There is no one way to categorize and define the human movement. It is a subject that can be studied during one’s whole life and there will be no definite conclusion about how it can be explained in simple terms. There is a myriad of factors that influence the efficiency of movement, all of them put together to create a unique blueprint for each individual and vary within each specialized field. What is the universal factor that will make the human body capable to move well in a variety of scenarios? It is a big question! And I am not sure there is a clear-cut answer to it. In this text, I propose to look at an aspect of movement that for me is at least a close call to be considered such a thing, which is differentiation.
In order to efficiently solve motor problems, the whole body needs to work in synergy. There should be communication between all of its parts that provide a basis for unified action. Without it, the body won’t be able to respond to external stressors and will constantly fight forces that act on it instead of collaborating with them. This connectedness is the feature of the tensegrity structure that characterizes the human body (and that of any other animal). Unfortunately, it can be easily lost when the body is not properly used. You can recognize the tensegrity clearly in young children – how their entire structure responds to any external occurrence in a coherent way. There is a quality to their movement that indicates the joined response of all parts of the body. You can observe the same phenomenon in high-level athletes and performers who have been involved in their craft since a young age. However, often when you ask them what is the basis for their movement they will not be able to respond because it is so ingrained in their way of acting, it becomes almost impossible to consciously recognize it. With disease and degeneration of the tissue related to aging in people who do not constantly move, this connectedness vanishes.
Nevertheless, not everything is lost for those who didn’t manage to maintain this quality since childhood. You can reconnect your body and restore the connectedness of your structure. There is no one way of doing it, but there is one essential element that is needed to create better synergy in the body, and this is the capacity to differentiate between all its different parts first, thus understanding clearly how they are interconnected. An example I often give to my students is that of a car: you drive a car and don’t think much about the way it works until it is broken. Of course, you can take it to the mechanic, but if you are able to take the car apart and know what each detail does precisely in relation to all the rest, you will get a different experience driving it and will be also able to fix whatever is broken without waiting for the emergency services to arrive. When you study something it is useful to understand what it consists of, keeping at the back of the mind that in complex systems the entirety of a thing is never merely the sum of its parts.
When we talk about the human body, differentiation leads to enhanced awareness. You know which parts are doing what exactly at every moment. The precision of sensory feedback is what allows for the differentiation of the body’s landscape. The capacity to sense one’s own body is called proprioception, and this is the main feature that is associated with the quality of motor control and dexterity (J. Han, et al, 2016). The complexity of human movement and its efficiency is the result of the interaction of sensory perception and motor output: as we move, we are constantly receiving corrections in real-time at incredible speeds. The ratio of sensory to motor information in the brain when we move is about 9 to 1 (B.Gesslbauer, et al. 2017). It is impossible to perceive consciously all these corrections, but you can improve the perception of sensory feedback in your body through deliberate practices. The more differentiated the map of your body is within your nervous system, the more enhanced your capacity for synergy in movement you possess.
There is another layer to it I would like to mention: when your body is well differentiated and you understand how to create different qualities and assemble synergies to efficiently solve motor tasks, you are also able to see it in others. For example, I would not recognize a degree of tension in another person if I am incapable of recognizing it within myself. Nor I would be able to appreciate a high level of skill if I would never attempt to learn it, thus never experiencing it within my body. It is like a gradient of colors: a trained eye of a painter will see much more tones of a single color compared to a regular person. By the same metrics, when my body is well differentiated and I have a bigger pallet of movement, I will be able to perceive more subtleties when observing others. This will make me a much better and more autonomous learner because now I can extract information from visual and tactile experiences and work with it. I can see with better clarity what is happening in front of me and will be able to apply it in my motor solutions later because I can pull from the references built on my own understanding. This way, I create a different kind of terminology that will help me to evolve further.
Our structure directly reflects all our thoughts and emotions, the persona we project into the world. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they move and solve motor tasks. I would say that without a differentiated body, you cannot know who you truly are. The body and the mind are inseparable, interwoven and constantly informing each other. The Cartesian split we have inherited in our thinking about these matters should be eliminated from our understanding of movement and relationships within different parts of ourselves and others. Each category of experience we have formed is part of a whole and cannot exist in isolation. The better the differentiation between them, the better the understanding of our true nature. Isn’t this the true meaning behind “knowing thyself”?