Movement and Cognition

Over the years I've observed how someone's physical state affects their psychological/emotional state.  When someone's mobility is compromised due to illness/injury and they become bed bound, pretty quickly their cognitive function seems to decline from my observation.  It does make sense from a neuroscience perspective because of all activities that take place in the brain when planning and executing motor actions.  I also noticed that people who have very sharp cognition tend to be physically active.  It makes sense why we can usually have better focus after exercising.  As Moshe Feldenkrais said, "Movement is life; without movement life is unthinkable."  Let's get moving!

Corrective exercise

As a healthcare professional, I was heavily trained in anatomy, kinesiology, and biomechanics and taught to assess movements/posture and identify dysfunctions/impairments then prescribe corrective exercises to "fix" their problems. Biomechanical ideals are just the average across population, and in reality everyone is so different structurally and functionally. "Average" doesn't mean correct.  Similarly below the average doesn't make it wrong either.  Who decided human beings should move certain ways??  No other animals learn movements from "experts."  I find this very interesting.  Babies/kids don't learn movements the same way we adults do.  How do babies learn to move?  Do they even care about learning movement?  They are just curious about the environment and exploring with their mouth and hands.  Curiosity drives them to explore lots of different movements so they can reach for a toy and bring it to their mouth.  Movements emerge out of these explorations. Adults don't often learn in this manner.  One big disadvantage of corrective exercise is that you could potentially eliminate your authentic movements which some experts call "wrong" movements and are forced to "correct" your movements, which may be "wrong."  In my opinion, no movements are wrong or right.  Even what experts consider ideal movements can be wrong if they're the only movement option available.  What's more beneficial is to expand movement options.  The nervous system is smart enough to figure out what's best in each situation given it has many options.  In my movement education sessions, I guide my students to explore a variety of movement options as opposed to "correcting" their movements.  

Vision and Hearing

One of my clients who recently had a cataract surgery told me that one thing that she noticed immediately after the surgery was that her hearing improved dramatically.  She didn’t really realize that her hearing was affected by her vision until she had the surgery.  Her story reminded me of how much we rely on our vision to interpret verbal contexts.  I can relate this to my own experience as a foreigner.  I’ve been in the States for 18 years and speak English fluently, but even now I sometimes have difficult time with phone conversations because I can’t see their body language or facial expression.  My grandmother was excellent at communicating with the body language. She couldn't speak English at all, but she always made friends and seemed to have very good conversations without speaking at all. From neuroscience, I understand the parts of the brain communicate with each other.  This story is one example.  This makes me wonder how smart phone/computer is influencing our non-verbal communication skills and the brain's functions and development.  Texting is becoming a very common communication method today.  It's convenient and can save us a lot of time, but it can easily deliver wrong message.  

Motor Performance vs Motor Learning

In fitness and rehab settings, it’s very common for trainers/practitioners to demonstrate exercises and have their clients repeat the exercise  and give them visual/tactile feedback to “correct” their movements before they give their clients a chance to feel/sense how they are moving. While showing them “correct” form of the exercise first and providing them external feedback would allow them to perform the specific motor task quickly, the motor task may not carry over to other functional tasks.
We often confuse motor performance with motor learning. Motor performance is the ability to perform a motor task. Motor learning is to have a carryover between one movement pattern and other functional movement patterns.

I think many people often use external feedback (visual/tactile/auditory) too much and don’t teach clients how to access their internal senses (proprioceptive-kinesthetic sense) to learn how they’re moving. The problem is that clients often don’t know how they are moving and can’t tell when they are moving “wrong.” When they are “corrected” and learn to copy the exact same movement, they still haven’t recognized the pattern of movement. Therefore, they just learned to perform that specific movement well, but they will probably go back to their old habitual patterns when doing functional tasks. I suggest we start directing clients’ attention to certain body parts and helping them become aware of how they are moving in space by asking them questions, before we jump in to put our hands and “correct” their movements. Let them explore movements and make some mistakes and let them make a choice. If we don’t allow them to make any mistake, how would they know what mistakes are? Learning always involves lots of trials and errors. We can help them recognize their mistakes so they can learn from the mistakes. We can become a movement tour guide for them so they don’t get lost.

© Taro Iwamoto 2015. Please do not reproduce without the express written consent of Taro Iwamoto.

Changing Habits

In the previous post, I talked about our habits as obstacles for improving our abilities (physical, emotional, and intellectual). If we want to improve our movement abilities, we’ll need to expand our motor habits. We all know that it’s not as simple as it sounds. Let me share my thoughts on this.

In order to change our habits we need to recognize our habits first. What makes it difficult is that habits are for the most part unconscious, so they are invisible. We somehow need to make invisible habits become visible or make them become conscious.

Awareness/proprioceptive-kinesthetic sense is our sixth sense. It allows us to sense and feel our bodies and movements accurately. Without sharp sixth sense we’ll not be able to perceive what we’re doing. This allows our habits to come to the surface and allows us to “see” our habits. This opens the door to new motor habits.

Mindfulness and paying attention to how we’re moving and relationships between body parts, sensations in our bodies and with movements, are ways to sharpen our sixth sense. As we pay close attention to our body and movements, we will start to notice how we use our bodies habitually with each movement. There’s many tricks to improve our awareness, which I will discuss in another blog.
Unfortunately there’s no shortcut to improving our abilities. But, if we can acknowledge this idea and become more aware and mindful of how we move, I’m very confident that we will continue to improve the quality of movement and the quality of life.

© Taro Iwamoto 2015. Please do not reproduce without the express written consent of Taro Iwamoto.

What is limiting our abilities?

Over the past years, I’ve come to realize that we are often limited by our habits. Limitations can be physical, emotional, and intellectual. As a movement educator, I often witness my clients beating their body when they run into physical challenges. What most people tend to do in that situation is that they try to force themselves to overcome the obstacle by will power with their “no pain no gain” mindset. Their mindset is such that if they can’t overcome the obstacle, they’re not trying hard enough; therefore, they will try harder. They may achieve their goal but not without a cost. Or they may fail and give up. This mindset is very common in many cultures. Truth is that “obstacle” is created by our habits. We can ignore this fact and keep driving ourselves with will power and keep exercising our habits until our body can’t keep up anymore. I think it’s our habits that make us move, feel, and think in very limited ways and that make us feel old. We can also make the obstacle disappear by recognizing our habits and creating new habits. This is where movement intelligence comes into play. Learning to create new movement patterns/habits isn’t something we (adults) often do when facing what I call “movement puzzle” or daily situations that challenge us physically.  Instead, we usually try to exercise our old habits and hope to break through the obstacle with strengthened old patterns. This works to some extent, but soon we’ll hit the wall again because we still haven’t realized that our habit keeps creating obstacles.
I’m not saying that habit is devil. Habits are very useful. In fact, if it weren’t for habits, it’d take us too long to do simple daily activities such as brushing teeth, or getting dressed. However, many habits are not serving us well anymore, yet we hold onto them because we’re not even aware of most habits.  I think habit can become our enemy when it’s invisible (we’re not aware) like silent cancer because we cannot recognize what is happening.  If we cannot recognize, we won’t be able to take any actions.