Working in Movement

Structure, Function What's the Difference  It's not that difficult for me to drift off into thinking  in terms of dualism--that mind and body function separately, without interchange. Despite years of thinking otherwise, it's pretty deeply embedded in the culture I grew up in. Why was I thinking about this? It came up for me as I was reading a couple of articles by Robert Schleip, a Rolfer and  Feldenkrais practitioner. These two articles, which can be found here, develop the idea that meat and brain aren't different things. If you are a bodyworker or healthcare provider, the distinction can be significant.  The articles were directed towards bodyworkers, but I think it makes a pretty good systems perspective on that world and almost any other I can think of. 

Here's a different perspective on structure and function quoted in the second article: 

What are called structures are slow processes of long duration, functions are quick processes of short duration. If we say that a function such as the contraction of a muscle is performed by a structure, it means that a quick and short process is superimposed on a long-lasting and slowly running wave. [The Nobel laureate Ludwig von Bertalanffy]

Learning all the time  Here is an accessible article about the work of Esther Thelen at Indiana University. To perhaps oversimplify things, Thelen studies how human babies develop and learn. The work is based on a type of Dynamic Systems Theory and premised on the idea that babies learn through problem solving using their developing movement abilities.

Gettin' it back Amputation changes the brain's sensorimotor maps, as discussed by Ramachandran in Phantoms in the Brain, and posted here. But what if you could reverse the amputation? What would happen to those sensorimotor maps? Though impossible until recently, hands can now be transplanted.  Such cases provide an opportunity to investigate the question. Based on observations of one patients' case, a team of neuropsychologists at CNRS in France suggests that such hand transplants reverse the amputation AND the resulting changes to the sensorimotor maps. The team used fMRI (functional magnentic resonance imaging) to peer into the sensorimotor workings of a man before and after bilateral transplant surgery. Evidently, this investigation provided some evidence for some pretty amazing plasticity. 

The main findings of this study shows that grafted hands come to be recognized and activated normally by the sensorimotor cortex. This suggests that new peripheral inputs allow a global remodeling of the limb cortical map, leading to the reversal of the functional reorganization caused by the amputation. Furthermore, the spatial trajectories of these activations over time indicate that the cortical rearrangement takes place in an orderly fashion. Thus cortical plasticity follows the normal body representation, i.e. the plan the body used before amputation.

 Full text of the press release from which this quote came can be found here.