is directed through the vestibular system, the extra pyramidal muscular responses, the vestibular-optical reflexes. I can stand up without paying mind to my action and act habitually and probably inefficiently. On the other hand I can develop my awareness in such a way that my experience of my acting is rich with knowing my self orientation, my relation to space and gravity, my sense of timing, and I will stand elegantly and efficiently using a minimum of muscular effort. The Question of Consciousness The fact that acts can be done with minimal awareness, or in some cases none at all is confusing to philosophers and scientists. It is thought then that consciousness has no biological function, that we could live without it. Paradoxically without consciousness no philosopher or scientist would ever be concerned about the issue. A more significant contention is that without consciousing no child could learn to erect himself or herself, and no child could self direct the activity needed for biological survival. The organization of erect standing and walking is undoubtedly the most complex thing a brain accomplishes in life, and at this moment in history well beyond the ability of the most sophisticated and rapid computers. My point here is that all human action requires an integration of conscious and nonconscious activity, and also requires immense and complex organization. We do not usually study ourselves with this attention to what we experience. Nor do we consider the degree to which our activity results from the integration of so many different levels. On the contrary we tend to study the visual system as an isolated entity, or the behavior of a subject in responding to a target stimulus. We do so because our analytical cognitive abilities are easy to use. We have organized cognitive systems available, which through complex organized entities such as language, symbolic pictorial representations, mathematics, we can represent ideas as images, sentences, or mathematical equations. Such complex organizations make simplicity possible. We tend not to consider how these capacities come into an organized state. We use these systems as if everything of significance can be expressed within them, without concern for the degree to which they also limit our thought processes. If we allow it to be so, we end up limited by the linearity of our communication systems, and specifically by the linearity of the logical structure of thought that is symbolically mediated, i.e., driven by the needs of language or other communication. Integration, coordination, interconnectedness is then hard to understand. It is easier to see functions as modularized and not worry how separate functions become integrated actions. Can we develop another way to think? The question of consciousness is one, then, that has baffled attempts to deal with it in a structured analytical way. There is a gap between what we can know of our own lived experience, which depends on consciousness or consciousing itself, and what we can postulate as an explanation of how consciousness is possible. Thus the controversies so familiar to those involved in consciousness studies. In this paper I wish to take an entirely different tack, and shift the thinking. My professional experience is in the area of movement learning in relation to developing awareness using The Feldenkrais Method. Although I work in the realm of a particular method, I believe that the success of this work reveals something quite general about the workings of the nervous system and indeed can show that the activities of consciousness or consciousing are essential to human biological life. What I propose is that the phenomenology of the Feldenkrais method allows one to connect changes in the domain of inner experience with changes in the organization of outer behavior. It thus provides a way to observe the correlations between the domain of phenomenology and the domain of external observation. The Somatic Insight Moshe Feldenkrais wrote in 1964. "My contention is that the unity of mind and body is an objective reality, that they are not entities related to each other in one fashion or another, but an inseparable whole while functioning. To put the point more clearly I contend that a brain without motor functions could not think or at least that the continuity of mental functions is assured by corresponding motor functions." Feldenkrais goes on to note that, "We have no sensation of the inner workings of the central nervous system; we can feel their manifestation only as far as the eye, the vocal apparatus, the facial mobilization and the rest of the soma provoke our awareness. This is the state of consciousness!" (Emphasis mine.) And lastly the conclusion resulting from these contentions: "..the state of the cortex is directly and legibly visible on the periphery through the attitude, posture, and muscular configuration, which are all connected. Any change in the nervous system translates itself clearly through a change of attitude, posture and muscular configuration. They are not two states but two aspects of the same state." With one stroke we have eliminated the mind-body problem. The stance taken here by Feldenkrais is hypothetical, and also operative. It is a working position, substantiated by the practical work he had been exploring for thirty years, and shared by a pioneering group of thinker-explorers of the twentieth century who were interested in finding practical ways of furthering human development. Among these people were F. Mathias Alexander, Heinrich Jacoby, Ida Rolf, Gerda Alexander, Elsa Gindler and her many students, Charlotte Selver, Emmi Pikler, Berta Bobath among them, and of course Feldenkrais who was influenced by this movement through his contact with Jacoby, but also through his work in Judo and contact with oriental teachers. (For an overview see Johnson, 1995.) Elsa Gindler, whose "arbeit am menschen" (work on the human) was so influential, cured herself of tuberculosis by so refining her awareness of her breathing that she taught herself to rest her diseased lung and breathe more fully with the healthy lung. F. Mathias Alexander discovered through extensive self-examination how he could inhibit habits of use of his head and neck that interfered with his voice, something essential for his original profession as an actor. Berta Bobath developed new approaches to physical therapy that involve a neuro-developmental approach, and Emmi Pikler, a radical way to rear children through her detailed observations of development. All of those mentioned developed practices of embodied awareness. Such practices show a correlation between a phenomenology of awareness and the refining and reorganization of human skills and capabilities. In the short space of this essay, it is not possible to explore any of these practices in any depth. However, I will take some specific examples from my practice of the Feldenkrais Method to illustrate what can be learned from these somatic practices. We can emphasize again that there is no mind-body problem from this perspective. What I hope to suggest is a direction to the solution of the other standing problems of consciousness. Examples from the Feldenkrais Method We call our processes in the Feldenkrais method, lessons, and they are in two styles. Awareness Through Movement lessons are presented verbally, usually to groups. The presenter guides the lesson by directing the participants through a series of movement sequences that increase the level of self-awareness of the participant, and at the same time increase the level of sensitivity to the nuances of kinesthetic sensation. Here is a particular Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lesson. As with many of these lessons, it has a large element of exploration in which the learner is directed to explore different movements with the attention directed to the quality of execution rather than the size of movement. Everything is done softly with emphasis on expanding awareness. For the sake of brevity I will only describe the major elements of the lesson. At first one is directed to sit comfortably cross-legged on the floor and to put the hands together as if praying with the elbows out. The instruction then is to keep the bases of the two palms together and separate the fingers from each other without moving the elbows. One tries both hands and then just the right and just the left. One then