The Alexander Technique and Back Care

by Witold Fitz-Simon In 2008, the British Medical Journal published the results of their randomized controlled trial of Alexander Technique lessons, exercise, and massage for chronic and recurrent back pain. This is not exactly news for those in the Alexander Technique community, as word of favorable scientific studies travel fast. The results were so positive in favor of the Technique, however, that it is worth giving them another look.

579 patients with chronic or recurring back pain were selected from 64 general practices in the United Kingdom. 144 people were given normal care for back pain that you might receive from any general practitioner. 147 were given six sessions of massage. 144 were given six Alexander Technique lessons. 144 were given 24 Alexander technique lessons. Half of the people in each of these groups were also given an exercise program.

The participants in the study were interviewed three months after their interventions were given, and again after twelve months. As you might expect, the control group showed no improvement after three months or beyond. Of the other groups, all showed some improvement. What is remarkable is what was found at the one-year mark. Those who had received massage reported they still experienced around 21 days of pain in the previous four weeks, whereas those who had taken six lessons in the Alexander Technique reported around 11 days of pain. Those who had taken 24 lessons in the Technique that ended a year previously reported only around 3 days of pain in the prior 4 weeks!

Here is the video that the BMJ produced explaining their study:

http://youtu.be/3GbwzqT9piU

http://youtu.be/BXmimtk381U

The American Center for the Alexander technique has a 50-year tradition of excellence in training teachers of the Alexander Technique. Click here to find a teacher near you.

[author] [author_image timthumb='on']http://www.acatnyc.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/After-crop1.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]WITOLD FITZ-SIMON has been a student of the Alexander Technique since 2007. He is certified to teach the Technique as a graduate of the American Center for the Alexander Technique’s 1,600-hour, three year training program. A student of yoga since 1993 and a teacher of yoga since 2000, Witold combines his extensive knowledge of the body and its use into intelligent and practical instruction designed to help his students free themselves of ineffective and damaging habits of body, mind and being. www.mindbodyandbeing.com[/author_info] [/author]

A Nobel Prizewinner’s Perspective on the Alexander Technique

by Witold Fitz-Simon http://youtu.be/XXr-9kQZ0ow

Nobel Prize winner Nikolaas Tinbergen was so impressed with the work of F. M. Alexander that he devoted almost ten minutes of his Nobel lecture to the Alexander Technique. Tinbergen won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973 for his “discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns.” Tinbergen, and his fellow prizewinners Karl Lorenz and Konrad von Frisch, performed studies on fish, insects and birds to observe genetically programmed patterns of behavior. They studied what the origins of these behaviors were, how they developed, and what stimulated them to be triggered. Tinbergen’s work had a profound effect in the field of behavioral sciences as a whole.

Tinbergen’s Four Questions

Tinbergen is famous for developing four essential questions that must be asked about any form of behavior in animals, human or otherwise, if the behavior is to be fully understood:

1. Causation: What causes the behavioral response to be triggered? How is that changed by what the individual or organism might have learned for itself? What are the different mechanisms that come into play as part of the behavioral response?
2. Development: How does the response change over time as the individual or organism ages?
3. Function: What impact does the behavior have on the individual or organism?
4. Evolution: How does the behavior compare in other species? Why might the behavior have evolved in the way it did rather than in some other way.

Watching and Wondering

In his speech, Tinbergen discusses how his time-honored process of “watching and wandering,” as he calls it, can be applied to the relief of human suffering, especially the suffering caused by stress. In the first part of his speech, he looks at Early Childhood Autism. His second example of an application of modern ethological methods (ethology is the term given to behavioral studies) is F. M. Alexander and the Alexander Technique. He praises Alexander for using these methods fifty years before they had become widespread in the scientific community:

"This story, of perceptiveness, of intelligence, and of persistence, shown by a man without medical training, is one of the true epics of medical research and practice.”

