REHAB
HOW CAN I GET MY BODY BACK?
Introspective observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always.
William James1
An embodied approach to human intelligence gives pride of place not to rationality but to sensibility. Reason is a fine tool, like the surgeon’s scalpel, good for some specialised tasks but not for everything. However well honed, it is not always the right tool for the job, nor always used skilfully. (Common) sense and sensibility must come first. So, from the embodied point of view, before any training in logical analysis or ‘rational thinking’ must come a well-developed sensitivity to the processes of one’s own body. If, in the process of developing rationality, that sensibility has been lost or muted, intelligence itself is diminished and needs to be rehabilitated. In this chapter we will look at some of the ways in which this can happen. But before we get going, I need to reiterate one important point from Chapter 8.
On the conventional view of mind, we might justify strengthening our body-consciousness on the grounds that some intelligent, interior observer, looking at this visceral data, can be better informed and thus make better decisions. But the embodied point of view on consciousness, as I have developed it, is different. The entire human system is self-organising. There is no ‘little person in the head’ who does the cognitive heavy lifting: who ‘pays attention’, ‘makes decisions’ and ‘plans actions’. When aspects of our internal activity become linked to consciousness, this is often because they are currently bound in to the high-level ‘dynamic core’ where all the different loops of neurochemical activation come together. So the benefit of ‘being conscious’ of our gut feelings is simply that, when awareness does arise, the underlying pattern of somatic activity is playing its part in the ‘central committee’. Its information is being taken into account. The benefit of developing greater ‘interoceptive awareness’, therefore, is that more of our viscerally embodied feelings and values are ‘at the table’. If they are not accompanied by consciousness, it probably means that, though they may well be active, they are not currently engaged in contributing to that top-level democratic decision-making process.
Interoceptive awareness
People vary hugely in how much of their own bodily activity they are routinely aware of, and in how much, if they really try to focus, they can bring into awareness. Stephen Porges has developed a Body Perception Questionnaire that enables you to check your own awareness.2 It asks, for example:
Are you never / occasionally / sometimes / usually /always aware of:
Your body swaying when you are standing
The pressure of the floor on your feet
The speed and depth of your breathing
Swallowing
The strength of your heartbeat
The temperature of your face
The feeling in your stomach
Sensations in your neck and shoulders
The feel of your clothes on your skin
Changes in your voice quality
And there’s another questionnaire, the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness, MAIA, that goes into more detail on the social and emotional aspects of body awareness.3 The MAIA has items like
‘I notice when I am uncomfortable in my body’
‘I distract myself from sensations of discomfort’
‘I notice how my body changes when I get angry’
‘I listen to my body to inform me about what to do’
People vary markedly in how they answer such questions, showing how differently people engage with their own bodies. Some of us are highly sensitive and attentive to changes and activities under the skin; others of us remarkably ignorant. And it makes a difference.
We’ve already seen how some of these differences in body awareness influence higher mental processes. People who are more sensitive to their heartbeat perform better on the Iowa gambling task, for example. Their greater bodily acuity enables them to register more fully the visceral legacy of previous experience, so this information feeds more accurately into the central decision-making processes that determine the choices that are made. If people’s interoceptive awareness is muted, however, they seem to have more trouble with decision-making. People suffering from clinical depression, for instance, are poorer than average at monitoring their own heartbeat – and they also, according to a survey of their therapists and psychiatrists, experience difficulty with decision-making in everyday life. In depression, it is not just that life seems bleak; the withdrawal of attention from both outside and inside deprives sufferers of those vital somatic markers that would normally have prompted and guided their choices and actions.4
Similar difficulties are experienced by people with eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia or ‘body dysmorphic disorder’ (when the body feels a different size, weight and shape to the way it actually is). Such people are often quite insensitive to the visceral feelings that signal when they are hungry or ‘full’. And when our sense of hunger is not underpinned by its normal visceral triggers and anchors we are at greater risk of eating (or not) for a host of reasons unrelated to nutrition. Anorexic individuals may as a result have difficulty sensing their own weight loss, and thus persist in thinking that their body weight is high when it is in fact already low.