turns the hands so that the fingers point away from the body. The same movements are repeated. For many people it is quite difficult and only a small movement is possible to do comfortably. Now one is instructed to think that the right eye contains something like a small telescope where the lens is. One then looks to the right and then up and around so that one makes a slow careful circular movement with the right eye attending to any parts of the movement which are not smooth and easy. By moving very slowly, delicately and attentively through the difficult portions of the movement, one begins to improve the quality of moving the eye. One can then make circles in each direction. Finally one combines this movement with the movement of the hands. Returning to the movement of the hands, the following effects are generally noted. First the right hand is now more capable than the left in the movement of keeping the base of the palms together and lifting the fingers away. Secondly the distribution of tonus throughout the entire right side of the body has changed. This is observable to an outside person observing the face, the shoulders etc. What we have here is a clear demonstration of the effect of directed conscious awareness on the activity of the nervous system itself. Note that in moving the right eye the left eye automatically moves also. Thus the changes in the distribution of muscular activity are not the consequence of the movement per se. The change then can only have resulted from the directing of awareness to the movement of the right eye. And this change is not localized with the eye, but distributed through the musculature of the entire right side and the corresponding movement organization. Any theory of consciousness and nervous system functioning must take such phenomenon into account. I believe this phenomenon, and many others not yet acknowledged, does indeed challenge a lot of our current thinking about mind, brain and consciousness. Phenomenologically one feels one's right eye in a new way. Initially as I begin to move my right eye in a circular motion, imagining the eye as a telescope, I move the eye in accordance with this image, feeling the movement of the eye with an attention that I normally do not bring to moving my eye. At first I may find it difficult to make the circle round; at certain points I find that I cannot move the eye the way I want. Slowly as I move, directing my attention to where I can move with quality, i.e. a sense of ease and comfort, I find that I can approach the difficult places in the circle and begin to make a complete smooth and enjoyable movement. Now I experience a spreading ease throughout first the right side of my face, then with my breathing. Eventually I am directed to return to the movement of the hands, and find my right hand more supple and moveable. This is learning, however, not at the level of simple association, or conditioning. Here is a story to show the same thing another way. I was teaching a Feldenkrais class to a group of people in a large corporation. Many were scientists, engineers and technical workers. The common characteristic of the group is that they all suffered with back pain at varying times. In one lesson we explored movements on one side of the body for almost forty minutes. In that space of time most class members improved their easy range of movement about seventy percent or more. I then had them check the same movement on the other side. They found themselves about as restricted as when they first tried to move on the first side. I then had them imagine the same movements as they did in the forty minute sequence on this other side for about five minutes. Suddenly they found that they could move eighty percent more on this side. One engineer looked up at me after experiencing this change and said, "That doesn't compute." What happened for him obviously challenged a belief he had that mind and material were separate and that immaterial mind could not influence matter, i.e. his body. Empirically he could not deny the experience; intellectually he could not account for it. Here a mental activity, imagining, affects the state of the organization of the nervous system as indicated by a new organization of movement. It is not an immaterial process in the sense that if one observes the person while that person imagines, one can detect subtle activity in the musculature which accompanies the imagining. Our second lesson process is named Functional Integration. This is a hands on process in which the practitioner communicates with the participant through touch. Feldenkrais described this teaching process as "dancing together." The practitioner touches and feels where the person touched can move and the person touched feels what is wanted or intended and responds. The aim again is enhanced awareness in which the person touched realizes new possibilities of kinesthetic sensing and feeling, and experiences shifts in the body (movement) image. Often the experience of the lesson for the participant is beyond verbal description, but the reverberations of these shifts become clear after the lesson as the person experiences daily life with a changed self-appreciation. How profound this can be will be illustrated with the specific examples cited below. Over the years I have given thousands of Functional Integration lessons. On the surface it appears as if I use my hands to communicate with the person receiving the lesson. In fact I have trained myself to use the movement of my entire structure to make the contact and sense the other person. I produce within myself a very clear organization of my spine and pelvis so that what is communicated with my hands is produced with my entire self-action. For myself, as practitioner, I find that I am effective when I shift to an open awareness, shut down my usual verbal self-chatter, and give up any attachment to producing results. My thinking is embodied in the sense that I move directly from sensing and feeling into the action of communicating through my own movement to the person receiving the lesson. I find in this way that I can be very precise to the needs of the person I am working with. Many people I work with report that they feel I have contacted them and felt their presence in an unique way. Here is an example from my individual practice that further indicates the relation of conscious experience to even the most reflexive activities of the nervous system. My client Jeff was recovering, very slowly, from Guillian-Barre Syndrome. This syndrome apparently involves an acute viral infection of the spinal nerve roots. Muscle weakness and paralysis result from disturbances of the lower motor neurons. Sensory symptoms involve loss of position sense, and some distorted sensations such as tingling. When he was acutely ill, Jeff was completely paralyzed, but he had not lost body (touch) sensation. He had recovered, by the time I began to work with him, to the point that he could make any voluntary movement asked of him. However, he found himself very weak and needed two crutches to walk. Often he used a wheel chair. At this point he was two years past his acute illness. As we did our weekly lessons, he improved his balance and his stamina. In a few weeks he was able to graduate to the use of one crutch. One day, as we started another lesson, my attention was drawn to Jeff's feet. I knew that he could feel my hand touching his feet, distinguish one toe from another, and wiggle the foot up and down, as well as the toes. Yet, when he wasn't trying to move his feet, they were lifeless. And when he walked, his feet slapped at the ground like floppy shoes. I chose then to do an experiment with a flat board. I had Jeff lie on his back. I put a soft roller under his knees and a Styrofoam roller under his ankles. This had two effects. First it took Jeff out of the gravity field so that he was not compelled to make an effort to stand up. Secondly I could feel how his feet moved without the heels pressing on the table and could move his entire self through pressure on his feet. I knew Jeff could make voluntary movements with the muscles of his lower legs, but from past experience I knew his weakness probably related to a lack of reflex tone in these same muscles. I also knew that by pressing his feet gently with a hard, flat surface, I could possibly elicit more so called reflex activity. It was a good choice of a lesson for