Working in Movement

I've found Feldenkrais work fascinating for a long time. Sometimes, though, it seems to be primarily viewed through the lens of tackling tough rehabilitation problems. Often, in the hands of a skilled practitioner, situations resistant to therapeutic methods can have positive results.

As wonderful as that is, I think there's more to it. There are some underlying themes of the work, from Feldenkrais' books, that take a much more general approach to solving problems of any sort, not restricted to rehab settings. An interesting interview I recently came across from an unlikely source reminded me of this.

I don't normally think of the Wharton Business School and the Feldenkrais Method in the same breath. But in What’s Behind the 4-Minute Mile, Starbucks and the Moon Landing? The Power of Impossible Thinking, Wharton marketing professor Jerry Wind, along with Colin Crook (former chief technology officer at Citibank), touches on some of those themes in talking about his recent book The Power of Impossible Thinking: Transform the Business of Your Life and the Life of Your Business.

gguys like Feldenrkais or FM Alexander weren't out to rehab themselves when they stumbled across their approaches: they urgently need to solve a critical problem that was limiting what they wanted to do in their lives. In short, they needed to change, at a very fundamental level.

One of the things that intrigued me about the interview was the idea that change involves more than just thinking--it involves action, sensing and feeling, too. The authors don't quite put it like that; they frame it more in terms of context or environment:

...if you quit smoking, you have to address the way your life might be organized around smoking breaks and a cigarette in the evening. It is not enough to just change your thinking; you have to also address the practical infrastructure and routines that support the old mental model. Old habits are comfortable and not easy to change.

It's too bad the book's title only reflects "impossible thinking." It takes thinking, acting, sensing and feeling to go against the impossible -- and lots of possible but difficult things, too.

It might be fun to be weightless, floating around free from gravity. After all, some high speed roller coaster rides produce fleeting glimpses of weightlessness, and that can be fun -- not so much as you get older, though.

But it turns out that prolonged periods of weightlessness (as in space travel) have their drawbacks. How does spending prolonged time in microgravity affect the bodies of astronauts? The ask the experts section of Scientific American takes a brief look.

Prolonged weightlessness (the article calls microgravity) does all sorts of nasty things to astronauts, from significant bone loss and muscle wasting to potential heart problems. The thing that gets my attention is the effects on orientation and balance:

Similarly, microgravity also impacts the neurovestibular system--an integrated set of neural sensory, motor and brain circuits that allows humans to maintain balance, stabilize vision and understand body orientation in terms of location and direction. Exposure to microgravity often leads to disorientation and decreased neuromuscular coordination upon return from prolonged missions. Immediately after landing, astronauts may have problems standing up, stabilizing their gaze, walking and turning.

Presumably, the orientation and balance functions return quickly once back in gravity.