bodyalive
bodyalive
Body Alive
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"Change your Body About Your Mind"
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bodyalive · 18 hours ago
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On line dance classes :: between Wind & Sea :: www.stefanipetracca.com/teaching
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"This work originated with Elsa Gindler,
Charlotte Selver’s teacher, at the turn of the century in Germany. It arose from a crisis in her life, in which she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She did not have money to go away for a cure. She simplified her life and gave acute attention to what was happening in her: learning to connect with breathing and discovering how to allow healing and replenishment through her own inner responsiveness. Much to her doctor’s amazement, she became cured of the tuberculosis. Through this process, she made discoveries that later became the foundation of her work.
Mary Alice Roche, a longtime student and colleague of Charlotte Selver wrote an article that describes the history of this work. In it she quotes, Gindler’s friend and colleague, Elfriede Hengstenberg (1985),
“Unable to afford going to a sanitarium in the mountains, [Gindler] stayed at home and became interested in sensing her inner response to every activity at every moment during the day. While just coming out of the sleeping state she gave herself up to the first stirrings of the awakening organism, to its elemental desire for extending – and discovered how spontaneously breathing responded to the slightest movement. This process belonged to her need for regeneration, but also to her need to protect herself against noise from the outside and inside. She found that in this practice she came into a state where she was no longer disturbed by her own thoughts and worries.And she came to experience … that calm in the physical field (Gelassenheit) is equivalent to trust in the psychic field… It is a state of being in balance. The core of the word is lassen, “allowing” in contrast to “doing” or “controlling” or “resisting.” Lassen is also related to sensing the pull of gravity. There is an interdependence between sensing one’s weight (sensing the attraction of the earth on one’s substance) and trusting, self-confidence, finding a standing point – and calmness. This means “trusting, a deep confidence in the world, in life, in one’s organism. This was her discovery, and it became basic to all other research.” (Hengstenberg, 1985, pp.11-12)
Gindler wrote, “The aim of my work is not learning certain movements, but rather the achievement of concentration. Only by means of concentration can we attain the full functioning of the physical apparatus in relation to mental and spiritual life…” (Gindler, 1978, pp.36-37).
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Basic AWARENESS - careful watching looking and listening is to key to healing.   I had several conversations with clients this week about just this. People don't believe it.  It's so simple.  It is the actual key out of pain and dysfunction in the body.
It's only taken me a lifetime and some of the greatest teachers of my time to begin to understand it. I am increasingly appreciative to this profound learning process that goes deeper rather that accumulating "more". I think that once you initiate a greater and wider somatic experience the realizations and "aha" moments happen as a gift from that place of awareness.
[quidnunc]
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bodyalive · 2 days ago
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Isadora Duncan
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bodyalive · 3 days ago
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Cranes Fleuris, 1909, James Ensor
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bodyalive · 3 days ago
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“Where does unbelief begin? When I was young
there were degrees of certainty. I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands. Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands occasionally disappear–”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God
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bodyalive · 4 days ago
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“Coloured model showing cutaneous root areas.” The diagnosis of nervous diseases. 1916. 
Internet Archive
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The human skin is an artificial boundary: the world wanders into it, and the self wanders out of it, traffic is two-way and constant.
–Bernard Wolfe
[alive on all channels]
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bodyalive · 5 days ago
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Alfred Stieglitz Photo “Hands” Georgia O'Keeffe, 1918
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Touch and the world of touch bring us out of the anonymity of distance into the intimacy of belonging. Humans use their hands to touch—to explore, to trace, and to feel the world outside of them. Hands are beautiful. Kant said that the hand is the visible expression of the mind. With your hands, you reach out to touch the world. In human touch, hands find the hands, face, or body of the Other. Touch brings presence home… The energy, warmth, and invitation of touch come ultimately from the divine. The Holy Spirit is the wild and passionate side of God, the tactile spirit whose touch is around you, bringing you close to yourself and to others.