Jeff. I began by pressing my hard board gently against Jeff's left foot. His foot, initially floppy and toneless, did not respond at all to the pressure of the flat surface as I tilted the board one direction or another. The foot stayed where it was, unmoved by the stimulation. I would interpret what I felt as I moved the board against Jeff's foot as "I am not connecting." The foot had a quality I could most easily describe as lifeless. In a normal situation a person's foot would follow the movement of the board as the foot reacted to the stimulation of the surface. Slowly as I pressed the toes and the ball of the foot, small responses began and Jeff's foot began to follow my movements. I could detect each increase in response with my hands, which then resulted in my increasing the stimulation of Jeff's foot. After twenty minutes or so, Jeff's foot responded with a good approximation of normalcy. I was now able to move his entire skeleton through his foot in a simulation of the function of standing on that foot. I do this by moving the board with my pelvis well grounded so that the movement of my center is transmitted through my arms to the foot, knee, pelvis, spine and head of my client. In my own feeling sense, I could imagine his entire spine and detect how each vertebra connected in the movement. To my estimation his lower leg muscles had increased in tone. The skeletal structure carried the movement to his head. But Jeff in fact was unaware at this point. I asked him to compare the left foot, the one we had worked with, with the right. He said that he felt no difference. I then asked him to get up slowly and take a few steps. I was pleased at this point. My work with Jeff had resulted in a discernable change in his foot and as he began to walk I could see that his left leg carried weight better than the right. His left foot no longer slapped the ground, but moved normally with the action of his walking. I let Jeff walk and didn't ask anything new of him. Jeff paused; a look of surprise passed across his face. "I didn't realize," he said. "I didn't realize that I had lost my foot. It's unbelievable. I have a foot again. I can feel it clearly." Jeff began walking more vigorously, feeling his left foot again and again. Here the nuts and bolts of changing neurological organization appear first. He walks differently and then finds a profound shift in his body feeling. That he says, "I have a foot again," indicates that the spatial area of his conscious appreciation of himself has expanded. It is not just a question of sensation. Remember, he never lost touch sensation. The phenomenology of the body-image is a profound subject. Here the body-image is linked completely to the return of organized functioning. Oliver Sacks in his book A Leg To Stand On (1984) provides one of the best first person descriptions of this relationship on record in writing about his recovery from a devastating injury to his leg. For Sacks the experience had an aspect of revelation as he realized the profound connection between his self image and his functioning, a phenomenological connection completely ignored in his medical training. In this second example, again from my practice, the change in body-image provoked a crisis. On the surface it appeared that my client and I were dealing with a problem in physical structure. This client was born with congenital malformations of both her hip joints. In her growing up she learned to do the things she wanted, i.e. mobilize herself to walk, stand, run, erect herself in gravity, despite the fact that both hip joints did not have proper sockets, and the joints were supported only by the tissue of the joint capsule. What she did with herself she did in her own fashion, finding a way that worked so that she could be as much as possible like other children. As a normal child does, she constructed patterns of action/movement that allowed her to succeed to the best of her ability. These patterns were not the same as those of a child without her structural difficulties. One point about these movement patterns is that they had value. They were the ones that worked given the constraints of her physical difficulties. At the age of twenty-six, her physicians, having noted that her bone growth had ended, replaced through surgery both hip joints with stainless steel balls and implanted Teflon sockets in her pelvis. Subsequent to this surgery and her convalescence she continued her life, but as time went on she began to experience increasing pain in her back. She continued with physical therapy. It was of no avail to her. Now in her thirties she was referred to me to see how my approach might aid her. What I observed about her was that despite the new hardware that gave her perfectly usable hip joints, she still walked and erected herself with the same patterns that were useful to herself as a child. These patterns involved an extreme arching of her low back and a bringing of her knees together for support. What I knew was that she had no sensation or feeling of other patterns. This may seem like mind reading. Nevertheless it is important to the outcome of what I do to make educated assumptions about my client's experience. I needed to know what she needed to experience in order to find a new pattern. The new patterns could not be taught externally and certainly not through language. The fact that ordinary physical therapy was of no use indicated this. We had to create an experiential pathway to a new body-movement image. To do this she and I had to retrace the learning path of erecting herself in gravity. I could feel in the quality of rigidity in her spine and ribs, which was unyielding even when she was lying down how little feeling she had of this middle part of herself. It was the consequence of the extreme efforting that she needed to hold herself erect. And indeed in standing one felt almost an impossibility of any change as she held her spine so strongly in fear of falling. In a more ideally organized person the spine is a flexible supporting column in which the muscles are of even tonus, ready for movement and action. The lessons that I did were created in part by watching how children learn the actions of coming up to stand, and imagining what needs to be felt internally in conjunction with this learning. Thus I began by getting her to move her pelvis and spine in relation to each other. It can only happen as an awareness. Even after a few lessons she had much less pain. At one particular lesson a new pattern emerged for her more clearly. At the end of the session she appeared to me to be frightened. She told me that she felt very strange. The next day she reported that she was in a crisis and that she hadn't slept well. I asked her what she was experiencing. She said, "I don't feel like myself. I don't feel like the same person. It's very disturbing." Later in our discussion she said, "But I know I also feel how much easier it is to walk." It was this later observation that allowed her to go on with the lessons. The lessons were leading to patterns that were completely novel to her experience. She discovered with each change some sense of disturbance of her self-feeling and thus her self-identity. What was fortunate for her progress was that each time that she felt strange to herself, she allowed herself the feelings of fright and disturbance, knowing that what was new to her sensation of herself would be "normal" in a few days. She thus found a way to transcend the identity of herself with a particular pattern of feeling of herself. The complexities we are approaching in this instance are beyond the scope of this paper. I will come back to the point, however, because one begins to appreciate that our issues do not exist in the vacuum of the isolated nervous system and person. In any case my client had to make a conscious step at a higher level. She had to observe two qualities of her changing and choose what best fit her life. I would like to make a brief diversion to indicate that phenomenologically sensory perceptions are not in isolated sensory systems. From my own experience I discovered a relation of body-image to vision. On a visit to an optometrist who specialized in a field called, behavioral optometry, I explored wearing prism glasses that distorted the experienced visual spatial field. One set made the floor appear much closer than in my normal vision. My internal body space decreased so much