There may be several reasons why interoceptive awareness can go up and down, and science has not yet pinned down when and where each of these possible causes applies. It may be that internal systems do partly shut down sometimes, so the neurochemical and muscular activities are themselves less intense and less ‘communicative’. This seems to be the case with meditators and others who are able to enter states of deep calm, for example. You might expect such folk to be better than average at feeling their insides, but one recent study found that when they were in this calm, restful state their introspective awareness was no better than normal. The authors of this study suggest that this is because their systems really have shut down so there is just less to feel. There is other evidence that meditators, when they are getting on with life, are indeed more sensitive to their inner workings than a matched sample of non-meditators.5
But it is also possible that bodily awareness is reduced when signals in the ‘normal’ range are not being processed properly as they loop up into the brain, and especially into the areas where all our sources of sensory information come together: the cingulate, the insula and parts of the prefrontal cortex. As we have seen, the brain is perfectly capable of muting feelings that, for whatever reason, it has decided are threatening or inappropriate, so that information is inhibited or expurgated as it unfurls. It can also be blocked from achieving the conditions necessary for it to become conscious, particularly from being linked to the currently active core of self-related activity. In this latter case, the gut feeling may still be playing at full strength, but we don’t know it.
We may suffer a drop in our awareness of the bodily self simply because the central machinery is not working properly. If the insula is on the blink, awareness will fade for physiological rather than psychological reasons. Professor Bryan Lask, President of the Eating Disorders Research Society, has shown that this is the likely cause in some cases. His functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI) studies show abnormal blood flow to the insula of recovering anorexics, which would make the communication between body and brain slower and less efficient. It could also explain why anorexic women often have difficulty in relating visual, tactile and visceral sources of information about the body to each other. To recover fully, medical treatment, as well as or instead of psychological therapy, may be what’s needed.6
Then again, it could be that the processing of bodily information is going OK, but there is too much activity in other systems for it to be heard. People who suffer from chronic pain, for example, can have the same trouble making decisions as depressed people, but for different reasons: the physical and emotional clamour of the pain simply drowns out other, perhaps less intense or urgent, visceral voices. In fact, we might all suffer from a version of this when our conscious self is arguing with itself so noisily that we can no longer sense our own bodies. Sometimes this ‘loud self’ becomes so habitual that the ‘still, small voice’ of our bodily feelings, values and concerns is shut out of the central decision-making process for long periods of time. (Although such talk used to be New Age whimsy, I think we are now able to put it on a sounder footing.)
Thinking itself could be contributing to this dysfunctional internal racket. In a world that confuses intelligence with rationality, we can be persuaded to think too much. The kind of thinking that is valued and promoted in the Cartesian world is necessarily conscious, and that means it is energetically expensive: it takes up a lot of the bandwidth of the underlying neurochemical systems. So clear, conscious, deliberate thinking can easily overwrite sources of quieter or more fleeting information. We saw earlier that golfers may, under pressure, activate a range of internal voices dispensing ‘good advice’ and find that their embodied performance – just attending to the ball, the putter and the hole – loses fluency and spontaneity as a result. We can overthink problems and make worse decisions, and be less creative, as a result. People who are thinking hard about problems, especially those that require a creative leap, do worse than those who report periods where their minds ‘just go blank’. In one study, students who were invited to choose an art poster for their room were more satisfied with their choice if they had based it on ‘gut feeling’ rather than on clear, justifiable reasons. People who are weighing up a difficult decision, such as choosing an apartment to rent from a wide selection, make better decisions if they spend a period of time, before making the decision, not thinking about it. In each of these cases, the contribution from the visceral, feeling centres of the body turn out to be crucial, and intelligence deteriorates if that contribution is overridden or drowned out.7 Numbing down equals dumbing down.
So what can we do – assuming the damage to our complex interior is not irreversible – to smarten up? In the rest of this chapter I will review four methods proven to be effective. The first is biofeedback: training ourselves to be more sensitive to and in control of our insides. The second is meditation, particularly a widely used form called mindfulness practice. The third is a therapeutic process called focusing, which increases awareness specifically of activity in the torso, where all our major organs live. This both increases interoceptive awareness directly and quietens competing forms of noisy activity in the mind. And the fourth is exercise and movement, some, but not all, of which helps to enhance intelligence. Actually there is a fifth form of somatic therapy as well – shifting our understanding of human intelligence so our minds make room for our bodies. That is the whole purpose of this book.
