Sometimes a lesson is entirely on one side. If it alternates sides, there is still a choice that has been made to start on one side or the other.
One principle at work in this is to start where the person is at, and explore what they already do best: we typically start with the side that has an easier time with whatever it is we’re exploring–movement, transmission of force, connection, etc.
But the choice of side in ATM has to be for everyone at once; even in choosing for the individual, there may be a tendency or pattern that individuals share with others.
In “The Elusive Obvious,” Moshe writes about this (pp. 75-77). The general theme of these pages seems to be how he independently and through his own work with people discovered things that others only discovered through large scientific research programs. These passages always involve a lot of name dropping. Very endearing.
He describes how, early in his use of ATM and FI during WW II, he would work exclusively on one side, in order to create a large contrast in feeling between the two sides, and therefore a situation in which a person would learn from him or herself, comparing the sensation of the sides and transferring the learning from the side that was active during the lesson to the side that had been passive. This discovery somehow anticipated, he thinks (as Bronowski explained to him), how the use of stochastic strategies in foraging (in evolutionary theory), requires an internal feeling/preference for the optimal. A quick google doesn’t immediately bring me to any connection between random walk theory and internal preferences, so I don’t know whether that idea Bronowski explained to Feldenkrais is still current.
But then, Moshe says, he gradually discovered that some things could be learned more easily on one side, and some on the other. This difference is not obvious: one wouldn’t notice it until many years in the work. He describes this as his independent discovery of brain lateralization.
Fine differentiation is learned more easily on the right side (hence left hemisphere), and he connects this to the idea that all “learned purely human activities” are left-hemisphere activities.
The left side (hence right hemisphere) can be used in a different strategy–to “build up” the movement and its mental representation, Moshe says. And lists of lateralized function may place spatial manipulation in the right hemisphere.
The left side (right hemisphere) learns more quickly and efficiently from the right–I guess that it grasps the “gestalt” from the right and hence learns in a more holistic way the function that was learned more analytically on the right. It learns “greater fluency and ease”, which he connects specifically to how hard the first side worked to learn, but my sense is that he means also that, however “hard” each side works, the point is that they work differently. The eighth lesson in the book ATM discusses and demonstrates this idea (and indeed works on the right side first, and then the left side in imagination).
I’ve not paid attention much in the past when people talk about brain lateralization in relation to what we’re doing in Feldenkrais, partly because the very idea of localization in the brain is still so much in development, and subject to fundamental puzzles–and the lateralization area is subject to “just so” stories (a phrase usually used when talking about how evolutionary theory can make up a story to explain things whose real sources lie in social assumptions and biases). Simplified popularizations proliferate.
Even if I were to integrate more thinking about lateralization into how I think about the work, I am dubious about how Moshe layers his idea of “learned purely human activities” onto the science. I would assume that non-human animals are accomplishing things with their left hemispheres, and that there is distinctly human learning involving the right hemisphere (pragmatics, context, prosody–these are things the Wikipedia article assigns, with much hedging, to the right hemisphere). I’m agnostic at the moment about Moshe’s broader story about handedness/specialization of function by side/lateralization being distinctly human and essential for language.
I’m used to thinking about a distinction between standing / extension / transmission of force / balance (usually left side) and folding / fine manipulation (usually right side). This passage inspires me to think more about quality of movement and learning on each side, beyond the more narrow functions I’ve just described.
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Foraging is the act of searching for food. Stochastic means random. Probably maybe there are many different kinds of food out there. Everything that is edible. Who wants to try those berries? These leaves? This chinese grocery store’s milk (is it fake and will make you suffer or is it safe and nourish you?) Is milk nutritious at all? Do we need milk? What’s this thing over there … I have a feeling I need to eat this … mmm … yummy ….
Plus: This whole left side/right side, specially of the brain, left side of the brain, right side of the brain, does it matter? I mean, in book sales, yes, but in my life? yours?
It’s interesting to think about how side effects things from the brain to movement, etc. You always hear about someone being more “right-brained” or “left-brained” and the idea has always been intriguing to me.
Hi Kate,
That idea has certainly entered our every-day vocabulary. It’s not clear how much science this is behind it, or to what extent it’s the old human tendency to label people and put them in categories. I tend to worry a lot about labeling/categorizing people. But I know other people in Feldenkrais do connect lateralization with the idea that by standing on one foot or the other you’re stimulating that part of your brain and therefore exercising that kind of outlook on the world. I dunno.
-Lynette
One set of complexities in the issue is that we are using our brains for so many different functions. It almost doesn’t make sense to say that one or the other side is dominant. Dominant in what? Sensory processing (which sense?)? Emotional and social processing? Motor control? Language–understanding or producing? Memory? Another complexity is that there is individual variation of unknown source and significance in localization of brain function.
Looking at word production (since handedness indicates the hand with which you produce written language), hemispheric dominance is associated with handedness, but not dictated by it. See for example http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/123/12/2512.abstract
Here’s an interesting “Neuromyth” publication from the OECD: http://www.oecd.org/document/63/0,3746,en_2649_35845581_34555007_1_1_1_1,00.html
When people use their right hand for writing or their dominant had is the right, would that mean they are suing their left brain the most? And if you’re left handed, is it your right brain that functions the most? This is a good debate and generally speaking its very hard to get points in which side will I agree.
Here’s an overview of recent hypotheses and one lab’s approach to hemispheric specialization/integration in action:
http://ivrylab.berkeley.edu/pdf/serriendynamics.pdf
Serrien, D. J., Ivry, R. B., & Swinnen, S. P. (2006). Dynamics of hemispheric specialization and integration in the context of motor control. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 7(2), 160-6. doi:10.1038/nrn1849
It contains discussions directly relevant to Moshe’s observations about differences in learning on the left and right, and shows the complexity of scientific precision in understanding specialization and integration for action.