that I felt about four feet tall. When I tried to walk, I could barely move my legs and had no idea where to place my feet. It took some minutes with the glasses to begin to recover normal movement. It is apparent that perceptions such as body-image are cross related within the many sensory systems. Any distortion in one place immediately produces disturbances in other perceptions as well as in functioning. And yet very quickly the nervous system begins to reorganize to restore the same coherence of perception and therefore the quality of action and movement. What interests me in all of this is the great plasticity of ourselves in self-organizing to provide us with a biological stability. I think I have strongly made the case so far that although we do not control the learning process directly, the activities of consciousing are essential to this level of learning in which perceptions and actions are interlinked and constructed. I would like to conclude with a description of a Functional Integration process that emphasizes how the nervous system responds much more directly to complete integrated action patterns rather than isolated parts of movement. I am working with Brenda who suffered a cerebral accident when she was in her twenties some twelve years before. She has pursued many avenues toward recovery of use of her paralyzed left hand, this hand which contracts into a snarl of confused twisting along with her wrist and arm when she tries to use it. When she ignores the arm and hand, it hangs with the elbow partially bent. We have worked together for four sessions and have already discovered together a number of new things not made available before. First and foremost, Brenda finds it easier to progress when she doesn't push, use effort, or try hard to get the result. She can also progress when one shifts focus away from the hand and the details of the action. And there is her discovery that it is not just the hand and arm where there is loss of mobility and function. I began my first lesson with Brenda by touching the ribs and spine on each side to reveal to myself that the affected left side was quite immovable compared to the right. When I passively moved the left arm, the ribs stayed glued to the table, an indication that her internal experience of this area is missing; this is in contrast to the right side where my lifting her arm led to the entire rib cage following and facilitating the movement. As I continued the lesson I spent a good bit of time with the "good" right side exploring how pressing the foot moved the ribs and spine on this side as well as continuing with movements of the arm in conjunction with the trunk and pelvis. Only then did I approach the left side again, and in doing so I also brought Brenda's awareness to the differences. As I sensed improvement, such as feeling that ribs and spine began to respond when I pressed the left foot, I checked with Brenda to find out whether she felt the difference. She did and indicated that she really appreciated sensing herself in moving. Moving the arm head and shoulder all together I was able to slowly, passively move her hand to touch her shoulder and then her neck and finally her face. At no time did I attempt to move her past any resistance that I sensed in her. Now in the fifth session I feel that when I move her arm, the ribs follow. I ask Brenda to take my hand and move it in space. This she does by catching my hand in her still spastically contracted fingers. But her arm and shoulder are no longer behaving in a spastic pattern of fixed contractions. I ask her to move me wherever she wishes. This she does lifting my arm, pushing it forward, pulling it back. Suddenly she realizes that she can move me, and, therefore herself to places that were unreachable when we started together. It is as if this functioning came out of nowhere. Later Brenda tells me that she has caught herself spontaneously using her left side in situations where previously she would never have considered it. We work more with the hand. I have her touch and feel my hand, touch herself and stroke herself. In my moving her passively to bring her hand to herself in previous sessions, I arranged her fingers, as they diminished in their spasticity, to touch her neck or her face. We work also with her sensation and perception. How she feels and identifies each finger and feels where they are in space and in movement. It turns out that her sense of space and movement is not reliable whereas touch is. As she uses the hand in the small ways that are possible, in touching, feeling, her sensation becomes more accurate. What is different about our work together. There are elements here of communication and contact, my ability to sense at all times what is going on with Brenda and stopping when it is too much, or when she begins to resist. There is the support I am able to give her, so that she trusts that my touch is safe, that I will respect her space and being. There are aspects of my skill that allow me to be intentional without being invasive, that allow me to guide without ever needing to be forceful. There is my constant reminder that there is no need to succeed, that success will follow process. I evoke a coupling that allows Brenda to find a new possibility. I do not give her any information, but out of the coupling, the dance we do together, she senses differences and in effect creates new information. Each one of us avoid the arrogance of thinking that we are responsible for what happens in the lesson. How is such a dance possible without consciousing, aware-ing at an expanded level? I must take into account Brenda as a thinking, feeling, breathing being. There is no way to achieve any result without accounting for the phenomenological, how she is experiencing the exchange between us, and what I am experiencing. We are coupled together so that although I cannot get inside her feelings, I can still respond to that through my feeling of her movement, and response to me. Consciousness can be eradicated in abstract thought, not in the lived world. Some Conclusions The perspective we have outlined here has, as I have shown through a number of concrete instances, empirical justification. I believe such a perspective has the power to resolve a number of continuing difficulties in the ongoing debates about consciousness, AI, cognition, etc. It is not my purpose here to do this. I would like, however, to point out that we can make some conclusions and actually eliminate some approaches to the problem at hand. I am forced to conclude through the medium of my approach, that I come close to a very direct contact, nervous system to nervous system in the practice of my lessons. The kinds of ways that the people that I work with change their patterns is indicative of this, as is the ways that I can work with myself. I make my conclusions, then, based on the practical consequences. One conclusion is that the nervous system responds to the impress of entire connected functions and structurally shifts to a better state of organization. Bits and pieces which have no particular meaning or relation to anything else have no effect. That's why trying to move the fingers of a person whose hand is paralyzed by stroke has very limited effect, but as in Brenda's case getting her to move me results in a profound reduction in her muscular spasticity, and the beginnings of her own movement capability. Similarly with Jeff, the contact with his entire skeleton simulating the function of standing on his leg brings back the image of his foot. It is clear then, for human beings, and for other living creatures, the whole is indeed greater than the parts. A corollary of this is that the level of change in the nervous system is the level of meaning. Change must be connected to life. The phenomenological perspective can not be eliminated. One could say that one operates one's nervous system through the highest level of organization, which implies experience and consciousness. Reductionism, one can conclude, is neither a pragmatic, nor effective approach to working with people at this level, nor to understanding the integrative aspects of the nervous system. To cite the example of movement science, years of attempts to understand coordinated human movement experimentally by trying to work at the level of individual motor units or some such bottom up approach has been spectacularly unproductive. Latash (1996) writes of