It may very well be that one of the underlying principles or models for our method is homeostasis. Have a look at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4669363/ For example, they write, "From our perspective as physiologists, it is clear that homeostasis is a core concept of our discipline. When we asked physiology instructors from a broad range of educational institutions what they thought the “big ideas” (concepts) of physiology were, we found that they too identified “homeostasis” and “cell membranes” as the two most important big ideas in physiology"
This leads me to wonder in what ways is this a metaphor for learning models? At the time Dr. Feldenkrais was writing BMB (and TPS), Gregory Bateson was writing about Deuterolearning (see: Steps to an Ecology of Mind). Bateson proposed multiple feedback loops corresponding to different levels of learning.
Well-done. "Feldenkrais is not neuroscience" is the name of a yet-unpublished essay that I have in my Roam graph. The deeper idea to me is that Feldenkrais is not science, regardless of the fact that there some scientific principles embedded in the work (Looking forward to responding to the haters that will come out when I publish the essay). Even neuroscience is not fully scientific if we consider nervous systems can change themselves and do not have full and complete "information" of the environment in which the live. Science has been described as that which is beyond the control of human beings - physics and chemistry Those are scientific fields. Neuroscience, economics, psychology - and yes Feldenkrais, are all useful to different degrees and worthy of study. But they are not science. (rough draft comment)
This question, 'what is scientific' is related to the question, 'what is the scientific method' or even 'is there a scientific method.' I like very much the contributions of Paul Feyerabend here, who makes some compelling arguments that there is no real method. My own take is that there's a least two extant scientific methods, one I call Baconian, relying on controlled experiments and quantitative response variables (dominant in, say, pharmacology or neuroscience), and one Darwinian, relying on model building and relatively passive observations (dominant in geology and astrophysics). I think I disagree that your considerations around information processing in nervous systems, or their ability to self-reconfigure, weakens neuroscience. Some phenomena are easier to understand in terms of linear cause and effect, some phenomena are made-up of causal loops that can feed-back or feed-forward into each other. Nervous systems are just capable of extremely complex behaviors, so studying them with most scientific approaches is tedious and difficult, as causation is easiest to figure out in short, linear chains. Where we can probably agree is that neuroscience definitely can't replace psychology today; the scope of things we need to understand about the human nervous system, in order to account for the range of human behaviors, is still quite daunting. As both neuroscience and psychology communicate with the pop culture, all kinds of garbage results! For example, the pop culture needs to shake-off the neurotransmitter-babble that the pharma industry swamped us with, where people are saying "this gives me a dopamine burst" as some kind of faux materialism, as if it isn't more precise (and equally vapid) to say "I am a dopamine burst."
Thanks Ryan. I am not making a value judgment against Feldenkrais, Neuroscience, Psychology (etc). They are hugely valuable fields and I enjoy digging deep into all of them. I am saying that human being and nervous systems that can change and adapt are of a different order than studying chemicals, electromagnetic radiation and the like. There are obviously physical processes at work in the functioning of human beings. And yet, they are not inert - they can change themselves and adapt and are inherently unpredictable over the long haul.
I get that Feldenkrais practitioners don't need to understand the science behind the process of neuroplasticity.
But I've heard countless Feldenkrais practitioners says that the method is an example of positive neuroplasticity. For example, in this free lesson on Elevating Your Mood, the teacher says at 5:30 minutes:
"Pausing between each movement will help to facilitate and access the innate neuroplasticity of your nervous system. Every Feldenkrais lesson, when done in this way, accesses this neuroplasticity and that's why the changes are often very very stunning. Because you each have a remarkable brain that is capable of change and improvement, but we need to access it and give it choices."
An assistant trainer in my program explained: "Neuroplasticity is how we learn, grow, and remember. If we don't use certain neural pathways, we lose them. ATM creates an environment where learning takes place and underutilized neural pathways are reawakened."
