Something I learned recently: Sweet concept, Brain Map

I imagine this as the average person’s brain map, and extremely abstract and unfactual at that, and here too(bottom) is an equally such, but more ideal brain map in my opinion.  Something I learned recently is thinking in terms of the brain map, had a small epiphany. Learning is cool, so I listened to this book Brains way of healing by Norman Doidge. There were a number of fascinating things about this book, but one concept stood out to me in particular. – a brain map. Moshe Feldenkrais was a big topic in the book. I trained muscle compensation with Janda in 2013, and later worked with Egoscue Posture, they are similar to the Alexander Method. I had heard of Feldenkrais but never had a good chance to study it, so when this book dove into his backstory and educational process I was pretty excited. Anyways so his work is based on a brain MAP. Every part of your brain is hooked up to this map, has a spot, and those spots work with or without other spots depending on the need and practice. 

So that was really cool! I am always helping people separate actions in their bodies as part of my work, so this was a really relatable idea to play with when I am talking to people – awesome. I’m not quoting anything, this is my interpretation. So get this, so when you say injure something like your arm – you don’t move your arm. Your brain map related to your arm gets smaller and less defined, and the parts that move with it, work independently so your arm stops being on the team. Your arm heals without movement, and this is very stiff, weak, hard to control, downregulated. You must then reincorporate it to your movement and your tasks, all the brain maps move again. They fire together, wiring together – that’s one I took from him. So apply this to literally any surplus of activity or deficit within the nervous, which equates to any action at all be it your movement, internal regulation, digestion, respiration etc. 

Your body is always fine tuning it’s movements and activities based on their use (perceived need), and I have known that, but to have now this brain map concept to explain it with is incredible! So think for instance, much of my work is helping people overcome compensation related to their glutes which may be causing an injury somewhere nearby like the back or the hamstrings – what I’m doing is redefining the brain map for the glutes. Unwiring them from the faulty connections, and helping the body adapt to a new pattern. I have been playing with this idea a lot, and my epiphany was that basically all therapy is trying to elicit a change in the brain map. By redefining that wiring related to a habit, movement, emotion, position etc it is all basically the same stuff. 

Feldenkrais, and my understanding is extremely general, uses relaxation techniques to restore baseline in the nervous system, and then introduces a new stimuli for the body to respond to without interruption or interference. In my work, I bring the body to balance and then introduce new stimuli. When you train literally anything, you bring yourself to baseline and then introduce new stimuli. Boom, well for me anyways. So brain maps are really cool, you should think about what your brain map looks like! 

Your feet could take up more space

Your diaphragm could take up more space

Your butt could take up more space… I’m sure of it. 

So that was something I learned recently, I am going to make more posts like this because it’s fun. Thanks for reading! Squeeze your butt and manage your posture to improve your brain map! Yay!

If thought what I learned was cool please subscribe to my newsletter, check out my youtube etc. Shoot me an email! I WANT to talk about it. Manage your posture, try it out! It’s easy and you will feel great.