this kind of approach as "trying to understand its (a complex system) function on the basis of the summed activity of its elements." "Apparently," he concludes, "this is a dead end route.": If this is so for a supposedly tractable problem such as the integration of the muscular system for movement, what then for studying consciousness? Fortunately this kind of impasse is leading to new directions. There is certainly research that is beginning to show that some kind of dynamic systems approach will be necessary. To cite one example: Walter Freeman in his investigations of the olfactory bulb in rabbits showed a number of startling things (Freeman, 1995). First that the initial signals from the smell receptors vanished in the cerebral cortex, and were replaced by a new pattern of cortical activity. Second that when the rabbit was reconditioned to a different response to the same stimulus (smell), a new pattern emerged, and that all the conditioned patterns to other smells shifted also. There may be good reason to believe that a nervous system does not deal with nor store raw sense data. If the responses of a higher animal relate to the meaning of a stimulus in regard to how the animal will act in the environment, we are dealing with a high level of biological complexity. This includes for higher animals the social environment. One could conclude that any project to explain even such a direct observable as behavior on the basis of knowing the precise state of the nervous system is doomed to failure. How then can we enlarge our understanding of our nervous system and its relation to the phenomenological realm, and consciousness? The organization of such a system requires the organization of effective action and movement as a ground for all further cognitive development. This is the major task of a nervous system. The corollary is that movement is essential to the task of self organizing the system. Very little has been explored scientifically in this realm. Some authors, Maturana and Varela (1984), Gerald Edelman (1987), have seen the essential importance of movement to understanding the nervous system and biological systems in general. Recently there has been a revival of dynamic systems theory in understanding movement and the brain. I suggest two sources, Kelso (1995), and Thelen and Smith (1994) for overviews. Whatever we want to say about the act of consciousing, we are always in it, and cannot escape to independently corroborate anything. Nor can we escape the fact that we live, develop, learn, organize our nervous systems in connection with a community of fellow beings. We have to assume that this is so for all higher living creatures. We can not have a separate understanding of the brain or consciousness without understanding experiencing, without accounting for the details of the phenomenology of lived experience. This experience can indeed be shared. What is needed is more exploration at the top level, which includes accurate study of the influence of consciousing on consciousness itself. Such a project has been endorsed by at least a few investigators recently. I mention particularly Nunez (1997), Varela (1996), and Wilbur (1997). I hope what I have contributed here helps further this understanding. Hopefully it will lead also to new explorations at the lower level of the operations of the nervous system itself.
Edelman, G. (1987), Neural Darwinism (New York: Basic Books) Feldenkrais, M. (1964), 'Mind and body'. Systematics: The Journal for the Correlative Study of History, Philosophy, and the Sciences, 2(1). (Reprinted in Your Body Works, p.p. 73-80, by G. Kogan, ed., 1980. Berkeley, CA: Transformations.) Freeman, W. (1995), Societies of Brains (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates) Kelso, J.A. Scott (1995), Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) Latash, M.L. (1996), 'The Bernstein Problem: How does the Central Nervous System Make Its Choices', in Dexterity and its Development, ed. M. L. Latash and M.T.Turvey (Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates)' p.294. Maturana H. and Varela, F. (1987), The Tree of Knowledge (Boston: New Science Library) Nunez, R.E. (1997), 'Eating soup with chopsticks: Dogmas, difficulties and alternatives in the study of conscious experience', Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4 (2), pp. 141-65. Thelen E. and Smith L. (1994), A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) Sacks, O. (1984), A Leg to Stand on (London: Duckworth) Varela, F.J. (1996), 'Neurophenomenology', Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3 (4), pp. 330-49. Wilbur K. (1997), 'An integral theory of consciousness', Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4 (1), pp. 71-92. (The term The Feldenkrais Method is a registered service mark of The Feldenkrais Guild , P.O. Box 489, Albany, OR 97321-0143. USA.) Case Study: Working with a Young Child By Lucia Schuette-Ginsburg Clara was six years old when she came for lessons with me. She was a thin, pretty and a rather timid looking child, and for a six year old she moved awkwardly with her feet turned slightly inward. Her parents were worried because her second toes had grown over her big toes, a condition which runs in the family. Her grandmother had severe difficulties in walking, a trouble as a result of the same problem, and the parents wanted to help their child if possible. Later, I found out that she was a restless child until she learned to read. In reading she found a way to please herself, because she did not like to move. (In the first part of the process an informal evaluation is carried out to assess the child's patterns of action, how she organizes herself in life.) When we entered my working space, which has a lot of mats on the floor and a table, Flora walked to the table and put herself sitting there. She was clear that that was supposed to be her place. Her feet were dangling down. I placed supporting pads under her feet so that she could sit with her feet on a surface. I noticed that her feet turned inward, and that she was collapsed in her lower back, holding herself upright by straightening her upper chest. This allowed her to look forward. I asked her if she knew why she came to me and she said because of her toes. She was wearing socks so I asked her what was wrong with them. She pulled off her socks and showed me her feet, which were very big with long toes, the second one grown over the big toe and very sweaty and wet. I asked her if she has trouble with them and she said no, only that getting nice fashionable shoes is not so easy sometimes. (The assessment continues bringing in the choices and desires of the child and the things she has accomplished. Curiosity is essential on the part of the practitioner. Note that the assessment does not involve a 'diagnosis' but a revealing of important aspects of the child in her life situation and in the family.) This was kind of a problem for me because here I had worried parents and there I had a child who did not seem to have a problem with what her parents were worried about. I said: "What do you like to do?" She said that she loves to read more then anything else. I was surprised; she could read with 6? "Yes," she said proudly, but she did not like to wear her glasses. I found out that she was farsighted +5.5, but I could not believe that she could read without glasses. I fetched a children's book and sure enough, she could read. What was that? I am farsighted +3 and I cannot read a sentence without glasses. The mother said that they had consulted several eye doctors about the problem. They all prescribed eyeglasses but did not wonder about how she could read. I decided to leave this issue alone for the moment and asked her, what she wanted to do better. She said that she has sports now as a first grader and she cannot do a somersault; besides that she is bad at sports. I said that maybe we can do something about that. She agreed in a friendly way. I found her very easy to work with through all the lessons I gave her. She was curious and happy to have my full attention while moving. With growing trust and self-esteem, she asked for things or told me when she did not want to try something. In the beginning she was always patient. (Starting the lesson the assessment continues while the first engaging the child begins. The pattern of her difficulties becomes more apparent.) I asked her to lie on the back