Working in Movement

When you move yourself, is it because your brain told your muscles what to do? I used to think so, but my experiences with the Feldenkrais Method has shown me that it can work both ways. That is, movement patterns, especially non-habitual ones, can change how you experience yourself. It seems like the muscular patterns, and awareness of them, provide information that somehow organizes nervous system tissue at some deep level. (You can experiment with this idea with links to simple Feldenkrais ATM lessons that can be found here.)

Feldenkrais lessons may not be the only place movement influences nervous system tissue. It may even be the case as the brain develops in the womb. Handedness Develops in the Womb summarizes new research into development of hand preference, whether you prefer to use you right or left hand.

The prevailing idea was that kids didn't develop a hand preference until they were three or four years old. But a new study in the UK suggests that it starts much, much earlier. The researchers looked (via ultrasound) at fetuses sucking their thumbs at 15 weeks, and found nine out of ten preferred to suck their right thumbs. They followed 75 of the kids as they grew and found all of the right-thumb suckers were right handed at 10 or 12 years, and two thirds of the left-thumb suckers were left handed.

What's interesting to me here is nervous connections for the brain to the body aren't thought to develop before 20 weeks, well after the initial observations. As one of the researchers put it in the article:

Instead, Hepper speculates that the reverse may be true: the fetus's body movements may somehow lead to the development of an asymmetrical brain. He points out that the sensory connections from the body to the brain develop before the connections that allow the brain to control the body's movement.

There are skeptics to the theory, but it is interesting that observed movement patterns can have such an influence, even from almost the very beginning of life.