Biofeedback
Whether there is any extra damping or not, biological signals are often faint and diffuse. Our language often reflects this vague character: queasy, edgy, out of sorts, off-colour, jittery, in the pink. Our expressions for our overall physical state are regularly indistinct and metaphorical. So it would be useful if we could turn up the volume and the resolution on those faint signals in order, at least, to learn to recognise them more clearly. And we can. There are many machines that can register different aspects of our physiological activity more precisely than we can ourselves, and then play that activity back to us in more vivid ways. You can see the electrical activity of your brain transduced into the colours of the rainbow, for example, or the varying conductivity of your skin converted into a rising and falling tone. With that heightened information, you can, often without knowing how you do it, learn to control that signal yourself. That is biofeedback.8
Through this methodology you can learn many useful things. You can learn to calm yourself, regain bladder control, control asthma, relieve headaches and reduce chronic pain. You can also learn to increase the coherence of your own biological functioning. Earlier we talked about the healthiness of having a heart that beats (within limits) irregularly, so that it can resonate with what is going on elsewhere in the body. If the heart is ‘strung too tightly’, so to speak, it becomes rigid and unresponsive to the other ‘instruments’ around it. It turns out that, if the heart rate variability (HRV) is displayed as a trace on a screen, people can learn to increase it – they can ‘loosen the string’ a little, and the body then works better as a whole. It takes on average four to ten sessions of practice to get the hang of this, and then the knack becomes a habit and there is no further need for the machine. Retuning and rebalancing the internal systems improves health; it also enhances skilled performance. Groups of basketball players and wrestlers were given some sessions of HRV training, after which, compared to controls, their speed of movement and reaction was significantly faster, their level of concentration was improved, and the ball players shot more baskets.9
But biofeedback can also boost more cognitive forms of intelligence. Children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) typically show rather different electroencephalograph (EEG) patterns from matched controls. Through neurofeedback they can learn to change these patterns, and this has been shown in a wide range of studies to have a beneficial effect on their ability to control their impulses and concentrate. The ADHD children also show significant gains on a variety of intelligence tests and other tests of cognitive performance. In one study, children given biofeedback training gained 22 IQ points, and this gain was maintained through various follow-up tests over more than four years. Neuroimaging studies showed that the inhibitory functions in the frontal lobes became more like those of non-ADHD children.
Similar benefits have been found with elderly people. Training them to be able to increase a particular aspect of their EEG called the Peak Alpha Frequency led to an improvement in the speed with which they could perform mental computations, and to greater control over their ability to stay on task. Overall, it is clear that biofeedback technology and training can help people to gain greater control over aspects of their bodily functioning that are usually outside of awareness, and that this control brings psychological benefits.
Mindfulness meditation
Some of the same benefits can be achieved without the use of biofeedback machines, simply by training yourself to attend more fully and with greater stability to bodily sensations. Attention is like a muscle that becomes stronger and more controllable over time; apparently it can be developed just like any other habit. One of the most well-known ways of developing this attentional control is through a kind of meditation practice called mindfulness training. In this training, you sit still and quietly, gently attempting to keep your attention focused on a simple bodily sensation such as the rise and fall of your chest and abdomen as you breathe naturally. Despite all the familiar background chatter and distractions of the so-called ‘discursive mind’, it is possible, with patience and persistence, for that interoceptive awareness to become clearer and more stable, and it can come to function as a kind of anchor that keeps your awareness more strongly focused in the present and reduces the length of time you spend ruminating over past and future.10
Studies of mindfulness practitioners have shown how this shift in attentional habits is mirrored in the functioning of the brain. Norman Farb and his colleagues at the University of Toronto have identified two complementary networks in the brain’s frontal lobes. One involves pathways in the medial prefrontal cortex and the language centres, and this network keeps tabs on our overall portfolio of personal projects, interests and disappointments. The other involves the lateral prefrontal cortex, the insula and the anterior cingulate, and focuses on what is going on in the present moment both within and outside the body. Seasoned meditators show less activity in the medial system and more in the lateral. They have upped their ‘presence of mind’ and reduced the time spent anxiously planning, reviewing and rewriting the scripts for achieving their goals and righting the wrongs they (think they) have suffered.11