with the feet standing and hold her right knee with her right hand. She definitely knew her right from the left, but it was not quite easy for her to reach for the knee. Reaching for the left one was even more difficult. When she had her two knees in her hands I asked her to roll a little bit from side to side, but she could not easily open her knees and balance. We changed to the side-lying position. She chose the left side. In this position she could grasp her right knee much more easily, and we engaged in a little game bringing head towards knee, then forehead, looking to the right and left of the knee. She enjoyed herself very much. Her upper chest softened; her neck got easier. Returning to lying on the back, I asked her to hold her knees again and it was much easier for her. I asked her to open the knees a little and she could do that. She rolled a little bit from side to side. Her upper chest got even softer, her face brightened up and she was much livelier. We invented all kinds of variations to reach for the knees and to roll, crossing arms over etc. When she came back to sitting her pelvis was under her and her head was carried differently. But most importantly, she was much more lively and wanted to come back the next day. I told the mother I would call her because I did not want to talk about Clara in her presence. There was so much I was curious about. For example, was she born with the second toes over her big toes? I called the mother and was told that she was not born like that. She remembered to alert the paediatrician about the family problem when Clara was 5 or 6 months old, before there might be a problem with her feet. He told her not to worry but to make sure she should wear broad shoes when she would begin to walk. I asked her if Clara had rolled over to lie on her stomach when she was at that age. She responded that she was surprised to remember that around 8 months Clara had about 10 sessions of neuro-developmental therapy (Bobath) because she did not like to lie on her stomach. The therapist found out that she had a 'distorted' pelvis. Clara did not like to go to her because she still did not want to lie on her stomach. The therapist demanded that, so they stopped seeing her after a while. I tried to match this information with what I found with her. On her right foot the second toe was not as far grown over the big one as on her left foot, and she could not roll over her left hip joint as easy as over her right. Had she never rolled over to lie on her stomach by herself? What did that mean for her development? If this important step of her development is missing, could that be the key to work with her? I went back to what I knew about development, seeing in front of my eyes all the different things a baby does lying on the back, then rolling to the side, rolling back to the back, moving in a circle on the back already using the feet a bit on the ground till the moment comes when babies find themselves on the stomach holding their head up, which was not possible to do before. The world has a different perspective when this is accomplished. The extensors (long muscles of the back and neck) now work strongly. To get back on to the belly she would have to use her sides quite differently, pushing the ground or reaching out with her arms and legs elongating one side while folding the other. There are a lot of possible ways to go about such a function when I think about Feldenkrais different lessons, and my observations with different children. But one fact remains, the world has a different perspective when one is lying on the stomach and looking into the surroundings. Suddenly the head needs no support anymore from the mother. The extensors have to work and the flexors have to let go. Arms and legs can be used differently to use the ground to start to reach for what is desired. The eyes have to work differently to look up. Is the back supporting the movement of the eyes,or the eyes supporting the movement of the back? Intentions change the use of our selves and development. I tried to make a working plan. I remembered Moshe saying to Karl Pribram in the discussion on the tapes from San Francisco (Feldenkrais, Pribram, 1975) that he tries to find the step of development, which is missing in a child to help her evolve. How is it that her feet developed like that? She learned walking although she never crawled or crept. For a person's foot to step off properly, the step off point is between the second and big toe functionally. Children do a lot of pushing with their feet while lying on the stomach creeping or crawling, getting up. Would it help to learn movements she never did to restore functions? And would that change something with her walking and her feet, getting her toes to separate? I believed that even so she would not use the movements anymore so extensively as she would have when she was 5 month old. But she would benefit. So my plan was to roll with her from back to belly and the other way around in different ways if possible and see what came out of it. But more important then anything else, she could develop a joy in moving again. That would be the groundwork for everything else, that is, to enjoy doing what she does, to become curious and to be satisfied with her self. (Notice that the interventions are in the form of investigations and are not just a question of movement. The child's affective experience is an essential element.) In the second lesson she came with a smile and it was clear she wanted to come back. That was a good start. I decided to work with her on the floor, so that we could roll around with a lot of space and start with something she certainly must have done as a baby. She showed me how nice she could roll a bit from side to side still remembering her last lesson although her upper chest was stiff again. With her knees in her hands, her head was lying on the floor and moved with the rolling. I put a roller under her pelvis to support her upper back on the floor so that I could work with shoulders, head and upper chest. She realized her arms got longer and she grabbed her feet. What a wonderful moment when she was surprised that she could grab her feet. She took her socks off and looked into the soles of her feet. Then we gave names to all of the toes. She has big feet. I had thought of course of interlacing hands and toes but I did not want to challenge her too much. Instead I had her interlace her fingers and exploring the unusual way of interlacing. May be I could get her curious of interlacing hands and toes later. I think a lot about how much I need to challenge to evoke learning and when not to, going slowly and without giving way to failure. With her something told me to go slowly. Next time she came she was very tired from school, so I decided to work with her lying on the back bringing her feet to standing. Her left foot was still turned more inward; it was not only the foot, but the whole leg from the hip joint. Her right leg was now lying turned outward. I worked from both her feet starting with the right, differentiating* toes, which she enjoyed, going slowly towards outward rotation of the foot and the leg, till we could stand the foot in letting the structure move the knees inward. We played frog lying on the back. She remarked that a frog cannot stand his feet on the ground. I said, a frog cannot lie on his back, nor can he walk but you can. Both of her legs were lying with the feet outward and when she came the next time the right one was still outward more but the left was turned inside again. So this approach did not work as well as I thought. (*Differentiation is an essential part of learning in which one learns to distinguish and move different parts independently from each other.) I asked her to lie on her back. Her left foot was standing inward with the toes crossed over; the right one was standing straight. I asked her to lengthen the left foot and to push the floor lightly with the right one. I made her aware of her pelvis lifting and rolling to the left and her ribs moving and slowly I asked her to push from different parts of her foot, then to lift the heel and push more from the front of her foot. After a while she put the opposite arm above her head and I asked her to look towards her hand while simply pushing with her foot. "Can you see your little finger, all the others one after the other?" I followed her movements with my hands, exploring