Working in Movement

Running across the video lecture on The Neural Mechanisms of Habit Formation that I mentioned yesterday got my curiosity flowing. Earlier today I was searching Google for "basal ganglia movement habits feldenkrais" when a most interesting and promising site popped up. It was the web site of Deric Bownds, a professor of Molecular Biology and Zoology at the University of Wisconsin. On Bownds site is the full text of his book The Biology of Mind - Origins and Structures of Mind, Brain, and Consciousness.

It's a book the Feldenkrais would have loved, I bet. One of the basic ideas, highlighted again and again, is how our minds, body actions, and environment are linked in a seamless whole and how mind and consciousness might be defined from the point of view of movement. Chaper 9 of the book is devoted to movement and action. A couple of quotes:

Thinking can be viewed as the activity of deciding "what movements I make next." The most complex brains are found in animals that make the most complex motions.

Many of our habitual movement patterns contain extraneous contractions, and you can learn about this in an interesting way. You can sometimes sense more about what goes into a movement pattern by imagining that pattern than by actually carrying it out.

There are also some movement experiments that are a lot like Feldenkrais lessons. I'm also finding the bibliography and footnotes useful.