In general, it seems as if mindfulness training increases the quality of information that arrives at the central core of neural decision-making from both internal and external sources. One recent study has shown that even something as ‘physiological’ as the functioning of the immune system is improved by mindfulness training.12 The immune systems of meditators respond more effectively to infection than do those of non-meditating control subjects. Meditation also improves the quality of communication between as well as within the body’s sub-systems. It increases the efficiency and comprehensiveness with which these sources are interwoven. The different loops become functionally better integrated – and this leads to better decision-making and so, in an important sense, to greater intelligence. The better I am informed, and the more fully that information is integrated, the better my system computes ‘the best thing to do next’. Behavioural evidence supports what we know about what is going on in the brain. Meditators are better at sustained concentration: they are less susceptible to distraction from whatever their ‘task at hand’ may be.13 And their brains seem to react faster and more fully to quickly changing events. Most of us, for example, are subject to the so-called ‘attentional blink’, in which seeing one thing reduces the likelihood that we will notice another event that follows close on its heels. Meditators show less attentional blink than the rest of us.14
One striking example of the benefits of mindfulness comes from a study of a group of long-term meditators taking part in what has come to be called the Ultimate Game. In the two-person version, A can choose how much of a $20 gift they will offer to share with B. The catch is: if B rejects the offer, they both get nothing. Rationally, it makes sense, if you are the second person, to accept even low offers: at least you get something rather than nothing. That’s what the meditators are inclined to do. The meditators’ ‘gratitude’, you might say, tends to outweigh their indignation that someone else is getting more than they are. Most people, however, ‘cut off their nose to spite their face’ by rejecting offers of less than around 20 per cent. We are unable to resist the urge to punish someone we think is behaving unfairly, even if we lose out as a result.15
Interestingly, this same study also monitored brain activity, and found a relative increase, in meditators, in activity in the posterior part of the insula. According to the researchers, this may signify a greater ability to feel our visceral responses, but without letting those feelings automatically grab the steering wheel of our actions. This gives quite a sophisticated boost to our intelligence: we are able to take our visceral responses fully into account, but to weigh them in the context of wider considerations of both our own and other people’s best interests.
So this increased ability to be fully present to all the information, including our own core values (which for most of us includes altruism or ‘being a good person’), means that it is not just intelligence in an abstract sense that benefits; our wider social and personal well-being increases too. A patient who had spent some time in a form of body-oriented psychotherapy, learning to pay closer attention to her bodily sensations and reactions, sums up this subtle step-change in full, real-world intelligence very clearly. The training, she said,
has done a lot to help me be calm when I’m in a stressful situation. So that when the stress arises – when you get to the airport and your plane is delayed nine hours and there’s no flights and no hotels and everyone else is sort of screaming – I don’t join in that any more. Now I can just see, ‘Oh, I’m feeling a bit agitated … time to start breathing!’ And realising that you have the ability to respond rather than react and the degree to which all of us are on automatic pilot most of the time. It’s like, ‘No, you have options here; you can choose how to respond to this situation.’16
The distinction she makes between responding and reacting is an important one, and it brings us back to System One and System Two (Chapter 5). Reacting, as she uses the term, relies a lot on habits and assumptions. For example, the current situation is quickly assimilated into one of the dominant emotional modes – anxiety, indignation or sadness. Responding is the ability of the body-brain to restrain this tendency to leap to conclusions and react in stereotypical ways, and to gain a fuller, more nuanced appreciation of the situation, in all its aspects, before actions are selected and initiated.
Focusing
Bodily awareness is made up of all kinds of sensations – and people may be sensitive to one kind and not to another. Meditators, as we saw, have been found to be more sensitive than average to touch on their skin, but no better than average at judging their heart rate when they are in a very quiet and relaxed state. Athletes and dancers can become very attuned to the feeling of their muscular bodies, but not to their emotional bodies (a dissonance very effectively dramatised by Natalie Portman in the film Black Swan). Developing interoception is a many-sided job, and different kinds of training may be needed to develop different areas.