what she was doing with herself while moving, taking over and exaggerating, or going into a new direction slightly. After a while I asked her to turn her hand still following with the eyes and to our astonishment she could roll onto her left side. I asked her what would happen if she kept on turning her hand and arm and follow it with her eyes. She did so and was lying on her belly. We both started to laugh with joy. We went back and forth quickly and slowly. We did not have time to explore the more difficult side, but her left leg was lying more turned outside. I called her mother and asked her what she observed with Clara. She reported that she always had a difficult relationship with her, because she was restless, did not like to move at the same time, but now she was much more open and accessible. "It has been much easier with her," she said. She could not believe that what we did had to do with the change in her daughters' attitude. Nevertheless she said that everything else was what it was before so it could only have to do with what we were doing. We both were astonished and happy. I asked her if we could still go on with our lessons in a 4day time schedule, because I had to leave soon to work somewhere else. I knew that the family had another daughter and was not well off financially. I offered that she could pay me monthly a certain amount. That made it possible to go on. When Clara came back she saw a big blue inflated plastic 'egg' lying on the floor and she threw herself on it. I watched her and saw that she did not dare to put her hands on the floor on the other side while lifting her feet from the floor. Here she was lying on her belly so why not take the opportunity? What if she made herself soft over the ball still with her feet on the floor? The moment she let her head and neck softened her legs got soft. I rolled her a little bit back and forth pushing a tiny bit with her feet. After a while we found out she could make herself like a stick rolling over a bit or like pudding cuddling around the ball. One moment she moved too fast and she had to use her hands on the floor on the other side to keep herself from falling but she used only with her right hand. She nearly fell and was scared. The firm floor was more secure for the moment. We went back to rolling over, I started pulling her arms, crossing them slightly to get her pelvis engaged to roll over. Then I asked her to push with her left foot. Her pelvis did not roll over or lift. We used the other side to see where she presses with the pelvis when she pushed with her foot and slowly something happened. I helped her with the movement of her left arm and then she could roll onto her right side. Her little two-year old sister at that point entering the room immediately imitated what she was doing. Her mother reported proudly that Sonya loved to move from the beginning. Claras face darkened while her mother said that on the playground Sonya climbs all sorts of climbing facilities but Clara does not dare to do it. I said Clara is cautious and does not want to do something she does not feel secure about. She liked that statement obviously. When she came back the next time she walked strangely. Her left foot was strongly turned inside her right one was moving forward. What was going on? Her pelvis was twisted. She said her back was hurting a little. Lying on her back her whole back was far from the floor. I started to pull her left leg in the directions it was going easily till her pelvis let go and her lower back and the middle of her back was more on the floor, then I asked her to lie on her side and she chose the right one. "How would you roll onto your back?" I asked her and she started to do it with pushing her left foot to the ground. I thought of folding and unfolding, differentiating both sides and helping her to find a way to move from her center. We started with folding the left side and unfolding as she followed the left hand with the eyes while lengthening the leg. When she came back to folding the left side she continued following the hand with the eyes. We rolled from side to side in the middle, elbows and knees pointing to each other. Then she continued rolling to one side in unfolding and folding again. As in all the other lessons, I followed her movements with my hands finding out where she interfered with her self and helping her to find another way. After a while she could do this baby rolling smoothly and comfortably with enjoyment. She walked much better but still with her left foot turned inside a bit. She was out of pain. Was it time to bring her on to her stomach? How would the use of her eyes in this position help to organize her self differently? In sitting she still stiffened her upper chest in order to look forward. Could this pattern change when she learned to use the extensors of her back in a different way? In the next lesson I asked her to lie on her belly. She did not know what to do with her head. Her elbows and lower arms were glued to the floor next to her head; she was looking to the left. I expected that if I would lift her feet, her pelvis would lift also. I pushed through her feet lying on the floor to get the pelvis to move. Then I asked her to push her elbows to the floor using the ground forces to lift her shoulders and head. To my utter astonishment her hands and lower arms lifted and she rounded her back with the right side of her forehead on the floor. The right side of her upper back bulged out a little anyhow when she was lying on her belly. I decided to use this but to differentiate this function of looking downward. I worked with the left shoulder blade, arms and ribs to differentiate the shoulder from the ribcage, then with the right shoulder and chest. I asked her to push again with her left elbow and lower arm onto the floor. Gradually she experienced that with this push, different parts of her chest lifted from the floor. I told her, "Look the floor is your friend, when you press the force comes back to lift something else." She laughed, and found that very funny. I asked her to look to her belly after she had her forehead on her hands, with her hands on top of each other, and she found out that she had to lift the middle of her back. The same moment somebody knocked at the door and she lifted her head beautifully to look at what was happening. It was so great that the environment helped that learning situation. I was not sure if she was ready to lift her head in this new way with all the extensors supporting this action with the pelvis on the floor, but she did the moment she was curious of something around her. There is an inbuilt pattern that is ready to work if it is not inhibited. I can trust this to work. This action showed that clearly, but I am always astonished when it happens. All humans learn to sit, stand and walk; it is something we inherited from our ancestors; we are standing on the shoulders of generations. When I saw her again after a month her mother said it was time that I was back. Clara was her old self again, but now much more demanding and she obviously needed to see me. I was glad that her mother thought so, because often when children start to change their behaviour, parents have a hard time to cope. They want the physical part to change but not always the other levels of the child. When Clara came in, she showed me what she had done in school. She had earned the best ratings and she was proud of it. I still had in mind her wish to learn the somersault but I thought she had to learn to use her arms to support her chest and head while standing on all fours. What about lying on your belly I asked and she agreed without hesitation. I helped her to discover how to find a place to stand her hand on the floor on both sides. With her elbows on the floor I asked her to look up and follow a little animal crawling along the floor moving up on the wall. Bending her knees so the feet were towards the ceiling she lifted one knee then the other with my help so that her pelvis could extent instead of being lifted. I had her close one eye and look up and lifting one knee with it and I found out that she used the opposite leg to the eye, which she left open. We tried with the eye open on the same side and it was more difficult. On her back again I saw that both of her legs were still turned with the feet outside. In the following four to five sessions we played with creeping in different