Body, Mature Behavior and the Neuroplastic Revolution

Moshe Feldenkrais had no need for assuming that neurons regenerate in adult life

I recently reread the introduction to "Body and Mature Behavior" by Moshe Feldenkrais. There are so many reasons why I love this book. It's so foundational to the Feldenkrais Method, an educational practice I've been interested in for a decade. It's also full of theory-level motivations for Feldenkrais Method. As I wrote recently in a tribute to Yochanan Rywerant, Moshe Feldenkrais obviously believed that knowledge can be transmitted through writing. So at first, it's provocative that BMB isn't required reading for Feldenkrais Practitioners.

The introduction shows the cultural climate that Feldenkrais was trying to influence. He makes reference to Freud’s psychoanalysis, Coué’s hypnotherapy¹ autosuggestion, and Pavlov’s behavioral physiology. He makes reference to Yoga, Judo, and traumatic brain injuries. He mentions that cerebrospinal fluid movements can apparently “massage the brain,” invoking the research of A.D. Speransky . He's not interested in disparaging other wisdom traditions but views their competition for the modern person's attention as disorienting. After surveying some of these different traditions, he writes:

To sum it up, it can be said that [people] believe in the interaction of the mind and the body. Some methods attribute greater fundamental importance to the mind, others to the body. Both views have some grounds for their beliefs. The result is inextricable confusion of thought. And the reason for this confusion is the arbitrary subdivision of life into psychic and physical. Even by assuming that the two are only different aspects of one and the same thing not much is gained practically.

I think one reason for the book’s lack of popularity is that it's targeted to a fairly educated audience in the 1940s. As explained in the Acknowledgements section, "The substance of this book was presented before the Association of Scientific Workers at Fairlie, Scotland, in a series of lectures given in 1943-44." The book is mostly intended to influence other scientists, as well as physicians and therapists. It's not really a self-help book.

The wartime audience that received these lectures was probably pretty white and male. The book is written with a Eurocentric perspective and grammatically defaults to the masculine. Feldenkrais refers to idiots and other medically endorsed social inferiors. And being a science-heavy book, it doesn't help its popularity that many details are currently understood to be incorrect. If one's assigning reading to a group of Feldenkrais Practitioner trainees, and many of them are non-scientists, this book is probably too much to ask of the class.

Not only is the science out-of-date, but some of the scientific background shared implies that Feldenkrais didn't rely on some currently-popular notions; maybe this lack of pop-science-compatibility limits the book's popularity. Feldenkrais writes, “Nerve cells do not divide after the first year of life...” which is not only incorrect but surely embarrassingly inconvenient for those marketing Moshe Feldenkrais as a prophet of “the neuroplastic revolution.”² It's inconvenient, but also powerful, to appreciate that Moshe Feldenkrais proposed the nuts-and-bolts of his educational approach while espousing a pre-neuroplasticity³ understanding of the nervous system.

Is it really possible to understand Feldenkrais Method without understanding the basics of neuron structure and function? That may seem like an incisive question if one is deeply committed to understanding reality at all complexity levels.⁴ But really, one doesn't need to know anything significant about neurons in order to devise Feldenkrais Method, and Body and Mature Behavior illustrates that explicitly.

To me, the irrelevance of neuroplasticity to Feldenkrais Method is as obvious as the irrelevance of hydraulic braking circuitry to learning how to drive a car. Functioning at one complexity level rarely requires understanding the generative processes at lower complexity levels. This is useful because it means we can, for example, build gizmos and prediction models for the weather and climate, without fully understanding what dark matter is, or how to quantize gravity.

Moshe Feldenkrais infers that the educational environment provided to young humans is the main way that functioning is acquired. This process and its implications are socially embedded, so the individual and their family unit (including their environments) are a good approximation for the appropriate complexity level in describing Feldenkrais Method. The functioning of cells, subatomic particles, or galactic clusters do not significantly factor into the theory of Feldenkrais Method.

1. Thanks Eva Laser

2. That's Norman Doidge's phrasing, who recently authored a foreword to a republished The Potent Self.

3. Neurorigidity? It's hard to name Norman Doidge's foil to neuroplasticity!

4. A complexity level is specified by the types of things that interact with each other, and the ways they interact with each other. For example, atoms interact with electrons to form molecules, on one complexity level. On a whole other complexity level, team members interact with each other, and an opposing team, to form a game of lacrosse. Sure, the team members are made of atoms and molecules, but it’s not relevant to experience of lacrosse players, because chemistry and lacrosse are on wholly different complexity levels.