~ from ANAM CARA: A BOOK OF CELTIC WISDOM
by John O'Donohue
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bodyalive · 5 days ago
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“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”
What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
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bodyalive · 5 days ago
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When you outsource thinking, your brain goes on vacation. "EEG analysis presented robust evidence that LLM, Search Engine and Brain-only groups had significantly different neural connectivity patterns, reflecting divergent cognitive strategies. Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support: the Brain‑only group exhibited the strongest, widest‑ranging networks, Search Engine group showed intermediate engagement, and LLM assistance elicited the weakest overall coupling." https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872
But also here's a fantastic essay on the subject: "Now, in the age of the internet—when the Library of Alexandria could fit on a medium-sized USB stick and the collected wisdom of humanity is available with a click—we’re engaged in a rather large, depressingly inept social experiment of downloading endless knowledge while offloading intelligence to machines. (Look around to see how it’s going). That’s why convincing students that intelligence is a skill they must cultivate through hard work—no shortcuts—has become one of the core functions of education." https://www.forkingpaths.co/.../the-death-of-the-student...
[Rebecca Solnit]  
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bodyalive · 6 days ago
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I Love The Dark Hours Of My Being by Rainer Maria Rilke I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.
Then the knowing comes: I can open to another life that’s wide and timeless.
So I am sometimes like a tree rustling over a gravesite and making real the dream of the one its living roots embrace:
a dream once lost among sorrows and songs.
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bodyalive · 6 days ago
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The little things that you saw with a child’s eye and that will never go away. That’s what consciousness is all about.
Derek Mahon (via theparisreview)
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bodyalive · 6 days ago
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Paul Klee. Pink Spring in Deep Winter. 1931
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Not what you have, but what you offered; not what she said or what he said, but what you said; not what you lost, but what you cultivated; not the degree to which you were right, but the degree to which you were kind; these are the measures of the heart, which as you measure out, will be measured back to you.
Gil Hedley, Integral Anatomy
[alive on all channels]
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bodyalive · 6 days ago
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In 1926, Virginia Woolf wrote about how, when one is ill:
All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe.
Woolf knew well about bodily interventions, suffering as she did from a range of symptoms pertaining to what today we call bipolar disorder. Yet the body intervenes constantly, whether one is ill or not. It is the mode of intervention that conditions how well, or unwell, we feel. A state of wellbeing is one in which we do not need to think about our embodied organism in any way other than the sensorial pleasures it affords, where we are immersed within our environment, engaged in an activity, involved with others. But one of physical or emotional pain affects the very foundation on which the sense of self we otherwise take for granted rests: what we feel ourselves to be can be upended. When this happens, we may realise that what we feel ourselves to be is in fact constructed. How we exist as embodied selves is a highly complex business involving the brain and body engaged in constant interaction.
Over the past few years, scientists working in neuroscience and psychology have been listening in on these brain-body interactions – in health and illness – and analysing how they constitute the always embodied self. They have been studying the sense of the body from within, which is called interoception. It is a term you will be hearing increasingly. This research is dismantling the pillars of a belief system that has long endured within those fields – as well as in the popular imagination – that the brain is an information-processing machine that can be understood apart from the rest of the body, as if our conscious, reasoning self were the output of a disembodied brain, and as if we were not fully biological creatures. This shift within the mind sciences is game-changing, and merits attention. Yet perhaps because we are in its midst, even its actors might not be fully aware of its historical and philosophical significance – and of its potential cultural and clinical implications. The time has come to take stock of the revolution under way.
Since the publication in 1994 of his first widely read book, Descartes’ Error (followed by four others), which showed how embodied emotional processes are integrated into rational ones, Antonio Damasio has been the most visible and influential neuroscientist to develop this reconception. Since then, research into the embodied sense of self has accelerated. And now a new generation of scientists is building on the insights first elaborated by Damasio. Over the past decade, there has been a six-fold increase in publications on interoception. Questions about the self – self-consciousness and bodily consciousness, our sense of body ownership, and agency – once the exclusive domain of philosophy, can now be investigated empirically. The emerging results have the power to transform our vision of what we are, as well as ground in scientific detail what we may intuitively feel about ourselves. They can provide insights into what it is that may be breaking down when the always embodied sense of self is disrupted, when that window pane is smudged. This is particularly important in understanding neurological and psychiatric disorders – psychotic events and schizophrenia, as well as autism, attention disorders, dyspraxias, somatoform disorders, body image and emotional-processing disorders such as anorexia, alexithymia (a difficulty in identifying or acting upon felt emotions) and more.
