Working in Movement

"You can be truly smart and still struggle in life if you lack the ability to plan, organize time and space, initiate projects and see them through to completion, and you can not resist immediate temptations in favor of later better rewards"  Thus begins the article Lack Direction? Evaluate Your Brain's C.E.O. in today's  New York Times: Science section.

The article goes on to describe disorders of the frontal lobes of our brains, and their impact on daily lives. Those are the areas that do the planning, organizing, etc. described in the first sentence. There is even a neat, easy-to-take test to try, the Stroop Test, that challenges you to inhibit your first reaction to a problem before acting. In this case, a series of words describing colors are given, and you're supposed to read them aloud. Then, you read the next series of color words allowed, only their font color is different than their content. You are supposed to speak the font color, and not the word itself. For example, blue, green, yellow. My first impulse when seeing blue is to blurt out "blue." Only that's not correct, the color of the font is red; the content of the word itself is blue. 

The Stroop Test is a great lesson in inhibition, which is something that is compromised in people with frontal lobe dysfunction. (Then again, the college drinking game Buzz fills the same function, though under more challenging conditions.)

Anyone who has studied the Feldenkrais Method or Alexander Technique will recognize this sort of inhibition as a great tool for learning. In these disciplines, you are learning through the use of your body in movement. It's not just about movement, however. In order to do the movements, you also need to coordinate your action with thinking, sensing and feeling. Quite challenging, but also quite a powerful learning environment. I suspect it could address some of the difficulties of frontal lobe dysfunction talked about in the article.

Hey, what is this Feldenkrais stuff about anyway? I'm always looking for verbal descriptions of the Feldenkrais Method that are concise and easy to grasp for the uninitiated. Maybe that's not going to work as well as I want it to. Look at this quote from Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder (and Grateful Dead lyricist) John Perry Barlow writing about the Burning Man project in Wired News

"The important thing about Burning Man is that it is the most experiential phenomenon I can think of ...It can't be turned into data in any useful way. You can't informatize it by blogging it, filming it or taking pictures of it, because so much of it can't be translated into information. "[Wired News]

So maybe that's the answer when asked: "Feldenkrais is an experiential phenomenon that can't be turned into data in any useful way. Now, please lie on your back and notice your contact with the floor..."