Frank Forencich

What is more important for us, at an elemental level, than the control, the owning and operation of our own physical selves? - Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

There is only one core issue for all psychology: Where is the "me?" Where does the "me" begin? Where does the "me" stop? - James Hillman, Ecopsychology

It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision. - Helen Keller

My friends tell me that I’m just a hairy bag of water and I guess they must be right. Actually, I’m not really that hairy, but as for the water, that’s true enough. All of us are aquatic organisms by nature, bubbles of moisture enclosed in an envelope of skin. When our ancestors crawled out of the ocean millions of years ago, they figured out a way to take the ocean with them. Metabolism just works better in a liquid medium: Thus, the bag.

Of course there’s more to an organism than a hairy sack. Our bags need skeletal limbs to get around, feet for locomotion and hands for grasping. We need muscles to make our limbs move, digestion to give us fuel, and a nervous system to coordinate our activity and behavior, all so that the bag can get around in the world and send its genes into the future.

But that’s not all. Your bag may be able to move from place to place, and it may even be fast and powerful, but how will it know the nature of its world? How will it navigate or make decisions about gravity, terrain, obstacles, plants and animals? Will the bag just blunder about its world, or will it make intelligent choices that allow it to survive in a dynamic and sometimes hostile environment?

SENSATION: WHAT'S IT GOOD FOR?

To meet this need, our bags come equipped with a set of highly sophisticated senses that provide an immense amount of information about the environment and the condition of the hairy bag itself. Multiple channels of data stream into our nervous systems, giving us the capability to direct our actions in ways that are appropriate to our surroundings.

Unfortunately, most of us fail to appreciate just how big a role sensation plays in our physical and psychological health. As G.W. Bush would have put it, we “misunderestimate” how powerful the senses are in keeping our hairy bags functional and happy.

To get the whole story, we have to understand that there’s a crucial distinction between somatic and special senses. These senses have entirely different purposes and affect our experience in radically different ways.

Let’s start with the somatic senses, for these are the oldest and most basic. The somatic senses tell us the intimate details of our state of body. These include touch, thermoreception (hot and cold), nociception (pain), proprioception (position and movement in space) and balance (inner ear). Taken together, these somatic receptors give us a sense of our physical identity. In a very real sense, they tell us who we are.

In contrast, the special senses include vision, hearing, smell and taste. These senses are obviously important in managing our experience in the world, but as we shall see, their role is somewhat overrated.

SPECIAL DEFICIT

To get an idea of the relative importance of the senses, we have only to think of people who are deprived of one type or the other. For example, consider the life of Helen Keller.

Most everyone knows the story. Ms. Keller was born in 1880 with normal sensation, but was struck by an illness at nineteen months - scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness did not last long, but it left her deaf and blind, a knockout blow to her special senses. Her somatic senses were left intact.

Keller's teacher arrived in 1887 and began to teach her to communicate by spelling words into her hand. The breakthrough came when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water."

Once she understood the nature of symbols, Keller began a passionate quest for knowledge and went on to become an extremely successful author, political activist, and lecturer. She learned Braille, and used it to read not only English but also French, German, Greek, and Latin. She wrote books and traveled the world, inspiring people wherever she went. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. Most of us would be delighted to function at so high a level. Winston Churchill called her "the greatest woman of our age."

Keller’s life teaches us many important lessons of course, but here we are interested in her experience with sensation. What we see is a striking difference between somatic and special senses. For Keller, the loss of special senses was a tremendous challenge, but it was not insurmountable; she managed to flourish in spite of her deficit. Her identity, personality and sense of personal integration remained intact. Her life is proof that the special senses, while obviously desirable, are not absolutely essential for health and function.

"THE DISEMBODIED LADY"

In contrast, consider a story recounted by Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sacks writes of a woman named Christian who lost her proprioception, her sense of body position and motion. Christian suffered a rare but debilitating reaction to an antibiotic; the result was a "sensory neuritis," an inflammation of sensory nerves.

