Moshe Feldenkrais And The Central Nervous System
Moshe Feldenkrais was very interested in Neuroscience and the evolution of the human brain. He liked to bounce ideas off the experts of his day to test his own theories. He was a big believer in the power of our central nervous system to learn and this made up the foundation of the system that has come to be known as the Feldenkrais method of somatic education.
Simple worms are closet brainiacs
DON’T be offended, but you have the brain of a worm. Clusters of cells that are instrumental in building complex brains have been found in a simple worm that barely has a brain at all.
The discovery suggests that, around 600 million years ago, primitive worms had the machinery to develop complex brains. They may even have had complex brains themselves – which were later lost.
Vertebrates, such as humans and fish, have the biggest and most complex brains in the animal kingdom. Yet all their closest non-vertebrate relatives, such as the eel-like lancelets and sea squirts, have simple brains that lack the dozens of specialised nerve centres typical of complex brains. As a result, evolutionary biologists have long thought that complex brains only evolved after animals with backbones appeared.
Not so, says Christopher Lowe of Stanford University in California. His team studies a species of acorn worm, Saccoglossus kowalevskii, which has a rudimentary nervous system made up of two nerve cords and nerves spread out in its skin. The worms live in burrows in the seabed and pull in passing particles of food.
Lowe found that young S. kowalevskii have three clusters of cells identical to the ones vertebrates use to shape their brains. In developing vertebrate brains, these clusters – called signalling centres – make proteins that orchestrate the formation of specialised brain regions. The acorn worm, Lowe found, produces the same proteins, and they spread through its developing body in patterns similar to those they follow in the developing vertebrate brain (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10838)….
The Feldenkrais Method http://t.co/xiOvehol
— BrassMusician (Brass Musician) (@BrassMusician) Thu Mar 29 2012
The Feldenkrais method is a very interesting modality and has helped thousands of people move better and relieve pain in the last thirty years. If you want to learn more about this technique click here.