Alexander Technique is one somatic technique of many. All of them lead to skillful movement and without background knowledge there no reason to assume that a specific technique inspired Dune.
I was guessing based on timing, but looking into Herbert I’m not seeing any obvious influence. It’s more a statement of Dune’s impact on how I think about movement than it is about Herbert, it looks like.
I don’t think that discussing it is inherently impossible. It just hard.
Well, you can certainly elaborate the basic intellectual edifice, as done for Zen here. My stab at it:
Humans are ‘psychophysical systems’ (read this as a rejection of dualism in practice rather than just philosophy). Most people don’t use themselves skillfully. One of the key skills in using yourself skillfully is learning the skill of not doing habitual wasteful or harmful actions, and this entails unlearning habits and defaults.
The sort of person who reads LW probably has significant experience entering strange new conceptual territory, to wrap their mind around beliefs or opinions that seem totally alien to them; they probably don’t have significant experience entering strange new physical territory, in the sense of moving or keeping their body in a manner that seems totally alien to them. And just as concepts that start off seeming alien can turn out to be helpful and grow familiar, so can physical mannerisms.
Communicating concepts in words is difficult but mostly doable. Communicating mannerisms in words is many times more difficult, and illusions of transparency even worse. Communicating mannerisms by touch is difficult but mostly doable. The communication difficulty is increased by the fact that the ‘mannerism’ involves the level of tension in the muscles and resistance to movement as well as the position of the joints. (I can show you a picture of how my shoulder is oriented; can I show you a picture of how readily it moves when you push or pull my hand?) Note also that many people spend years of focused effort in learning how to better communicate with words (both listening/reading and speaking/writing), and very little focused effort in learning how to better communicate with mannerisms (observing with sight or touch and demonstrating with example or touch).
It’s even more hard when the people you are talking with don’t have the background to understand the basic claims and then want peer reviewed research for every claim.
There seems to be a general heuristic of “if you can’t articulate how you know X, I don’t believe that you know X” that I am deeply ambivalent about using. On the one hand, it serves as an impetus to abstract and formalize knowledge and is useful as a cautionary principle against trickery. On the other hand, much (if not most!) knowledge cannot be easily articulated because it is stored in the form of muscle memory or network associations rather than clear logical links. I don’t seem to rely on that heuristic very much, for reasons I haven’t fully unpacked.
Last Sunday I went to a 1 1⁄2 hour Grinberg Method presentation by a Grinberg teacher. At the end I asked innocently asked a deep question.
After a bit forth and back the teacher did understand my question. On the other hand someone practicing Grinberg professionally with 1 year of professional training didn’t even understand my question.
On the other hand, much (if not most!) knowledge cannot be easily articulated because it is stored in the form of muscle memory or network associations rather than clear logical links.
Not only that. If a specific concept withstood 100 separated attempts of falsifying it, I can be pretty confident in the concept. On the other hand summarizing those 100 separate attempt of falsifying it can’t be done in a LW post. Of course the concepts for which that’s true are also quite central for the way I view the world.
There seems to be a general heuristic of “if you can’t articulate how you know X, I don’t believe that you know X” that I am deeply ambivalent about using.
When talking about somatics, it often also useful to think “if you don’t articulate how you know X, then I have no good idea what you mean when you say that you know X”. Unfortunately that’s quite unavoidable in the topic.
“If I claim that lowering my center of gravity will ground me and make it harder for someone to push me” then, the average person on LW likely does not have a concept of what that sentence means.
The communication difficulty is increased by the fact that the ‘mannerism’ involves the level of tension in the muscles and resistance to movement as well as the position of the joints.
Not only that. It also involves movement intentions. Movement intentions are not something trivial to explain.
At the beginning of the year I was a Bachata Congress taking a workshop. The teacher announced to the group that he does something and the audience is supposed to tell him what he does.
He did the basic step and changed his movement intention from up to down and back a few times. I was the only person who noticed that. He said that nobody even noticed before in his workshops and he’s teaching at a different Congress most weeks. The kind of people who go to dance congresses are not totally incompetent at human movement and still he usually does this and nobody can tell him what he’s doing. For me it looks quite obvious but then I spent a lot of time with somatics (but still have no professional training).
Concepts like tensions, muscles, resistance to movement and position of joints are all ideas that for which I assume that most people on LW have phenomenological primitives. Movement intention isn’t like that. It’s nothing that somebody in school told you about.
