Working in Movement

Charles Darwin had a few ideas in his time and he wrote them down. Some of those ideas had something to do with how we and other animals react to stuff happening around us. In Expressions, he discussed the idea of facial and bodily expressions and our reaction to them. But the 19th century had no way of testing his ideas, at least as they might relate to how the nervous system processes expressions. In Reading the Body, Carl Zimmer reports on a study that does just that.

The basic idea of the post was how one of Darwin's ideas, that of the use and recognition of facial and body expressions, has been studied, at least in the sense of detailing the functional brain anatomy involved. That got me thinking about movement education, especially the Feldenkrais Method and the Alexander Technique. Both Feldenkrais and Alexander premised their work on the idea that inaccurate proprioception causes or contributes to the misuse of the body in movement, and this in turn gives rise to any number of bad things. Alexander: "It's hard to know a thing by an instrument that's wrong." Feldenkrais: "If you don't know what you're doing, you can't do what you want."

We accept these ideas and see examples of it everyday in our clients (and ourselves). But was the idea just the thoughts of these way-ahead-of-their-time somatic educators, or is there the same sort of scientific testing and explanation available.

One place that I'm starting to look is the Proprioception Lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Heavily medically oriented, it seems to contain a wealth of information that merits a look.