If you want a book I personally liked Thomas Hanna’s Somatics Reawakening The Mind’s Control Of Movement, Flexibility, And Health. It can be found as a PDF on the internet.
The books starts by explaining why you should care about somatics.
He might exaggerate some things but I think that no matter what you do in terms of the factors of aging that Aubrey de Grey describes, if you don’t address the somatic factors you won’t make it to 300 years of age even if you do gene therapy.
At the end the book describes exercises that you can do at home before going to sleep and after waking up. I’m not sure whether those exercises as described by Hanna are optimal but they do something. There a higher time investment to get into it but after that the regular upkeep is at 5 minutes per day after waking up.
Finding local classes is also good. At the moment I still lack the knowledge to judge the quality of all methods. Doing Feldenkrais with a teacher that has years of experience would be a straightforward route.
Would you mind explaining why you think Somatics works? That >=3 people on LW take it seriously certainly lends some credibility, but as far as I can see there’s not much else to recommend it. I’m genuinely curious what convinced you, since this seems potentially useful.
Nor does their official website provide any convincing evidence.
Edit: This is a review of 6 Feldenkrais RCTs, and concludes:
[The six studies] were all burdened with significant methodological weaknesses. … All but one trial reported positive results. Conclusion: The evidence for the FM is encouraging but, due to the paucity and low quality of studies, by no means compelling.
Would you mind explaining why you think Somatics works?
I hold my beliefs on the subject mainly because of things I have seen with my own eyes and experiences I made. I spent years in standard physiotherapy. As part of my QS regiment I measured my lung function daily. After a 20 minute intervention at a bar by a practitioner of somatic psycho-education I woke up the next day with an 50% increase in my lung function. At that time that wasn’t permanent but after 4 months of weekly session I stabilized on that new value. Specific improvements in that timeframe often happen right the day after a session.
Hard QS numbers where what hooked me initially. Then as time went on things got more complicated. I started perceiving a lot more. I made a lot of experiences but they don’t fit into a structure. Today I could spent 5 minutes to describe you how my body feels and I don’t really have a way to compress that into a decent number that I could track. This means that studying the subject via the scientific method is very hard.
There are a bunch of things I perceive which I can’t measure with any method I could think of and where I’m not calibrated and therefore I can’t tell whether the variable actually changes or my perception of the variable changes.
For example at the start of this week my physical perception increased. Practically that means that I can dance a Salsa turn pattern comfortably at my Salsa lessons with eyes closed. At the same time my increased perception comes with slight nausea I can perceive and I get diarrhea. But overall I feel more comfortable.
If I would use some random checklist than I would mark nausea as something negative. But I do thing the problem was there before and it’s just my increased awareness that brought it to the forefront.
If you study something like back pain, we don’t have good objective methods to measure back pain. The standard is to ask people and when your primary modus operandi is about using changing in perception as a means to get results that’s problematic.
We have X-rays to diagnose the shape of bones but we don’t have similar high powered equipment to measure the amount of contraction of all the muscles in the body and have standardized that equipment to be useful for diagnosis of illnesses that have to do with contraction of muscles that don’t relax themselves when they should relax themselves.
A Feldenkrais practitioner might say: “Hey you have this muscle in your back and is tense. If that muscle would be relaxed your back would feel better. I can teach you to relax it.” That seems like the kind of question that should be easy to investigate scientifically. You would just need an objective measurement for whether the muscle is tense. Unfortunately we don’t have this for clinical practice. Scientific discovery has a lot do to with having good tools.
I have a friend who writes a software that uses the kinect for analysing movement patterns to study another physical therapy. It’s hard to get academic funding for it. In biology there a lot of money for buying fancy fMRI’s and gene sequencing equipment. There not much money for buying good camera’s and software to analyse movement patterns of humans so she has to repurpose closed source gaming hardware. There’s nobody spending the millions to get an open source solution that’s optimised for the needs of researchers of human movement. Such tools might be a better target than telomere research for someone who wants to found the fight against aging.
I don’t capitalize the term somatics because it’s a field that contains many methods. I do think that the book of Thomas Hanna is good but I don’t specifically endorse Hanna Somatic Education over another brand like Feldenkrais. Thomas Hanna unfortunately died in a car crash so his trademarked method isn’t as strong as it would have been if he would have spent another two decades in research.