Is it inaccurate to speak about the ATM process in this way? Is it problematic to use neuroplasticity language in our marketing?
I don't think it's particularly inaccurate to reference neuroplasticity as you mention here. But I notice you mention "positive neuroplasticity" and that presages my criticism. Neuroplasticity may be integral to learning, but that makes it central to many other phenomena like addiction and anxiety. If one wants to read or discuss neuroscience to understand how life works, I have no qualms. But often in the context of somatics or pain education, students will form dichotomies between self and the nervous system, or self and the brain, and such thinking reinforces self-relationships that can be problematic. Thinking of oneself as a brain in a body is not better than thinking of oneself as a mind in a body! So when someone wants to mention physiology concepts in their marketing, I encourage them to think about the whether the potential side effects (shoring up dualistic self-relationships) are worth the compelling effects of having explanatory physiological details. From another perspective, imagine that no progress had occurred since 1960 in terms of neuroplasticity research, but we had ten or twenty times the knowledge of the role of mitochondrial dysfunction in human health. Since neurons are energy intensive cells, it makes sense that all the details of "maintaining neuro-mitochondrial health" would be peppered into mechanistic descriptions of things like learning and athletic performance. Perhaps in that reality, somatic educators would find their classes fuller if their marketing materials mentioned how learning is a process that requires thriving mitochondrial functioning, and it wouldn't be a lie. But I suggest it wouldn't actually help people to learn, to visualize their mitocondrial processes. And a side effect would be that people view themselves as having a part:whole relationship with their mitochondria, something that cannot really be modulated with voluntary movements.
Thanks for writing about BMB Ryan. I have the 2005 edition and I have painstakingly translated along with GI and checked every single reference. After the war, MF spent several years working on the lecture - this text is written for the general public, in other words it is not a lecture for the white men. Among other things, Ida Rolf used this book as a starting point when she developed her connective tissue massage.
MF wrote an introduction, not a foreword. And Coué didn't practice hypnotherapy - that's the point, he called what he taught auto suggestion.
Then regarding neuroplasticity - Eric R Kandel received the Nobel Prize in 2000 - why do you rely on a book from the forties regarding a finding that was then unknown? All scientific findings reported do not need to be updated.
Oh, and please don't make me find examples of the Eurocentric and male-centric language. It may be edited for the general public, but it self-discloses its origins as lectures to a particular audience.
Thanks, as always, for your scholarship, Eva. Especially that I muddled autosuggestion and hypnotherapy. I'll correct that. But regarding neuroplasticity, I don't know if you appreciate how there's a fairly dominant tendency in the Feldenkrais Method community, to cast MF as a prophet of neuroplasticity. One datapoint is the republished Elusive Obvious, with the subtitle "The Convergence of Movement, Neuroplasticity, and Health." https://www.amazon.com/Elusive-Obvious-Convergence-Movement-Neuroplasticity/dp/1623173345
A very important perspective that was just emerging as Dr. Feldenkrais was writing BMB was the so-called cybernetic reasoning. Dr. Feldenkrais was clearly aware of the signal processing implications (his mention of superheterodyne feedback circuits necessary for his sonar patents) and his knowledge of homeostasis via Dr. Cannon.
One call tell a story with numbers and statistics. It can be very useful to do so. However, neither numbers nor statistics make something scientific, though many people think otherwise. (Not expecting you to agree FYI. Might be a good topic for a podcast or YT video)
I really liked the frame for this essay -- the flow and ideas contrasting the fields of intellectual/scientific reasoning in the 1940's and now. I was only disappointed that it ended. And I heartily agree that it is not a good book for a beginner partly because it has references to experiments that hardly anyone knows about (and some of which have been supplanted). His addendum, The Potent Self has more space for learners to self-reflect.
I think your statement, "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. " is an essential statement and well-worth a good debate in our community. So many of us give lip-service to Norman Doige, without critical review of what he was saying about the essentials of the Feldenkrais Method.