Interoception consists in the perception and integration of all signals from within our body, whether we attend to them or not. These include autonomic, hormonal, visceral and immunological functions: breathing, blood pressure, cardiac signals, temperature, digestion and elimination, thirst and hunger, sexual arousal, affective touch, itches, pleasure and pain. Interoception therefore lies at the core of our very sense of self: physiology and mental life are dynamically coupled. The central and autonomic nervous systems act on each other, higher cognition and emotional states interacting constantly. We sense, monitor and adapt ourselves to the situations we find ourselves in, often without our realising it – homeostatic processes thanks to which we physiologically adjust to the changing environment, and to which interoception corresponds.
The neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington was the first to use the term ‘interoceptive’, as long ago as 1906. He used it to refer to the sense of our own viscera (today’s visceroception). The term homeostasis was coined in 1926 – the year in which Woolf published her essay – on the back of the concept of ‘milieu intérieur’ (‘interior milieu’) that the biologist Claude Bernard had first described in the mid-19th century. As the historian Stefanos Geroulanos and the anthropologist Todd Meyers have recounted on Aeon in light of their book on the topic, it emerged following the carnage of the First World War, which had led physiologists and clinicians to reconfigure their understanding of the body as ‘an organism that organises itself’, as ‘an integral whole’. Damasio wrote in his book Self Comes to Mind (2010) that though the principles of homeostasis ‘are applied daily in general biology and medicine, their deeper significance in terms of neurobiology and psychology has not been appreciated’. But now, just a few years later, they are both appreciated and far better understood.
It is in relation to others that we acquire a sense of self, which develops in this embodied interoceptive way from infancy
The meaning of interoception expanded after the neuroscientist A D Craig, nearly a century after Sherrington, revised it to encapsulate what he termed ‘a sense of the physiological condition of the entire body’: these translate as ‘“feelings” from the body that provide a sense of [our] physical condition and underlie mood and emotional state’. Emotional feelings are distinct from emotions, and they are ‘mental experiences of body states’, as Damasio had advanced with his somatic marker hypothesis – summarised by Craig as ‘the subjective process of feeling emotions’, which recruits brain regions involved in homeostastic regulation. These feelings, ‘grounded in the body itself’, are crucial to our ability to make decisions. We don’t merely think through our decisions, including those that seem most rational, such as those concerning finances: we experience feelings about their possible outcomes that determine how we act – and if the brain areas involved in the processing of emotional feelings are damaged, our ability to make decisions is impaired. Craig identified the interoceptive pathways that provide a cortical image of homeostatic processes from all the organs, and which translate as feelings when brought to consciousness. As detailed in How Do You Feel? An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self (2014), he and his team individuated projections to the brainstem of neurons in the spinal cord called lamina I: these provide to the autonomic nervous system, or ANS, input about the ‘mechanical, thermal, chemical, metabolic and hormonal status of skin, muscle, joints, teeth and viscera’ from small-diameter nerves throughout the organism’s tissues. It is from these lamina I projections to brainstem that ‘sensory channels’ ascend to areas of the thalamus, and from there to a brain area called insula, the ‘interoceptive cortex’.