Sensitivity to what is going on in the major cavities of the body – the throat, the chest and the abdomen – is one of the most important areas when it comes to developing ‘intelligence in the flesh’. And here it is worth mentioning a specific practice called ‘focusing’ that has been developed to train exactly this aspect of our bodily awareness. Back in the 1960s, Eugene Gendlin and his colleagues at the University of Chicago were trying to identify the ‘magic ingredient’ in counselling and psychotherapy that made some clients feel they were making productive progress, while others were spinning their wheels. After analysing hundreds of tape recordings of therapeutic sessions, they found it. It wasn’t the school of the psychotherapist, or even their personality or ‘bedside manner’. What made the difference, in the majority of cases, was whether clients spontaneously talked about their troubles in a particular way.17
The stuck clients (to put it very crudely) tended to trot out tales of woe fluently and rapidly. They had their well-rehearsed story – and they were sticking to it. But, strikingly, the ones who were getting the most benefit talked much more hesitantly. It was as if they were trying to find just the right words to express the complex truth of their predicament, and were listening carefully to their own formulations to see if they did justice to this truth. Moreover, it turned out that the touchstone of this truth was not a cognitive response but a visceral one. Clients were not rationally appraising what they had said, but allowing their spoken words to resonate with what they were feeling in their bodies, especially in the torso, where the major organs and the visceral core are situated.
Gendlin called this pre-verbal, embodied sensation the ‘felt sense’. The successful clients were in touch with this felt sense and were checking to make sure that the essential meanings were preserved as it unfurled into words. When they were, Gendlin discovered, clients experienced a bodily feeling of relaxation – ‘Ah yes, that’s it. That’s exactly it.’ The felt sense would then change, and deeper understanding, integration or reconciliation would emerge. In a picturesque image, Gendlin once described this process as like ‘listening to the child in your chest’. When the child feels accurately heard and appreciated, it can, so to speak, stop squirming and grizzling, and unwind. It feels as if an uncomfortable blockage, like indigestion, has been dissolved, releasing a fuller, more integrated feeling of inner flow and harmony.
Gendlin’s genius was to discover that this knack can be learned by almost everyone. (Having done several focusing workshops I can testify to this.) You ask yourself a very general question – ‘What’s this whole thing with my workplace / my mother / my fear of being alone about?’ – and then hold your attention in your torso and wait to see what sensations form there. It might be a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, a feeling of being unable to breathe, a pricking in the back of your throat, or perhaps a slight tensing of the shoulder muscles (or a hundred other things). You learn the art of slowing down the unfurling process – the differentiating of this deep concern into more precise words, feelings or gestures – so that it doesn’t cut corners, or quickly replace the actual with the ‘normal’, but preserves the authenticity and the complexity of the felt sense as it gradually wells up. And that process brings insight and a feeling of forward movement. Gendlin says: ‘Underneath your thoughts and memories and familiar feelings, you can discover a physically sensed “murky zone” which you can enter and open. This is the source from which new steps emerge. Once found, it is a palpable presence underneath.’18
Try it. Be patient: it works. But it works best in communication with someone else. The interpersonal bodily resonance that we looked at in Chapter 9 is a very useful medium for developing this greater sense of integration and unfolding. In a telephone seminar in 2011, Gendlin explained why.
Focusing is a way to access your bodily knowing. Your body picks up more of the other person than you consciously can. Your body also puts out more of yourself than you intend or than you know is visible. Others often react to that rather than to your conscious message. With a little training you can get a feel for your bodily knowing of what is going on.19
As the therapist tunes into and resonates with the client’s total embodied state, so the client, with some conscious direction, can learn to do the same. A growing body of research is tracking the neurochemical correlates of these intra- and inter-personal resonances. Not surprisingly, the prefrontal cortex, insula and cingulate are all implicated again.20
You could say that psychotherapy is concerned with mental health rather than cognitive performance – though the distinction clearly breaks down in this new view of real-world intelligence. For example, Gendlin has more recently discovered that the same kind of patient inward attention contributes significantly to the process of creative thinking. Gendlin has developed a kind of coaching protocol in which one person can help another to take the inkling of a novel idea, which they do not initially know how to express very well, and slow down its unfurling so that a genuinely satisfying expression of this idea can gradually evolve and come together. He has dubbed this ‘Thinking at the edge’ (or TATE, for short). Like therapeutic focusing, the process starts with a general question: ‘In your professional field, or in your life, what do you “know” and cannot yet say, that wants to be said?’ Your partner then helps to guide your sensing and thinking with a kind of subtle, patient midwifery, until you begin to find new forms of words (or other symbols), the mots justes, that ‘do justice’ to the original inkling. Though this research is still in its infancy, there are several encouraging studies of the use of TATE in various managerial, academic and educational contexts.21 (Indeed, writing this book has been a long process of trying to find good ways of putting new inklings into words.)