I think you should fix your website Ryan H, and stop promoting feldenkrais as teaching movement. Then you can raise your voice. I am very serious. We can blame it on a substandard training in Feldenkrais but I don't think that is credible. You can do better.
I haven't seen this new publication of TEO basic Feldenkrais, (I've translated it too) but these people are like Trump, repeat lies until they believe them themselves. I found an article today from 1991 where Mark Reese publishes a previously unpublished article by MF and I am absolutely convinced that MR made the same brutal mistake in that publication as he does in the so-called biography.
And I am born 7 years after the war, my prediction for a text is very different than yours. We think different. Reproduction is the pinnacle of biology but MF never mentions childbearing in his texts. It is his obvious bias.
Unless you want to comment on my FI or ATM, I really don't understand your tone here. Writing about Feldenkrais Method (to an audience primarily of somatics nerds) doesn't reflect much on my training. And if you think my marketing is so incompetent I shouldn't even be writing here, I guess I'll need more convincing.
Eva Laser, where do I promote Feldenkrais Method as "teaching movement"!? That's not my marketing strategy. Feldenkrais Method is a form of somatic education that uses a movement-based pedagogy, not a form of movement education.
Ryan, perhaps Eva is referring to your statement on the main page: "Our students learn how to move more comfortably and with more self-awareness, leading to better functioning."
However, you clarify this with, "Stop learning to move and start moving to learn!"
it's a conundrum, for sure. I certainly have no competence in this area.
Oh, I do see how that wording sounds like I'm teaching movement, thanks Rob Black. Sorry Eva Laser if that seemed like I'm being evasive, I was just being slow. I hate the wording Rob picks out, will change it soon.
Despite Moshe's many errors and thinking to the contrary, it is not either/or, but rather both/and. You can use Feldenkraisian strategies to teach movement and you can also use it to teach awareness. One does not preclude the other.
It may very well be that one of the underlying principles or models for our method is homeostasis. Have a look at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4669363/ For example, they write, "From our perspective as physiologists, it is clear that homeostasis is a core concept of our discipline. When we asked physiology instructors from a broad range of educational institutions what they thought the “big ideas” (concepts) of physiology were, we found that they too identified “homeostasis” and “cell membranes” as the two most important big ideas in physiology"
This leads me to wonder in what ways is this a metaphor for learning models? At the time Dr. Feldenkrais was writing BMB (and TPS), Gregory Bateson was writing about Deuterolearning (see: Steps to an Ecology of Mind). Bateson proposed multiple feedback loops corresponding to different levels of learning.
Well-done. "Feldenkrais is not neuroscience" is the name of a yet-unpublished essay that I have in my Roam graph. The deeper idea to me is that Feldenkrais is not science, regardless of the fact that there some scientific principles embedded in the work (Looking forward to responding to the haters that will come out when I publish the essay). Even neuroscience is not fully scientific if we consider nervous systems can change themselves and do not have full and complete "information" of the environment in which the live. Science has been described as that which is beyond the control of human beings - physics and chemistry Those are scientific fields. Neuroscience, economics, psychology - and yes Feldenkrais, are all useful to different degrees and worthy of study. But they are not science. (rough draft comment)
This question, 'what is scientific' is related to the question, 'what is the scientific method' or even 'is there a scientific method.' I like very much the contributions of Paul Feyerabend here, who makes some compelling arguments that there is no real method. My own take is that there's a least two extant scientific methods, one I call Baconian, relying on controlled experiments and quantitative response variables (dominant in, say, pharmacology or neuroscience), and one Darwinian, relying on model building and relatively passive observations (dominant in geology and astrophysics). I think I disagree that your considerations around information processing in nervous systems, or their ability to self-reconfigure, weakens neuroscience. Some phenomena are easier to understand in terms of linear cause and effect, some phenomena are made-up of causal loops that can feed-back or feed-forward into each other. Nervous systems are just capable of extremely complex behaviors, so studying them with most scientific approaches is tedious and difficult, as causation is easiest to figure out in short, linear chains. Where we can probably agree is that neuroscience definitely can't replace psychology today; the scope of things we need to understand about the human nervous system, in order to account for the range of human behaviors, is still quite daunting. As both neuroscience and psychology communicate with the pop culture, all kinds of garbage results! For example, the pop culture needs to shake-off the neurotransmitter-babble that the pharma industry swamped us with, where people are saying "this gives me a dopamine burst" as some kind of faux materialism, as if it isn't more precise (and equally vapid) to say "I am a dopamine burst."
