by Jeff Hawkins

The Body Knew First — Part 2 of 4

(Four short reads on the neuroscience of movement, and what it means for how you live in your body).

Try something quickly…

Picture a coffee cup and imagine tracing its rim with your fingertip.

Now picture doing the same thing using only your eyes, no touching at all.

Which one gives you a clearer, more complete sense of its shape?

Almost everyone says the first one — even though, on paper, vision gives you plenty of information already.

Why would touch, and movement, add something sight alone can’t?

Jeff Hawkins spent his early career building the Palm Pilot before walking away from Silicon Valley to chase exactly this kind of question full-time.

His book A Thousand Brains lays out what he and his team found: your neocortex is made of roughly 150,000 nearly identical units called cortical columns, and each one is constantly building its own small model of the world.

The catch is that a column can’t build that model from sensory input alone. It has to be wired to movement too — because the only way to know not just what something is, but where it is and how its parts relate to each other, is to move in relation to it, or move your attention across it.

Hawkins pushes this further than you’d expect.

He argues the same mechanism underlies abstract thought, not just physical sensing — that thinking itself is a kind of movement, your attention traveling through an idea the way your fingertip traveled around the rim of that cup.

Under this model, there’s no separate “thinking module” quietly working with clean, pre-processed information. There’s only ever sensorimotor modeling, all the way up, whether you’re learning the shape of an object or working through a difficult idea.

This is, essentially, the working principle behind an Awareness Through Movement lesson, decades before anyone had language like “reference frames” or “cortical columns” to describe it.

A Feldenkrais lesson doesn’t hand you the “correct” way to move and ask you to copy it. It invites you to explore, to sense small differences, to let your own movement build the model — because that exploration, not the instruction, is the only way any part of your nervous system can actually construct a clear, accurate picture of anything, including yourself.

If you’d like to feel what that process is actually like from the inside, rather than just read about the theory, a private Functional Integration lesson is the most direct way in. A practitioner’s hands guide your body through movement it may never have found entirely on its own — and you get to notice, in real time, what a nervous system building a clearer model of itself actually feels like.

Next: if movement is how the brain builds its models, the obvious next question is what, exactly, it’s building models of.

One of the biggest things it maps, it turns out, is you.

Stay tuned.

Ravi

PS: Interested in knowing more about the origins of Brains?

• Click here to watch this TED Talk  – The Real Reason For Brains –  by neuroscientist Dan Wolpert. The talk is short, under 20 minutes, highly entertaining as well as informative. I would encourage you to watch it.
• Or here to read my Blog post: Why Do You Have A Brain?