In contrast to interoception, the notion of proprioception is more familiar to most of us – the sense of our dynamic, musculoskeletal body in space. It is how, for example, I know where my arm is when I wake up in the dark. It is distinct from interoception, but functionally and anatomically connected to it, as is also the case for exteroception, the sensory perception of the outside world. These senses can be manipulated, as has been done to great effect in the much replicated Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) first conducted 21 years ago, where one sees a rubber hand being stroked synchronously with one’s own hand – itself unseen – with the resulting sense that the rubber hand is one’s own, an effect dramatically demonstrated when the experimenter hits the rubber hand with a hammer and the subject almost invariably recoils as if the hand belonged to him or her. The RHI has served research into the fundamental sense of body ownership and the related sense of agency – the sense we normally take for granted that my leg, say, is mine, or that I am moving my own arm. Complex processes enable this sense to develop and be maintained, or, as can be the case in somatosensory and sensorimotor pathologies, disturbed. The RHI, and related experiments triggering a full-body illusion show that ‘multisensory integration can update the mental representation of one’s body’ and that exteroception can influence self-awareness, as reports the psychologist Manos Tsakiris, whose research within these areas has been yielding important insights.
But, as he and his team have found, this induced change in conscious body ownership results also in nonconscious changes in the physiological regulation of the self – that is, in interoception. The anterior insula is involved in both these exteroceptive and interoceptive processes, resulting in how we feel that our body is oneself and that the self remains unified and stable amid exteroceptive inputs. Moreover, it has been shown to be activated during both interoceptive and emotional experience, and also to be involved in the distinction of self and other. This in turn bears on the related capacity for empathy – with consequences for racial bias that Tsakiris has recounted here on Aeon, in a finding by his team that throws light on the neurobiology underpinning our social and political emotions. Other brain areas involved in the bodily self-consciousness arising out of the processing of multisensory signals are the fronto-parietal and temporo-parietal regions, as reported by the cognitive neuroscientists Olaf Blanke and Andrea Serino, who perform key research on how multisensory perception gives rise to the embodied, spatially located, self-conscious subject of experience that we each are (with eventual applications to prosthetic limbs).
However crucial a finding is the involvement of these areas, and of the insula in particular, in the formation and maintenance of a core selfhood, it is the interactions between brain and body that are the centre of our story. The body sends signals to the brain, and vice versa, in a constant feedback loop that involves the ANS acting in response to external inputs and interoceptive states, enabling and disabling our various states of arousal and fight or flight reactions. In this way, ANS serves homeostatic adjustments. Recently, the notion of allostasis has been gaining ground in accounting for these adjustments: where homeostasis refers to a stable condition, allostasis refers to the process that the organism engages in to achieve stability, ‘the regulation of bodily states through change’, as Tsakiris and the neuroscientist Anil Seth define it. So for instance, one homeostatic imperative is to remain within a specific temperature range: we would die if we were unable to anticipate how environmental temperature influences body temperature, and so to adjust our actions accordingly, dive into the cool sea when the sun is baking, say. Allostasis is this anticipatory adjustment – what ‘enables the organism to proactively prepare for such disturbances before they occur’, writes the philosopher Jakob Hohwy with Andrew Corcoran. The same process applies to all basic bodily functions. We need to get hungry before we faint, thirsty before we get dehydrated, and so on.
These complex interoceptive processes are happening all the time, whether we are aware of them or not. They are modulated by the ANS, ensuring constant adjustments as well as basic survival. In cases of stress, these evolved responses of the ANS can go into overdrive, affecting gut function and vascular health, triggering the various immune and inflammatory responses that result in illness. Investigations regarding this all-important brain-gut interoceptive pathway are ongoing. But the equally all-important brain-heart connection has been particularly crucial to our understanding of interoception, because of the ease in performing heartbeat detection tasks to test individual interoceptive ability otherwise challenging to measure precisely because it is the stuff of our subjective experience. The neuroscientist Catherine Tallon-Baudry has hypothesised a ‘neural subjective frame’, connected to homeostatic regulation, necessary to subjective, perceptual consciousness, which depends on ‘how the brain registers information on the heart’. Important experiments have been conducted, most notably by the neuroscientists Sarah Garfinkel and Hugo Critchley, that show how emotions are modulated in synchrony with cardiac rhythms. Emotional self-knowledge is a multilayered affair: Garfinkel and Critchley have also identified how interoceptive accuracy, sensitivity and awareness are distinct from each other, reflecting respectively the ability to detect one’s heartbeats, the evaluation of one’s own ability to do so, and one’s ‘meta’-ability to gauge one’s own awareness. We all differ in these abilities, and in our corresponding sensitivity to the ongoings of our body. These exquisite distinctions between levels of self-awareness translate into pain threshold, anxiety level and so on – into our ability to experience feelings, to have a sense of what they correspond to, to track and modulate them, or not.