The Kinesthetic Feedback Report

One interesting scientific discovery Tinbergen talks about in his lecture (he skips over it in the above video, but you can find it in the written text here on page 12) is the way in which the brain uses the kinesthetic, or “feeling,” sense and how that can cause us trouble:

“There are many strong indications that, at various levels of integration, from single muscle units up to complex behavior, the correct performance of many movements is continually checked by the brain. It does this by comparing a feedback report, that says ‘orders carried out,’ with the feedback expectation for which, with the initiation of each movement, the brain has been alerted. Only when the expected feedback and the actual feedback match does the brain stop sending out commands for corrective action… But what Alexander has discovered beyond this is that a lifelong mis-use of the body-muscles (such as caused by, for instance, too much sitting and too little walking) can make the entire system go wrong. As a consequence, reports that ‘all is correct’ are received by the brain (or perhaps interpreted as correct) when in fact all is very wrong. A person can ‘feel at ease’ e.g. when slouching in front of the television set, when in fact he is grossly abusing his body.”

• Tinbergen’s entire speech can be seen here.
• You can download a PDF of his speech here. The section on the Alexander Technique begins on page 10.
• To read more about Tinbergen, you can find his Wikipedia page here
• To read more about Tinbergen’s “Four Questions,” you can find the Wikipedia page here.
• To read more about the kinesthetic feedback report, you can find a Wikipedia page on “efferent copies,” the scientific term for the potentially faulty kinesthetic model that the brain stores and uses as a reference for what “feels right,” here.

[author] [author_image timthumb='on']http://www.acatnyc.org/main/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/After-crop1.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]WITOLD FITZ-SIMON has been a student of the Alexander Technique since 2007. He is certified to teach the Technique as a graduate of the American Center for the Alexander Technique’s 1,600-hour, three year training program. A student of yoga since 1993 and a teacher of yoga since 2000, Witold combines his extensive knowledge of the body and its use into intelligent and practical instruction designed to help his students free themselves of ineffective and damaging habits of body, mind and being. www.mindbodyandbeing.com[/author_info] [/author]

Can Reading a Good Book Improve the Way You Use Your Body?

by Witold Fitz-SimonResearchers at Emory University in Atlanta recently released a studythat showed that reading a book can increase connectivity in the brain for at least five days. Twenty-one graduates from the university were given sections of a novel to read over a nine day period, receiving fMRI scans before and after reading. Heightened connectivity that remained even after reading was found in two regions of the brain: 

• the left temporal cortex

• the somatosensory cortex

Unsurprisingly, the left temporal lobe houses the primary auditory cortex which is associated with language and meaning. It makes sense that reading would stimulate language centers of the brain. Less obvious, perhaps, is the stimulation of the somatosensory cortex, an area which takes information from various sources—such as sensitivity to pain, sensitivity to temperature, and proprioceptive information—and combines them into what we think of as the the sense of touch.

From the study:

“One possibility for increases in somatosensory cortex connectivity is that reading a novel invokes neural activity that is associated with bodily sensations. This is called the theory of “embodied semantics”… Somatosensory cortex activation has been previously demonstrated by the reading of metaphors, especially if they are tactile metaphors… It is plausible that the act of reading a novel places the reader in the body of the protagonist, which may alter somatosensory and motor cortex connectivity.”

Science-fiction and fantasy are genres of literature that take us out of our bodies into new and magical landscapes. Perhaps we could create a new type of literature that takes us into our bodies and changes our use.

Have you ever had the experience of being physically transformed in any way by something you’ve read? Perhaps you had the feeling that a piece of literature unlocked something inside you that helped you relate to the world differently. Let us know in the comments of your favorite transformative works.

Sources: The Independent, UPI, Wired.com, Wisegeek.

WITOLD FITZ-SIMON has been a student of the Alexander Technique since 2007. He is certified to teach the Technique as a graduate of the American Center for the Alexander Technique’s 1,600-hour, three year training program. A student of yoga since 1993 and a teacher of yoga since 2000, Witold combines his extensive knowledge of the body and its use into intelligent and practical instruction designed to help his students free themselves of ineffective and damaging habits of body, mind and being. www.mindbodyandbeing.com