So, reading Serrien, Ivry, & Swinnen.
It appears that the idea that the specialization of the left hemisphere in learning movement is still thought by some, not all, to be related to its dominant role in language acquisition. (Interesting–a left hemisphere parietal lesion is likely to have an impact on complex action of both hands).
And as one would often observe in doing Feldenkrais, the right hemisphere/left side plays a more postural role and the left hemisphere/right hand a more manipulative role–a pattern clearest in right-handers (which doesn’t mean it’s universal in them, or straight-forwardly reversed in left-handers).
The prevalent thinking is that the left hemisphere controls those aspects of movement that are “closed loop” (well-established movement patterns) while the right controls “open loop” (exploratory, based on feedback). These are aspects of movement, not sets of movements: the action of throwing an object starts with a (left-hemisphere dominant) plan and ends having been shaped by refinement provided by the right hemisphere responding to feedback from the environment to guide the movement to reach its goal.
So if that’s the case, ATMs really are a right hemisphere workout–we heighten strongly the guidance from feedback for even the simplest actions. And this left hemisphere has some kind of strong spatial function which I’m going to have to spend more time reading about before I come back and post some more. Stay tuned…
There is much complexity in this article that I won’t try to summarize, but some major points I take away from it relevant to our work are:
It has long been thought that lateralization of the brain is, roughly, about language/motor skills on the left side of the brain, and spatial representation/attention on the right. Already it is long understood that insofar as there is functional specialization, both hemispheres of the brain must contribute to actions “with the right hand” and “with the left,” and this is observed in the research tradition drawing on brain injury patients.
fMRI and other tools now let researchers look at much more than deficits that result from lesions. These researchers represent a tradition that understands lateralization as integrated, dynamic, and developmental. Integrated because a given action involves both functional specializations (they give the example of a throwing action: the left hemisphere is more involved in planning the movement trajectory and starting it; the right hemisphere more in the adjustment of that intention to feedback from the environment, to create the precise and final aim of the action). Dynamic because in learning movements, the right brain is more active in gathering feedback in execution, while the specific skill will be transfered to greater control by the left brain as the skill is successfully learned. Developmental because this and other patterns will differ across the developmental path of the person from infancy through life.
Right brain: 1) open loop (exploratory action with a high degree of feedback from the environment); 2) exploratory processing, novel situations; 3) local attention? or monitoring for mismatch between intention & action? or control of spatial attention for both left & right visual fields? 4) less-well understood…spatial response selection.
Left brain: 1) closed loop (a motor skill that is a settled pattern selected and implemented); 2) handling familiar situations; 3) spatial memory, learning, orientation–global attention? 4) planning, recognition, imitation of action; 5) syntax/sequence of action.
Now, the open-loop/closed-loop distinction is not looking to be the clear dichotomy it once seemed to be. The example above of throwing an object shows that these are not two types of action, but that the two cooperate in creating a single action.
The dominance of the right brain in open-loop movement and the left in closed loop movements is related to the postural vs. manipulative specialization that is handedness. They talk about this a lot for right-handedness and closed loop movement control, and don’t say so much about why postural specialization may be involve open loop processing, but it makes a great deal of sense to any Feldenkrais practitioner. Open loop processing is about the refinement of intention to the feedback of the environment. The intention part in standing is very small and largely reflexive (not falling over), and the brain is really occupied with adjusting that to the environment, whereas the more intentional, differentiated, deliberately learned actions of the dominant hand involve a behavioural repertoire of a broad range of possible intentions one selects among to enact in a given situation.
All of this is with the caveats: these patterns are most consistent but not universal in right-handed people, and that left-handers are not organized by being straightforwardly opposite (I think we see that in ourselves and our clients). Furthermore, the research tradition draws from finger-tapping studies and the generalization to other actions is unknown! Huge caveat that! This is almost always the case in science–the experimental repertoire is miniscule and artificial compared the phenomena we want to understand!
Now how does this related to the learning on one side vs. the other that Moshe talks about? It’s not straight-forward. The researchers here are very specifically discussing lateralization of function in a context where a final action is the product of the whole brain, not of the contralateral hemisphere. Everything that it is said the left hemisphere specializes in, it specializes in for action of the whole person…any action involves inhibition of a reflex left/right mirroring; any action involves postural position as the background of manipulation; any action may be done with greater skill on one side or the other but can be done on the other side; in short, any action involves the integration of these lateralized specializations. (That summary is a mashup of what I read here and what I experience in Feldenkrais, and it leaves out a lot of interesting stuff they say that I don’t yet understand.)
But still, since handedness is connected (though not 100% correlated) with this lateralization, and since we as Feldenkrais practitioners understand “handedness” in terms of an integration of two specializations (the more postural/extensors/reflex side vs. the more manipulative/flexors/intentional side), I think the picture here is broadly consistent with what Moshe is talking about in the above passage, although he was working from a scientific basis that hadn’t got beyond lateralization of language.
At the beginning of the 2010 Keynote address to the Feldenkrais Guild annual conference, Elizabeth Beringer talks about Moshe’s tendency to start ATMs on the right, and even do them entirely on the right, especially in his later teaching, and she connects this approach to some of the research summarized in this article I’m describing:
http://www.feldenkrais.com/events/conference/2010/videopart1
Specifically, that when you are doing a right-handed movement, you have the left motor cortex active, but when you do a left-handed movement, you have both sides active. She speculates that you get a clearer message when you address via the right side than when you address via the left.