These abilities even translate as character traits. So for instance, people with a higher interoceptive accuracy – that is, a greater ability to monitor their own internal states, identified by heartbeat detection tasks – are less prone to be taken in by the RHI than those on the lower end of the scale, Tsakiris and colleagues have found. This means that their self is more stable, and their capacity for empathy higher: as Tsakiris and the psychologist Clare Palmer report, ‘interoceptive processing acts to stabilise the model of our self’, so we can ‘attribute emotional and mental states to the self or to others without blurring the distinction between “self” and “other”’. This matters hugely in our day-to-day lives. In a major review article in Neuropsychoanalysis, the psychologist Aikaterini Fotopoulou – who studies in particular the centrality of affective touch in interoceptive processing and emotional development – and Tsakiris argue that the self is shaped from early infancy – when one is entirely dependent on the carer for homeostatic regulation and hence survival – by embodied interactions with carers that centrally include affective touch. This confirms insights from psychoanalysis: affect is ‘the background of all subjective, conscious experience’, they write. Our capacity to modulate affect begins with the carer attending to the infant’s embodied needs. Out of the processing of sensorimotor signals initially integrated into a basic, minimal or core self arise what they call ‘embodied mentalisations’ that progressively lead to our ability to form a boundary between self and other – a process that cannot happen in isolation. It is necessarily in relation to others that we acquire a sense of self, which develops in this embodied interoceptive way from infancy on. We sustain a constant sense of selfhood in dynamic relation to and distinction from others, and, in turn, our ability to form a boundary between self and other is a function of our ability to feel our embodied selves from within – this is the important novelty of their claim. An unformed or badly formed boundary can translate into psychiatric pathologies.
Our brains serve our bodies, rather than the obverse – a liberating idea
This picture integrates a useful model from artificial intelligence, principally developed by the influential neuroscientist Karl Friston, called Predictive Coding, which is increasingly widespread in accounting persuasively for interoceptive and homeostatic/allostatic processes, and for psychopathologies, including depression. It reconceives the brain as a ‘statistical organ’ that makes predictions about sensory information on the basis of previous instances. It ‘generates explanations for the stimuli it encounters’, Friston writes with Anil Seth, ‘in terms of hypotheses that are tested against sensory evidence’ from our visceral sensations. The actions we undertake in response to interoceptive signals – that is, the allostatic regulation that our homeostatic needs impel us to engage in – serve to reduce prediction errors with regard to our expectation of environmental inputs. In this way, our present is made of a constant projection into the future out of the past. So, as Fotopoulou and Tsakiris write, an infant will ‘progressively build generative models regarding the possible causes of their sensory states in the external world’. The brain predicts the probability of an embodied feeling state occurring as a result of an input – ‘embodied mentalisation’, in their coinage. This physiological, homeostatic reaction turns into the ‘psychological feelings’ they call ‘mentalisation’ and that form the core of the infant’s minimal self. The stability of the self in an always changing environment, Tsakiris and Seth have argued, is ensured by our engaging in allostatic prediction. This stability is never given: our constantly revised engagement with the world is a dynamic process.
In Self Comes to Mind, Damasio argues that ‘the body is a foundation of the conscious mind’: our brains serve our bodies, rather than the obverse – a seemingly provocative, but profoundly liberating idea that arises out of the oft-forgotten fact that life began without nervous systems. Our inherently homeostatic selves are on a continuum with homeostatically governed single cells and bacteria. As he writes, ‘the special kind of mental images of the body produced in body-mapping structures, constitute the protoself, which foreshadows the self to be’ – and eventually culture, art and meaning, as he has also continued exploring in his most recent book, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. The structures responsible for this, as Craig showed too, are in the evolutionarily ancient upper brain stem, below more recent cortical structures, ‘attached to the parts of the body that bombard the brain with their signals’, forming a ‘resonant loop’ as somatic markers. That these processes begin with homeostasis shows how deeply continuous our very consciousness is with the most primitive fabric of life. It is a potent rebuttal to René Descartes. And as Tsakiris has put it: ‘By grounding the self in the body, psychology could, at last, overcome Cartesianism and make the bodily self the starting point for a science of the self.’ We are indeed beyond the starting point now.
