Working in Movement

As a guy named Jimi asked so long ago, "Are you experienced?" Experienced at what, you might ask. In movement education, the question is more like "how do you experience yourself within your environment?" Well, that seems to depend on the shape your brain is in at the moment. More precisely, the cortex part.

What if there's nothing going on there? I've written about this previously, and noticed today that Carl Zimmer returns to the Schiavo case Florida.

A person in a vegetative state does not visualize bottles of Gatorade. That would call for activity in the cerebral cortex that's just not there. As for pain, much of our experience of it relies on the cerebral cortex. It makes us aware of the pain, generates fears of future pain, and so on. With a cortex under deep anesthesia, it's hard to argue that such people experience "agonizing deaths." Their fully conscious loved ones may suffer at the sight of a seizure or mottled skin, but they can't project that suffering into the mind of the patient. Furthermore, in the 2002 book The Vegetative State, the leading neurologist Bryan Jennett writes that the medical consensus is that soon after withdrawal of a feeding tube, the body's own pain-killing opioids flood the nervous system.

What if there's something going on, but it's scrambled up a bit? Zack Lynch cites research from Yale that illuminates the link between the senses and the brain, which he says "enables us to understand the world in a unified way."

From Yale: "A common type of synesthesia is “colored-hearing.” People with this condition see specific colors in their “mind’s eye” when they hear words, letters or numbers spoken out loud. For the blind people with colored hearing, the meaning of a word, rather than its sound alone, seems to be important. For example, when the word “March” was used in a sentence to mean a particular month of the year, one volunteer saw a “dark greeny blue” color. But when he heard the same word used as a verb (“The soldiers march across the bridge.”) he did not see a color."