As far as the concept of muscles go, I’m currently reading Anatomy Trains with includes the nice passage:
If the elimination of the muscle as a physiological unit is too radical a notion for most of us to accept, we
can tone it down in this way: In order to progress, contemporary therapists need to think ‘outside the box’ of
this isolated muscle concept.
That’s were it get’s conceptually interesting and unfortunately that’s no ground that’s easy to discuss on LW or for that matter on any online forum I know of.
I was guessing based on timing, but looking into Herbert I’m not seeing any obvious influence. It’s more a statement of Dune’s impact on how I think about movement than it is about Herbert, it looks like.
Well, you can certainly elaborate the basic intellectual edifice, as done for Zen here. My stab at it:
Humans are ‘psychophysical systems’ (read this as a rejection of dualism in practice rather than just philosophy). Most people don’t use themselves skillfully. One of the key skills in using yourself skillfully is learning the skill of not doing habitual wasteful or harmful actions, and this entails unlearning habits and defaults.
The sort of person who reads LW probably has significant experience entering strange new conceptual territory, to wrap their mind around beliefs or opinions that seem totally alien to them; they probably don’t have significant experience entering strange new physical territory, in the sense of moving or keeping their body in a manner that seems totally alien to them. And just as concepts that start off seeming alien can turn out to be helpful and grow familiar, so can physical mannerisms.
Communicating concepts in words is difficult but mostly doable. Communicating mannerisms in words is many times more difficult, and illusions of transparency even worse. Communicating mannerisms by touch is difficult but mostly doable. The communication difficulty is increased by the fact that the ‘mannerism’ involves the level of tension in the muscles and resistance to movement as well as the position of the joints. (I can show you a picture of how my shoulder is oriented; can I show you a picture of how readily it moves when you push or pull my hand?) Note also that many people spend years of focused effort in learning how to better communicate with words (both listening/reading and speaking/writing), and very little focused effort in learning how to better communicate with mannerisms (observing with sight or touch and demonstrating with example or touch).
There seems to be a general heuristic of “if you can’t articulate how you know X, I don’t believe that you know X” that I am deeply ambivalent about using. On the one hand, it serves as an impetus to abstract and formalize knowledge and is useful as a cautionary principle against trickery. On the other hand, much (if not most!) knowledge cannot be easily articulated because it is stored in the form of muscle memory or network associations rather than clear logical links. I don’t seem to rely on that heuristic very much, for reasons I haven’t fully unpacked.
Last Sunday I went to a 1 1⁄2 hour Grinberg Method presentation by a Grinberg teacher. At the end I asked innocently asked a deep question. After a bit forth and back the teacher did understand my question. On the other hand someone practicing Grinberg professionally with 1 year of professional training didn’t even understand my question.
Not only that. If a specific concept withstood 100 separated attempts of falsifying it, I can be pretty confident in the concept. On the other hand summarizing those 100 separate attempt of falsifying it can’t be done in a LW post. Of course the concepts for which that’s true are also quite central for the way I view the world.
When talking about somatics, it often also useful to think “if you don’t articulate how you know X, then I have no good idea what you mean when you say that you know X”. Unfortunately that’s quite unavoidable in the topic.
“If I claim that lowering my center of gravity will ground me and make it harder for someone to push me” then, the average person on LW likely does not have a concept of what that sentence means.
Not only that. It also involves movement intentions. Movement intentions are not something trivial to explain.
At the beginning of the year I was a Bachata Congress taking a workshop. The teacher announced to the group that he does something and the audience is supposed to tell him what he does. He did the basic step and changed his movement intention from up to down and back a few times. I was the only person who noticed that. He said that nobody even noticed before in his workshops and he’s teaching at a different Congress most weeks. The kind of people who go to dance congresses are not totally incompetent at human movement and still he usually does this and nobody can tell him what he’s doing. For me it looks quite obvious but then I spent a lot of time with somatics (but still have no professional training).
Concepts like tensions, muscles, resistance to movement and position of joints are all ideas that for which I assume that most people on LW have phenomenological primitives. Movement intention isn’t like that. It’s nothing that somebody in school told you about.
As far as the concept of muscles go, I’m currently reading Anatomy Trains with includes the nice passage:
That’s were it get’s conceptually interesting and unfortunately that’s no ground that’s easy to discuss on LW or for that matter on any online forum I know of.