This shift away from Cartesianism – let us call it the interoceptive turn – has a long history within Western thought, at the crossroads of philosophy, medicine and psychology. We may begin when there developed over the 17th century mechanistic and corpuscularian models of nature – attempts at forging a new scientific method to re-describe matter, motion and living bodies. These freed natural philosophy from the Aristotelian strictures that had prevailed for close to 2,000 years and had ensured the mind-body, human-animal continuum. Descartes is infamous for loosening the connection of matter and mind. His ambition to replace the Aristotelian system with his own mechanistic model was broadly successful within philosophy – and later within medicine. Echoing St Augustine’s idea that the very existence of thought presupposed a disembodied, thinking self, Descartes performed the introspective turn that we are outgrowing – theologically locking himself into a system that required the conscious mind to pertain to an immaterial, immortal soul, a ‘thinking thing’ separate from the realm of ‘extended’ physical things. And he thereby sundered the continuum of higher, self-conscious thought with the other functions of all living beings, denying beasts any sort of mindedness. There were alternatives to this substance dualism – and he himself accepted that mind and body do interact, in emotional experience. Many physicians, attuned to the realities of ailing patients, adopted Gassendism, an adaptation of ancient atomism and Epicureanism to Christianity, which maintained the continuum of nature. Over the 18th century, vitalists battled against mechanism in philosophy and medicine, arguing for the inherence of soul in body. There were attempts from then on at a psychosomatic medicine. As materialism rose along with secularism, the notion of a separate, immaterial soul lost its function.
But it took a while for the empirical study of the embodied mind to become enmeshed with the philosophical study of knowledge and self. Realms of enquiry remained divided until the birth of scientific psychology, in the second half of the 1800s, when modern neurology and psychiatry took shape along with growing knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the brain and nervous system. Freud himself specialised in neurology when the discipline was new, before realising that the neurobiology of his day would be unable to yield the secrets of mind. He eventually posited an unconscious field of mental action, often somatised – as in the case of hysteria, today’s somatoform disorder – but accessible through talk, creating psychoanalysis. The notion of a scientific psychology was coined by his older contemporary Wilhelm Wundt, who elaborated an introspective ‘experimental psychology’ to build a theory that would account for subjectivity. However, what first kickstarted a quarter-century ago the perspectival shift that has led to where we are today is the resurgence of William James’s scientific psychology, as given in his Principles of Psychology of 1890 and in his 1884 article on emotions – mainly his notion that emotions are the product of the body’s autonomic response, only thereafter translated as behaviour and experienced as feelings, and that consciousness is a continuous ‘stream’ of embodied experiences. (It is the very stream that formed the core of Woolf’s writing technique.)
Western medicine mechanistically chops up the body and leaves patients confused about the nature of their ailments
Until then, philosophy had remained largely disengaged from empirical investigation (in contrast to early modern practices), while the belief prevailed within cognitive science that our brain might ‘just’ be a machine that computes information, performing functions that could be studied irrespective of the biological structures upon which they operate. It was a transposition of mind-body to brain-body dualism – as if biology were incidental to the higher activities of an ultimately disembodied mind. This functionalist focus on the algorithmic operations of cognition had followed upon behavioural psychology, which, partly in reaction to Wundt’s introspective psychology and in an extension of Cartesianism, posited that behaviour was the outcome of reflex-like responses to environmental stimuli rather than manifestations of emotionally rich intentions. Cognitive science outgrew the behaviourist model from the 1950s on, absorbing neuroscience and evolutionary theory into its accounts of individual and social psychology, and elaborating scientific protocols that put the mind back behind the behaviour. The analogy of the brain with a computer, however, remained powerful.
