Working in Movement

I love to read, but I also like well-done audio when I can find it. I've mentioned Steven Johnson's book Everyday Neuroscience, and briefly described one of the chapters on paying attention. It's a quite enjoyable book: the subject catches my interest and it's written in a really entertaining and informative style. More science-related books could take a note from Johnson's style.

Now I get my wish for some audio from Johnson. You can hear him interviewed about the book on Technation, a U.S. public radio program. To hear the interview, you'll need the Realaudio player.

I particularly enjoyed Johnson's description of an fMRI session that he had. The idea of the session was to observe Johnson's brain activity as he thought about things while inside the contraption. At first, he couldn't think of anything and just kind of fumbled around. But toward the end of the session, he began composing sentences describing the experience for the book. You'd think that not thinking would show little brain activity and composing the sentences a lot. Instead, results of the scan showed the reverse to be the case. The scan showed Johnson's brain awash in activity when he wasn't thinking of anything, and fairly quiet and concentrated into a few areas when composing the sentences. It was as if, according to Johnson, something in his nervous system kept everything else quiet when he needed to concentrate on drafting language.

It seems that both excitation and inhibition can influence vast areas of the brain, and can spread pretty quickly. The trick, I suppose, is knowing or finding an activity that does the trick. In movement education, we often find some combinations of movement and paying attention to those movements producing and spreading inhibition, calming things down and freeing up movement possibilities. More on this later.