Working in Movement

There is an old saw in the Feldenkrais Method and other forms of movement education based on body awareness: "If you don't know what you are doing, you can't do what you want." That is, for whatever reason, most of us develop an inaccurate, unreliable sense of kinesthesia. We can't feel our movements as precisely as we are capable of doing. One of the aims of movement education is to let us learn to feel what we are doing accurately once again. Then we can better control our movement--maybe to improve our dance, performance or athletic skills, or to use ourselves in a way that doesn't put as much stress on the body and hence reduces discomfort or pain. The kinesthetic sense is always the focus of these efforts.

The field of biofeedback takes a different approach. To aid learning better control of a human function, feedback generally comes from an external source. Usually, this is a computer or other electronic device that monitors nervous system activity and then somehow communicates these measurements to the subject who is attempting to learn better control of that function.

Though it doesn't rely directly on sensing as does movement education, useful biofeedback also stresses precision and accuracy as part of the learning process. To have an impact, you gotta measure the right stuff. Successful biofeedback experiments on animals often rely on implanting electrodes into precise regions of their brains in order to supply accurate feedback. Not really practical for humans.

But now Brain Watching Helps Suppress Pain reports on a new study at Stanford that has taught a few people pain control by offering feedback from a very specific region of their brains, one associated with pain control. Functional Magnetic Reasoning Imaging (fMRI) machines provided the subjects with a real-time representation of what was happening in this region as the experimenters applied a painful sensation to the palms of their hands. By learning to influence a visual representation of the pain control brain region, subjects learned to control the painful sensations in three thirteen minute sessions. The visual representation was either of a flame that subjects attempted to lower or raise, or a simple bar graph.

Interestingly, people who had learned to control the pain during the experiment could not say how they had done it. Their nervous systems had learned a new process for managing the response to pain, but not in the active way we usually think of learning. But the learning had only progressed because of the precision and accuracy of the feedback. Measurements of other brain regions would not have worked.

Awareness can be sensory or externally supplied. Either way, it is crucial to the learning process. But to be most useful it needs to be precise and accurate. Then you can do what you want.