Computational neuroscience continues to grow. Friston’s Predictive Coding theory is one of its fruits. But the hold of ‘strong AI’ has loosened since the 1990s – just as Damasio’s insights into embodied emotions and the emotive self started putting the whole organism together again. By then, the body had also become a popular theme in the humanities and social sciences. And the centrality of the body to the mind began around that time to be analysed within an anti-cognitivist neurophilosophy first made popular by Francisco Varela, which combined an outgrowth of the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty with Buddhism: for ‘enactivism’ and related approaches, cognition and the sense of self depend upon a body endowed with sensorimotor capacities embedded within the world. The philosophers Shaun Gallagher or Dan Zahavi work within this lineage, and the hybridisation of disciplines has enabled philosophers such as Frédérique de Vignemont to analyse neuroscientific data, and, conversely, for neuroscientists to work with philosophers. The minds of animals are studied on a continuum with ours. The remnants of substance dualism endure in AI and some everyday thought habits. But we can no longer escape the reality of our biology, as scientists are showing us, a fraction of whose work I have presented here. And there is much more ahead.
Yet insights from theory have always been hard to apply straightaway, if at all, to the clinical realm. There is today an increasing dissatisfaction with mainstream Western medicine, which mechanistically chops up the body and leaves patients confused about the nature of their ailments, and concurrently a growing market for alternatives that take holism seriously. (In Germany alone, psychosomatic medicine is an institutionally established clinical field.) In parallel, practices such as yoga continue to grow worldwide. The science of embodiment might provide eventual protocols for the testing of such holistic treatments and practices, to help target them to particular conditions, especially psychiatric and neurological. Biofeedback, the use of sensory stimuli, physical therapy, etc, have been shown to help reduce the anxiety caused by the combination of high interoceptive awareness and alexithymia (as Fotopoulou and colleagues have shown), and often found in autism, heighten interoceptive awareness in anorexia and attention disorders – or lower it in depression and somatoform disorders, where, as the neuroscientist Georg Northoff has argued in his book Neuro-Philosophy and the Healthy Mind (2016), one’s body becomes the predominating content in awareness, at the expense of the environment. And just as mindfulness has become a widespread tool, which the psychologist Norman Farb has studied in relation to interoception, so the practice of yoga, which powerfully modulates interoceptive awareness, could benefit from inputs from the scientists investigating embodiment – and vice versa.
The interoceptive turn is a historical step to the other side of our mind’s looking glass, into the heart of our complex organism, reconciling us to our mortal embodiment, forcing us to consider our mental makeup with humility as just one aspect of biology – a far cry from the posthumanist future that Yuval Noah Harari and others warn us about. It does not dissolve the mystery of how we are able to think and speak sophisticated thoughts, create art and meaning, or indeed investigate self and world: science does not replace experience, and though it is indispensable to serious thought about human nature, and to the advancement of clinical care, so is a humanist eye on what the best of science can tell us about ourselves. Yet this new picture has a transformative power. It can help understand, to an extent, how we relate to each other as embodied beings, how we feel at each moment of our lives, why Woolf’s ‘creature within’ feels what she does when unwell. It can help us understand each other in our animal nature so as to regain harmony with nature, and in our inherently social nature so as to regain harmony with each other – and to maintain our psychophysical integrity in the face of the ‘procession of changes’ that Woolf writes of. No window pane into the self is perfectly transparent. But we are clearing up some smudges.
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bodyalive · 7 days ago
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"Being understood", 2024 - by Nanda Hagenaars (1988), Dutch
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« Sometimes we use our minds not to discover facts, but to hide them. We use part of the mind as a screen to prevent another part of it from sensing what goes on elsewhere. […] One of the things the screen hides most effectively is the body, our own body, by which I mean the ins and outs of it, its interiors. Like a veil thrown over the skin to secure its modesty, the screen partially removes from the mind the inner states of the body, those that constitute the flow of life as it wanders in the journey of each day.