Thanks Ryan. I am not making a value judgment against Feldenkrais, Neuroscience, Psychology (etc). They are hugely valuable fields and I enjoy digging deep into all of them. I am saying that human being and nervous systems that can change and adapt are of a different order than studying chemicals, electromagnetic radiation and the like. There are obviously physical processes at work in the functioning of human beings. And yet, they are not inert - they can change themselves and adapt and are inherently unpredictable over the long haul.
I get that Feldenkrais practitioners don't need to understand the science behind the process of neuroplasticity.
But I've heard countless Feldenkrais practitioners says that the method is an example of positive neuroplasticity. For example, in this free lesson on Elevating Your Mood, the teacher says at 5:30 minutes:
"Pausing between each movement will help to facilitate and access the innate neuroplasticity of your nervous system. Every Feldenkrais lesson, when done in this way, accesses this neuroplasticity and that's why the changes are often very very stunning. Because you each have a remarkable brain that is capable of change and improvement, but we need to access it and give it choices."
https://www.feldenkraisaccess.com/liberate-mood
An assistant trainer in my program explained: "Neuroplasticity is how we learn, grow, and remember. If we don't use certain neural pathways, we lose them. ATM creates an environment where learning takes place and underutilized neural pathways are reawakened."
Is it inaccurate to speak about the ATM process in this way? Is it problematic to use neuroplasticity language in our marketing?
I don't think it's particularly inaccurate to reference neuroplasticity as you mention here. But I notice you mention "positive neuroplasticity" and that presages my criticism. Neuroplasticity may be integral to learning, but that makes it central to many other phenomena like addiction and anxiety. If one wants to read or discuss neuroscience to understand how life works, I have no qualms. But often in the context of somatics or pain education, students will form dichotomies between self and the nervous system, or self and the brain, and such thinking reinforces self-relationships that can be problematic. Thinking of oneself as a brain in a body is not better than thinking of oneself as a mind in a body! So when someone wants to mention physiology concepts in their marketing, I encourage them to think about the whether the potential side effects (shoring up dualistic self-relationships) are worth the compelling effects of having explanatory physiological details. From another perspective, imagine that no progress had occurred since 1960 in terms of neuroplasticity research, but we had ten or twenty times the knowledge of the role of mitochondrial dysfunction in human health. Since neurons are energy intensive cells, it makes sense that all the details of "maintaining neuro-mitochondrial health" would be peppered into mechanistic descriptions of things like learning and athletic performance. Perhaps in that reality, somatic educators would find their classes fuller if their marketing materials mentioned how learning is a process that requires thriving mitochondrial functioning, and it wouldn't be a lie. But I suggest it wouldn't actually help people to learn, to visualize their mitocondrial processes. And a side effect would be that people view themselves as having a part:whole relationship with their mitochondria, something that cannot really be modulated with voluntary movements.
Thanks for writing about BMB Ryan. I have the 2005 edition and I have painstakingly translated along with GI and checked every single reference. After the war, MF spent several years working on the lecture - this text is written for the general public, in other words it is not a lecture for the white men. Among other things, Ida Rolf used this book as a starting point when she developed her connective tissue massage.