Exercise and movement
Running! If there is any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I cannot think of what it might be … The mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.
Joyce Carol Oates
Mens sana in corpore sano – a sound mind in a sound body – may be a saying of dodgy provenance, but is there any evidence that physical exercise really makes us smarter? We all know that exercise is good for our health and well-being. But what about our intelligence? The evidence is that exercise does seem to benefit thinking – though not always. Simply becoming more muscular or developing athletic expertise does not have any direct effect on our intelligence. In fact, heightened levels of mental and physical control can enable one to dampen and ignore feelings of distress or exhaustion – as, again, with Nina, the obsessional ballerina in Black Swan (and some top athletes and performers).
Yet physical movement can contribute positively to intelligence in at least three complementary ways. The first view sees exercise as increasing the physiological performance of the body-brain by, for example, improving the supply of oxygenated blood to the brain, or simply by getting the organs to work more efficiently.22 But there are more direct effects on intelligence as well. Exercise certainly affects brain areas such as the hippocampus that are strongly implicated in learning and memory. Regular running makes more neurons grow in these areas, and has a beneficial effect on the speed and effectiveness with which people learn. In one study, people learned new words 20 per cent faster after a burst of intense physical activity. Exercise is especially useful for protecting our minds from the effects of ageing. The hormones involved in regenerating neurons decline as we get older, and exercise offsets that decline. It’s also the case that the connectivity of the brain decreases as we age; the different circuits become slowly more disconnected from each other. This effect too is offset by exercise.23
But exercise affects thinking in young people too. Aerobic exercise especially makes a difference in tasks that require inhibitory control by the frontal lobes: planning, sequencing and prioritising, and keeping on track towards a current goal despite temptations and distraction. More specifically, practising complex physical skills such as dribbling a football, in the context of exercise that makes you tired, seems to accelerate the development of those frontal lobe faculties even further. Even regular bouts of less skilful physical activity during lessons have been shown to boost achievement in reading, spelling and mathematics – and thus, not surprisingly, to show increases in IQ.24
Secondly, the role of exercise can also be seen as vital for keeping internal communication between organs and sub-systems at an optimal level. The body is a mass of interconnecting, interlocking, intercommunicating sub-systems. As in any relationship, these communications vary not just in content but also in quality. If my wife and I stop communicating, we no longer have a marriage. We no longer resonate with and shape each other in an elastic and evolving way. Being well tuned, well tempered – in good temper with ourselves and the world – turns out to be a key ingredient of intelligence. If a part of me becomes too flaccid, it cannot pick up the detail of what it is sensing. And the same is true if it becomes sclerotic. When we become hard-hearted, we lose our sympathetic resonance with the world – and especially with the people – around us. A chronic loss of empathy is tantamount to a loss of intelligence.25
If we become sedentary and/or obese, or succumb to certain states of ‘mental illness’, it may well be that we literally lose a kind of constitutional physical elasticity that is important for the systemic resonance of the body’s components. As yet there is little research in this area, and more would be of great interest. It seems likely, for instance, that the accumulation of ‘hard fat’ around the vital organs, as in the ‘apple shaped’ form of obesity, would reduce inter-organ communication as well as bringing the well-known health risks. The fat could cause compression of sensory nerves, restriction of fluid-borne neurochemical messenger molecules, or literal damping of physical resonance. One might also wonder about the effects of pharmaceutical drugs such as statins, blood-pressure regulators and weight-loss pills on the effectiveness of the body’s internal communications.
