Working in Movement

What do art education, political science and methods of movement education like the Feldenkrais Method have in common? Whether we're look at pictures, voting or just moving ourselves through our daily round, the brain is involved. This seems readily apparent for movement education, as I've written about here a lot. But what about art education and political science?

Pat Kane's Play Journal points to an Arion essay from art educator Camille Paglia. It turns out that Paglia is not fan of higher education's current approach toward teaching arts and humanities. The young today have been raised with sophisticated (and not so sophisticated) images coming at them in the form of televison, movies, video games, the Web, etc. As well versed as they may be in these sorts of moving images, they could use some help working with the still images that are such a big part of the context in which the young develop. Here's what she had to say:

The visual environment for the young has become confused, fragmented, and unstable. Students now understand moving but not still images...Education must slow the images down, to provide a clear space for the eye.

The relationship of eye movements to cognitive development has been studied since the 1890s, the groundwork for which was laid by investigation into physiological optics by Hermann von Helmholtz and Ernst Mach in the 1860s. Visual tracking and stability of gaze are major milestones in early infancy. The eyes are neurologically tied to the entire vestibular system: the conch-like inner ear facilitates hand-eye coordination and gives us direction and balance in the physical world. By processing depth cues, our eyes orient us in space and create and confirm our sense of individual agency.

This reminds me of a blinding flash of the obvious that occurred to me during my training as a Feldenkrais practitioner, which I wrote about here. Paglia goes on:

Those in whom eye movements and vestibular equilibrium are disrupted, I contend, cannot sense context and thus become passive to the world, which they do not see as an arena for action. Hence this perceptual problem may well have unwelcome political consequences.

It is this last statement that interests me--that such things as developmental issues with the visual and vestibular system connect to problems of the political system. This ignores for the moment how (or if) such developmental issues might be addressed.

Though they aren't addressing these sorts of issues, those whose business is politics aren't ignoring the brain, at least not those of potential voters. Using MRI to See Politics on the Brain reports on studies focusing on potential voters reactions to different political advertisements. Yes, not surprisingly, there might be a difference between Republicans and Democrats, at least in terms of which parts of their brains light up as they view ads.

Political and neuro sciences at first blush don't seem that connected, all jokes of voter intelligence aside. But at least those proceeding into this new area seem to be doing so with a measure of caution:

"Brain imaging offers a fantastic opportunity to study how people respond to political information," said Jonathan D. Cohen, director of the Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior at Princeton. "But the results of such studies are often complex, and it is important to resist the temptation to read into them what we may wish to believe, before our conclusions have been adequately tested."

The brain activity of voters is surely interesting. But what about the politicians themselves? Anyone studying that?