It’s completely an issue about how you form your beliefs. I didn’t form mine on the subject matter through scholarship but through empiricism.
There limited peer reviewed research on Feldenkrais but those studies rather indicates that it works than indicating that it doesn’t work.
If you need peer reviewed studies to believe that investing more energy is probably not having a good return. On the other hand from the initial list of this article, I don’t use Source Control Software either because the software was shown to be effective in peer reviewed experiments.
I second the recommendation of Somatics—it’s a good simple explanation of Feldenkrais Method, and the exercises are good for my lower back.
I think there’s a rejuvenating effect because Feldenkrais reverses a lot of accumulated movement habits, but it’s plausible to me that gene therapy might have the same effect. On the other hand, we have Feldenkrais and we don’t have anything like that level of gene therapy.
As far as aging goes, Aubrey de Grey lists aging as being about a bunch of factors. He proposes if we fix those factors through techniques like gene therapy we can get 1000 years old.
Aubrey de Grey’s list misses “bad movement habits” or as Thomas Hanna calls it Sensory-Motor Amnesia (SMA). I think it’s important for the discourse about fighting aging to understand that Grey’s list isn’t complete.
One thing I’d add to the list of Aging factors is a generalization on the unnecessary tension and lack of sensation noted by somatic practitioners—feedback loops and signal transduction pathways pegged into insensitive operating points.
Some signal gets too large, which tamps some sensitivity down, when then leads to positive feedback making the original signal even larger. Hormones, neurotransmitters, muscle actuation/sensing. System compensation helps in the short run, but they lead to getting trapped at suboptimal operating points that are local minima, that require some “kick” to get you out.
With the latest post on Neoreactionaries, I felt the urge for some Moldbuggery.
He had an example of the human organizational version of the principle described above, which I realize now is largely his whole Cathedral analysis as well. When the feedback loops get screwed, so do you.
Nearly every scientist in a field can be working together to promote a falsehood because they all get their money from Joe Romm and company. And if the falsehood is exposed rather than promoted, there is no field left. It is no more surprising that all USG-funded scientists are unanimous in promoting AGW as a global emergency, than that all Philip Morris-funded scientists are unanimous in promoting tobacco as a vitamin.
If you want a book I personally liked Thomas Hanna’s Somatics Reawakening The Mind’s Control Of Movement, Flexibility, And Health. It can be found as a PDF on the internet.
The books starts by explaining why you should care about somatics.
He might exaggerate some things but I think that no matter what you do in terms of the factors of aging that Aubrey de Grey describes, if you don’t address the somatic factors you won’t make it to 300 years of age even if you do gene therapy.
At the end the book describes exercises that you can do at home before going to sleep and after waking up. I’m not sure whether those exercises as described by Hanna are optimal but they do something. There a higher time investment to get into it but after that the regular upkeep is at 5 minutes per day after waking up.
Finding local classes is also good. At the moment I still lack the knowledge to judge the quality of all methods. Doing Feldenkrais with a teacher that has years of experience would be a straightforward route.
Would you mind explaining why you think Somatics works? That >=3 people on LW take it seriously certainly lends some credibility, but as far as I can see there’s not much else to recommend it. I’m genuinely curious what convinced you, since this seems potentially useful.
Looking at the Wikipedia pages on Somatics and on sensory-motor amnesia, I see no significant evidence that this actually works.
Nor does their official website provide any convincing evidence.
Edit: This is a review of 6 Feldenkrais RCTs, and concludes:
I hold my beliefs on the subject mainly because of things I have seen with my own eyes and experiences I made. I spent years in standard physiotherapy. As part of my QS regiment I measured my lung function daily. After a 20 minute intervention at a bar by a practitioner of somatic psycho-education I woke up the next day with an 50% increase in my lung function. At that time that wasn’t permanent but after 4 months of weekly session I stabilized on that new value. Specific improvements in that timeframe often happen right the day after a session.
Hard QS numbers where what hooked me initially. Then as time went on things got more complicated. I started perceiving a lot more. I made a lot of experiences but they don’t fit into a structure. Today I could spent 5 minutes to describe you how my body feels and I don’t really have a way to compress that into a decent number that I could track. This means that studying the subject via the scientific method is very hard.