ways. She became much more playful, asked for things, uttered dislikes, and we involved her little sister whom she could teach how to move like a crocodile. She loved to play with the creeping and to involve her sister, because she understood something that her sister, although a "better" mover, could not do. It was great that this sisterly competition helped. This worked from now on very often, because the father or the mother had to bring her and the sister accompanied them. She used to play around sometimes outside but most of the time in the room. They liked each other a lot and played often together at home. When I came back after a two month period she told me that she learned to ride a bicycle and her mother told me that she was much more adventurous in the playground. But the most interesting thing for me that they did not tell me, was that her right second toe was now only a little bit over her big toe; it just touched the nail on the side and the left foot improved also, but not as well. I thought she was ready to go on all fours. But in this configuration her problems showed up again. So we did a lot of lifting one arm, the other, one knee, the other, shifting weight, learning to balance. When I asked her to put the top of her head on the floor, she said it was too painful. I tried it with a big cushion under her head, which worked better. Then I decided to work with her feet on a roller on the back. If she could lift her pelvis with her knees going forward and had the experience of her pelvis and back extending it would help her. I first worked with her right foot on a firm roller rolling her foot on it extending and flexing her toes, working from the heel extending and flexing her ankle. Moving her foot over the roller her toes slightly separated. Then I used a roller lengthwise to differentiate the movements of the foot and the ankle, knee and hip joint. In the end she had both of her feet on two rollers and lifted her pelvis high in the air. To do that, she had to push down so that her pelvis extended and her back and the knees would come over her feet forward in a bridge. She loved that, because she felt like an acrobat on the rollers. She was standing quite differently. Both of her feet were pointing forward her head was in a different place, she did not know how to walk first, it must have felt very strange to her. Back on all fours again, we started in the next session to bring one arm under and put one side of the face to the floor. This turned out to be difficult to the left side. She could not orient herself in this configuration and turning her pelvis to the right with her right shoulder on the floor was at first impossible. The lower ribs on the left and right did not know how to move. So we went back to all fours to a movement, which became easy to her, and had been difficult in the beginning. This was too come to sitting from all fours to one side, and then the other bringing one leg in front of the other, and crossing over. I rolled her head for a while to get her feel connected all through the spine. Then we went back to the difficult position. The easy side was easier now and the difficult was at least possible. Sonya jumped in every now and then and tried also. In the next session the girls brought a box with all kinds of seashells with the wish for my admiration. We took one shell out after the other and looked at them. I was a little nervous about time, but then I decided to go with the flow and use our play with the shells for more learning. I asked them to take off their socks and put back the shells with their toes. I noticed that Sonya did not have the problem with her toes. We laughed a lot and both girls had fun. I told them the story about a student who I met in Heidelberg who did not have arms and did everything with her toes. So the theme of people who used their feet like hands brought us to exploring interlacing hands and toes. This was not easy for Clara, but possible on both sides. This theme accompanied us through many of the next lessons because they liked it so much and showed me what they could do. Meanwhile I came up with all kinds of different inter-lacings. Next time we went back to the 'judo roll', a variation of the summersault in which one rolled with the head to the side. I did not tell Clara that was what it was. She still could bring her shoulders to the floor and the sides of her head. The lifting of her knees was difficult again because she moved backwards with her legs instead of rounding her back and turning her pelvis. So we spent some time in this position bringing the toes for running and back again and I helped her to feel what the pelvis was doing when she did that. Now pushing from different parts of her feet was important again. We investigated this with both feet with each shoulder on the floor. Then she started to lift the easy knee first and I told her that she could look from under her standing arm at the same time. This time the force from her foot was transmitted forward. With her easy side I asked her if she could think of lifting this foot completely from the floor and she did. She was so proud of herself and I was too. I thought to myself, if we had not this experience of success, why would we go on learning? It is such a reassuring feeling that we are capable of doing something we could not do before. Scientists are thinking if human beings have an inbuilt capacity to want to improve themselves, I think Clara is a wonderful example how this boosts your self esteem. To have somebody who helps her to go on when she was stuck even without knowing, eventually changed her way of being in the world with her self and with others. She now learned to roll in the judo roll fashion in the following weeks. I was again out of the country for a couple of months, but the parents come back to me when I came home. Clara is now 8 years old. I saw her last year 7 times. Her right foot has all toes next to each other and the left foot has the second toe touching the nail at the side. These changes happened without ever correcting her. She continues to come. I have no idea till now, how she manages with her eyes without the eyeglasses. She wears them in school but not regularly. This secret did not unfold. We are currently working standing on a roller and here her pattern shows again, she cannot roll the roller with her left foot, she has no balance. I brought her to the floor lying on the back pushing with her left foot to roll the pelvis and she was stuck again. She could not push with the outside of her foot; she could not lift her heel and push without cramping her toes. A little reminding helped her to let the triangle with her arms go the side in all variations and later she could do the pushing. Back to the roller she could roll the roller with her foot and stand on it with her fingertips on the wall and balance. For my self, working with Clara was a major learning path. Thinking of it reminds me that we all have capabilities which will unfold if we let it happen, that we can trust our system more than we often think, and when someone helps us to develop awareness about what we are doing we can change in directions we did not think of before. I do not know till today what happened with her feet, when she was around five months old. The question if there was an inherited weakness, or if it came about functionally because she did not do certain movements, or if it was a combination of both, still stands. What I know is, in walking with her through the path of filling in gaps of her development, she started to use new functions, and her body configurations started to change while growing. Even so the old patterns show up in different ways in challenging situations. She has learned that she can do something about it, which she did not know before. I think that experience will accompany through her life. Meanwhile her little sister now comes for lessons also, because she is started walking with her feet inwards. Is it a "family thing" and how is it connected? We still have further mysteries. In this extended series of lessons we have included many movement activities in which Clara's active participation was essential. In this sense a developmental learning as created in the process, which was facilitated to match her stages of learning. Feldenkrais developed such facilitated processes out of his discoveries that we now call Awareness Through Movement. |