The alleged vagueness, elusiveness, and intangibility of emotions and feelings are probably symptoms of this fact, an indication of how we cover the representation of our bodies, of how much mental imagery based on nonbody objects and events masks the reality of the body. Otherwise we would easily know that emotions and feelings are tangibly about the body. Sometimes we use our minds to hide a part of our being from another part of our being. »
— António Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness exhaled-spirals
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bodyalive · 8 days ago
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Photography: Akira Enzeru
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“In the heat of her hands I thought, this is the campfire that mocks the sun.”
— Jeanette Winterson, from ‘Written on the Body’
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bodyalive · 9 days ago
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Rachel Harrison: Untitled (Perth Amboy), 2001
"The photographs were taken in Perth Amboy, New Jersey after the artist read in the newspaper that the Virgin Mary appeared in a pane of glass in an upstairs apartment window. Rather than document the spectacle of the event, the photographs focus on the window where the apparition appeared. The series chronicles a ritual which arose as spontaneously as the Virgin Mother’s appearance: the touching of the glass. The face of the participant is rarely seen, instead what emerges is the depiction of personal identity through the specificity and expressiveness of touch." (press release)
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bodyalive · 9 days ago
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They taught you the heart was just a glorified meat pump. That it squeezes and pushes blood like some crude mechanical device. A hydraulic engine made of flesh. That is what they want you to believe. Because if you buy into that primitive lie, you never ask deeper questions.
But it is false. It has always been false. And the real science proves it.
Dr Francisco Torrent-Guasp, a Spanish cardiac researcher, discovered what the textbooks refuse to acknowledge, that the heart is not a pump. He dissected thousands of hearts and found that the heart is a single continuous muscle band, folded into a spiral. He proved the heart works like a vortex generator, creating suction and torque, not pressure.
He called it the Helical Ventricular Myocardial Band and it changes everything.
The real movement of blood comes from pressure differentials, electromagnetic flow, and coherent resonance. The blood spirals naturally. It does not need to be forced through miles of arteries and capillaries. That idea is beyond stupid. The so-called pump is not strong enough to push thick fluid through 60,000 miles of tubing. That is basic physics. That lie was dead on arrival.
Here is the truth. Blood moves before the heart forms in the embryo. It flows via frequency, resonance, and electric charge. The body is a field, not a factory.
Your heart creates a toroidal electromagnetic field that radiates six metres from the body. This field syncs with the Earth, the Sun, and every living being around you. It is a resonator. A tuner. A conductor. It aligns the rhythm of your cells. It feels. It remembers. It emits. And it responds to emotion, thought, light, sound, and breath.
When you feel love, grief, fear, or peace, your heart transmits it. It is the central frequency modulator of your biology. Not a fucking pump.
And the institutions know this. The HeartMath Institute has measured these fields for decades. They know the heart has more neuronal cells than parts of the brain. They know it is a second brain. They know coherence in the heart transforms the entire nervous system.
So why are they still teaching children a 400-year-old guess from William Harvey that has never been updated?
Because if you knew the truth, you would never accept statins or beta blockers again. You would understand that trauma, emotion, and disconnection break the heart field, not cholesterol. You would stop obeying the medical cartel and start tuning your body like the intelligent frequency field it is.
They do not want coherent humans. They want disrupted, inflamed, fragmented people who rely on drugs to survive. That is the business model. And the fake heart pump lie is central to it.
Your heart is not a pressure valve. It is a vortex. A field tuner. A resonating gateway between physical and energetic worlds.
It is the instrument of your soul. And it has been hijacked by science that refuses to evolve.
Jamie Freeman
[Thanks to Jaynie Ward]
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bodyalive · 10 days ago
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“Our brains are (by nature) unusually plastic; their biologically proper functioning has always involved the recruitment and exploitation of nonbiological props and scaffolds. More so than any other creature on the planet, we humans emerge as natural-born cyborgs, factory-tweaked and primed so as to be ready to grow into extended cognitive and computational architectures—ones whose systemic boundaries far exceed those of skin and skull.”
— Andy Clark in The new humanists: science at the Edge
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