The third benefit comes from exercise that increases our interoceptive awareness (and not all exercise has that intent or that effect). T’ai chi is a prime example of exercise where bodily awareness is explicitly cultivated. It is a venerable, originally Chinese, exercise regime that consists of slow, flowing bodily movements requiring detailed coordination of head, eyes, arms, torso, pelvis and legs. The movements are very precise but, to begin with, quite unfamiliar and so require a high degree of concentration and subtle body awareness to master. In a review of well-conducted evaluations of the cumulative effects of t’ai chi, Peter Wayne (US Scientist of the Year 2013) and his colleagues at the Harvard Medical School found significant increases in bodily awareness, with clear benefits for both mental and physical functioning. Elderly practitioners of t’ai chi are less likely to fall (and suffer the consequences of bruising and bone fracture that can follow), for example, because they feel the sensations of their feet on the ground more fully and accurately. Ironically, because they are more present, and less preoccupied (as many elderly people are) with a fear of falling, they fall less often. And the functioning of their internal systems improves more generally, so that there are real benefits to memory and problem-solving as well. These benefits are significantly larger than any that accrue from forms of physical exercise that do not focus on the cultivation of bodily awareness.26
Hatha yoga also stresses bodily awareness, and research suggests that it can have short-term as well as long-term benefits for the way we think and solve problems. Neha Gothe and her colleagues at the University of Illinois compared the effects of a mere 20 minutes of yoga practice with the same amount of time spent in conventional stretching exercises (which do not emphasise awareness). Their subjects were female college students who had no previous experience of yoga, t’ai chi or any similar form of exercise. Five minutes after a period of exercise or yoga, they were given tests of their ability to focus on a task and ignore distractions. Performance on these tests was significantly better when they had just had the yoga session than after conventional exercise. So the good news is that you do not have to practise the disciplines for months before you begin to experience the cognitive benefits; a mere 20 minutes will give you a ‘quick win’.27
Dance training, too, requires the dancer to develop a high degree of bodily awareness – though the emphasis may be more on the muscles, and the positioning and shaping of the body in space, than on the more visceral aspects of interoception. So we might expect a mixed picture when we go looking for cognitive benefits of dance. Some of the yoga studies, for example, used a dance class as a control group, and found little cognitive benefit of dance as compared with Hatha yoga. Peter Lovatt, however, has found a direct effect of dance on the way people think. Peter is both a professional dancer and an academic psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. With his colleague Carine Lewis, Peter gave novice dancers 15 minutes of either free, improvisational dance, or of highly structured dance steps, and then tested them on their ability to solve two different kinds of puzzle. One required creative insightful thinking, the other more logical and analytical thinking. The effect of the dancing on their problem-solving was quite specific. The improvisational dancers showed improved performance on the insight problems but not on the analytical problems, while the structured dancers showed exactly the reverse effect. Although a preliminary study, it does suggest, intriguingly, that mind and body can mirror each other’s mode very quickly – as we would expect if they actually are, and are felt to be, two sides of a coin.28
*****
Overall, it is pretty clear that we can indeed improve internal communication between our different organs, with a corresponding increase in mental agility and performance. Our ability to learn, remember, pay attention, solve problems and engage with others are all dependent on the quality of the communication within and amongst that complicated circuitry. And that quality can be recovered and enhanced through different kinds of exercise and therapy. So what, in the light of this knowledge, might I be inclined to do differently?
At a very superficial level, I might try some ‘power posing’ before an interview, using body posture to induce a corollary state of confidence. I might exercise more, in the belief that ‘being in better shape’ would benefit not just my health and longevity, but my mind as well. I’d think of the goal not as becoming fitter or firmer, but as toning my system so that it is better tempered, more in tune with itself and its surroundings. I wouldn’t be aiming to run faster or to defy the sagging and wrinkling of age, but to thrum more sweetly and respond more intelligently to the constant plucks of the innards and the ‘outtards’ that compose myself. And I might practise slow movements, or even sitting still, in order to learn to listen and feel these plucks and throbs more fully – not so that a disembodied mind can be ‘better informed’ (for I accept now that this ethereal governor doesn’t exist), but so that every member of the corporeal choir can contribute its particular voice more fully to the central chorus out of which my intelligence emerges. I’ll practise noticing my heartbeat, the rise and fall of my breathing, my blinking and the faint background clamour of tensions and itches, and tremor in my muscles, so that no part of me, if I can help it, is excluded from the moot.
But what about the deeper effects of embodiment on our very sense of self? And how would society need to change if its members experienced themselves as fully embodied? These are the questions we will address in the final chapter.