There are a bunch of things I perceive which I can’t measure with any method I could think of and where I’m not calibrated and therefore I can’t tell whether the variable actually changes or my perception of the variable changes.
For example at the start of this week my physical perception increased. Practically that means that I can dance a Salsa turn pattern comfortably at my Salsa lessons with eyes closed. At the same time my increased perception comes with slight nausea I can perceive and I get diarrhea. But overall I feel more comfortable.
If I would use some random checklist than I would mark nausea as something negative. But I do thing the problem was there before and it’s just my increased awareness that brought it to the forefront.
If you study something like back pain, we don’t have good objective methods to measure back pain. The standard is to ask people and when your primary modus operandi is about using changing in perception as a means to get results that’s problematic.
We have X-rays to diagnose the shape of bones but we don’t have similar high powered equipment to measure the amount of contraction of all the muscles in the body and have standardized that equipment to be useful for diagnosis of illnesses that have to do with contraction of muscles that don’t relax themselves when they should relax themselves.
A Feldenkrais practitioner might say: “Hey you have this muscle in your back and is tense. If that muscle would be relaxed your back would feel better. I can teach you to relax it.” That seems like the kind of question that should be easy to investigate scientifically. You would just need an objective measurement for whether the muscle is tense. Unfortunately we don’t have this for clinical practice. Scientific discovery has a lot do to with having good tools.
I have a friend who writes a software that uses the kinect for analysing movement patterns to study another physical therapy. It’s hard to get academic funding for it. In biology there a lot of money for buying fancy fMRI’s and gene sequencing equipment. There not much money for buying good camera’s and software to analyse movement patterns of humans so she has to repurpose closed source gaming hardware. There’s nobody spending the millions to get an open source solution that’s optimised for the needs of researchers of human movement. Such tools might be a better target than telomere research for someone who wants to found the fight against aging.
I don’t capitalize the term somatics because it’s a field that contains many methods. I do think that the book of Thomas Hanna is good but I don’t specifically endorse Hanna Somatic Education over another brand like Feldenkrais. Thomas Hanna unfortunately died in a car crash so his trademarked method isn’t as strong as it would have been if he would have spent another two decades in research.
30 seconds of research leads me to believe it’s quackery. Should I investigate further?
It’s completely an issue about how you form your beliefs. I didn’t form mine on the subject matter through scholarship but through empiricism.
There limited peer reviewed research on Feldenkrais but those studies rather indicates that it works than indicating that it doesn’t work.
If you need peer reviewed studies to believe that investing more energy is probably not having a good return. On the other hand from the initial list of this article, I don’t use Source Control Software either because the software was shown to be effective in peer reviewed experiments.
I second the recommendation of Somatics—it’s a good simple explanation of Feldenkrais Method, and the exercises are good for my lower back.
I think there’s a rejuvenating effect because Feldenkrais reverses a lot of accumulated movement habits, but it’s plausible to me that gene therapy might have the same effect. On the other hand, we have Feldenkrais and we don’t have anything like that level of gene therapy.
I like Somatics, but think that it’s a very thin skim on what Feldenkrais had to offer.
Feldenkrais have very interesting stuff on volition and action in The Potent Self. Body and Mature Behavior is good too.
As far as aging goes, Aubrey de Grey lists aging as being about a bunch of factors. He proposes if we fix those factors through techniques like gene therapy we can get 1000 years old.
Aubrey de Grey’s list misses “bad movement habits” or as Thomas Hanna calls it Sensory-Motor Amnesia (SMA). I think it’s important for the discourse about fighting aging to understand that Grey’s list isn’t complete.
One thing I’d add to the list of Aging factors is a generalization on the unnecessary tension and lack of sensation noted by somatic practitioners—feedback loops and signal transduction pathways pegged into insensitive operating points.
Some signal gets too large, which tamps some sensitivity down, when then leads to positive feedback making the original signal even larger. Hormones, neurotransmitters, muscle actuation/sensing. System compensation helps in the short run, but they lead to getting trapped at suboptimal operating points that are local minima, that require some “kick” to get you out.
With the latest post on Neoreactionaries, I felt the urge for some Moldbuggery.
He had an example of the human organizational version of the principle described above, which I realize now is largely his whole Cathedral analysis as well. When the feedback loops get screwed, so do you.