MF wrote an introduction, not a foreword. And Coué didn't practice hypnotherapy - that's the point, he called what he taught auto suggestion.
Then regarding neuroplasticity - Eric R Kandel received the Nobel Prize in 2000 - why do you rely on a book from the forties regarding a finding that was then unknown? All scientific findings reported do not need to be updated.
Oh, and please don't make me find examples of the Eurocentric and male-centric language. It may be edited for the general public, but it self-discloses its origins as lectures to a particular audience.
Thanks, as always, for your scholarship, Eva. Especially that I muddled autosuggestion and hypnotherapy. I'll correct that. But regarding neuroplasticity, I don't know if you appreciate how there's a fairly dominant tendency in the Feldenkrais Method community, to cast MF as a prophet of neuroplasticity. One datapoint is the republished Elusive Obvious, with the subtitle "The Convergence of Movement, Neuroplasticity, and Health." https://www.amazon.com/Elusive-Obvious-Convergence-Movement-Neuroplasticity/dp/1623173345
A very important perspective that was just emerging as Dr. Feldenkrais was writing BMB was the so-called cybernetic reasoning. Dr. Feldenkrais was clearly aware of the signal processing implications (his mention of superheterodyne feedback circuits necessary for his sonar patents) and his knowledge of homeostasis via Dr. Cannon.
One call tell a story with numbers and statistics. It can be very useful to do so. However, neither numbers nor statistics make something scientific, though many people think otherwise. (Not expecting you to agree FYI. Might be a good topic for a podcast or YT video)
I really liked the frame for this essay -- the flow and ideas contrasting the fields of intellectual/scientific reasoning in the 1940's and now. I was only disappointed that it ended. And I heartily agree that it is not a good book for a beginner partly because it has references to experiments that hardly anyone knows about (and some of which have been supplanted). His addendum, The Potent Self has more space for learners to self-reflect.
I think your statement, "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. " is an essential statement and well-worth a good debate in our community. So many of us give lip-service to Norman Doige, without critical review of what he was saying about the essentials of the Feldenkrais Method.
I think you should fix your website Ryan H, and stop promoting feldenkrais as teaching movement. Then you can raise your voice. I am very serious. We can blame it on a substandard training in Feldenkrais but I don't think that is credible. You can do better.
I haven't seen this new publication of TEO basic Feldenkrais, (I've translated it too) but these people are like Trump, repeat lies until they believe them themselves. I found an article today from 1991 where Mark Reese publishes a previously unpublished article by MF and I am absolutely convinced that MR made the same brutal mistake in that publication as he does in the so-called biography.
And I am born 7 years after the war, my prediction for a text is very different than yours. We think different. Reproduction is the pinnacle of biology but MF never mentions childbearing in his texts. It is his obvious bias.
Unless you want to comment on my FI or ATM, I really don't understand your tone here. Writing about Feldenkrais Method (to an audience primarily of somatics nerds) doesn't reflect much on my training. And if you think my marketing is so incompetent I shouldn't even be writing here, I guess I'll need more convincing.
Eva Laser, where do I promote Feldenkrais Method as "teaching movement"!? That's not my marketing strategy. Feldenkrais Method is a form of somatic education that uses a movement-based pedagogy, not a form of movement education.
Ryan, perhaps Eva is referring to your statement on the main page: "Our students learn how to move more comfortably and with more self-awareness, leading to better functioning."
However, you clarify this with, "Stop learning to move and start moving to learn!"
it's a conundrum, for sure. I certainly have no competence in this area.
Oh, I do see how that wording sounds like I'm teaching movement, thanks Rob Black. Sorry Eva Laser if that seemed like I'm being evasive, I was just being slow. I hate the wording Rob picks out, will change it soon.
Despite Moshe's many errors and thinking to the contrary, it is not either/or, but rather both/and. You can use Feldenkraisian strategies to teach movement and you can also use it to teach awareness. One does not preclude the other.