Working in Movement

John Ratey is a psychiatrist who has written some interesting books on the brain: A User's Guide to the Brain and Shadow Syndromes Ratey seems particularly interested in things like Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), but his scientific journalism skills make him a good general chronicler of brain research in easy to understand language. You can hear him talk about A User's Guide in anaudio interview available on this page. (You'll need a Real Player to listen.)

In an interview on BrainConnection Ratey summarizes what seems to me to be his take on the practical use of all this neuroscience and brain research. Namely, that individuals perceive things differently, and the perception and its interpretation in the brain varies hugely among people. This has a lot of implications for interacting with people, particularly for professionals. Here's a quote:

BC: You advocate that mental health professionals not ask their patients "how do you feel," but instead, "how do you know the world?" Why?

Ratey: I think it’s an important distinction. Let’s look at how you experience the world. Let’s look at your perception and your cognition and how this has impacted your life. I’ve seen so many ADD and LD people over the years and the fact is that they see the world differently and this contributes to the way they feel. And it makes them feel bad, basically. And if you just focus on the feeling bad, then you’re missing a big chunk of what’s going on; you’re missing the point. A lot of people with ADD, for instance, are so mad at themselves because they have failed to succeed and they don’t know why. They haven’t had a name for it and haven’t had a reason for it, other than they’re lazy and no good, when in fact a big contributor to it is the way their brain works.

From a movement education point of view, we could ask something like "how to you experience this movement?" We naturally assume that people experience a given movement, say, turning the head to look over the shoulder, much the same as anyone else. Not necessarily true. People differ in how they experience a movement or even a given posture. In Feldenkrais work, instead of asking "how do you experience this movement or posture," we use our kinesthetic sense to explore this with the person. But if we don't ask the question, verbally or kinesthetically, we're not really in the realm of learning, at least in the movement education sense of it.