Almost overnight, she lost her awareness of her body and her sense of physical self. The effect was profoundly disturbing to her identity. Sacks described her predicament this way:

"She continues to feel, with the continuing loss of proprioception, that her body is dead, not-real, not-hers - she cannot appropriate it to herself. She can find no words for this state, and can only use analogies derived from other senses: ‘I feel my body is blind and deaf to itself…it has no sense of itself - these are her own words.’"

After 8 years of physical therapy, Christian showed no signs of neurological recovery and remained in a disembodied state. She learned to monitor her physical movements by vision, but the process required intense, intentional concentration from moment-to-moment. She learned to walk and take public transport, but only with great vigilance. At the time Sack’s book was published, it was unclear whether she ever regained a sense of personal identity or wellbeing.

THE DEMISE OF THE SOMATIC SENSES

Adverse reactions to antibiotics are one thing, and we might be inclined to write this story off as a clinical curiosity. But Christian’s body-blind experience is actually an extreme example of an epidemic that is sweeping the modern world. That is, we have a huge population of individuals whose special senses are intact, but whose somatic senses are severely atrophied because of disuse.

The modern world is the culprit, of course. Touch, for example, is highly compromised. Shoes insulate us from the earth; we lose an immense amount of sensory stimulation, starting at an early age. Modern homes and workplaces are constructed of smooth, monotonous materials. Where our hands used to touch dirt, rocks, sticks and animal hides, they now touch tactile-neutral countertops, desks, furniture and tools. Modern social norms often discourage physical contact with others. For many people, handshakes are the most intimate physical contact that they regularly experience.

Proprioception and balance similarly fall into atrophy. Monotonous sidewalks, floors and stairways offer little stimulation to the body’s position senses. Consequently, these sensory systems stop firing. We don’t use the capability, so we lose it.

Our experience of hot and cold is also compromised. Many of today’s buildings are maintained at a constant 68 degrees. Synthetic clothing wicks moisture away from the skin and leaves us comfortable year round. Unless you’re active in getting outdoors, you may go weeks or months without getting hot or cold.

Pain also diminishes. Our highly engineered homes and workplaces are designed to eliminate scrapes, bumps, bruises, lacerations and other minor skin insults that would have been so common in outdoor environments. To be sure, many people experience musculoskeletal pain, but these pains often come from other sources: sedentary postures, movement specializations and overuse. Paradoxically, much of this pain comes as a result of inadequate somatic sensation.

PRIMAL CONFUSION

The atrophy of the somatic senses plays out in some disturbing patterns of human psychology, identity and behavior. For many modern people, the body no longer feels itself clearly. Physical identity begins to weaken and drift. Without somatic sensation, we tend to forget who we really are. I call this state "primal confusion."

The most obvious manifestations of this confusion are the ADD and ADHD that we see in so many modern children. But it also shows up in a host of sub-clinical syndromes, in adults as well as children. Somatic sensory deprivation leads to anxiety, loss of concentration and poor performance. Without a sense of body, our minds and spirits begin to wander. We seek a sense of grounding anywhere we can, sometimes in substances, excessive eating, chronic exercise, over-stimulation of the special senses or in extreme cases, cutting our own flesh.

Movement is at the heart of the problem and the solution. Mick Dodge, ("the barefoot sensei") likes to remind us that muscle is "the largest sensory organ in the body." Every muscle, every tendon, every ligament is wired with mechanoreceptors. These receptors feed immense amounts of information back into the nervous system and in turn, tell us about the position of our bodies. The more we move, the more information we gather.

When we look at it from this perspective, we begin to realize that movement deprivation is also a form of sensory deprivation. Sedentary living doesn’t just lead to muscular atrophy, it also leads to sensory atrophy. And in turn, this sensory atrophy leads to problems of cognition, attention, concentration and identity.

This is no trivial matter; sensory deprivation is a dangerous business. In small doses, such as immersion in flotation tanks, it may promote relaxation and creativity. But extended periods of somatic sensory deprivation can result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, depression and psychosis. In fact, sensory deprivation is one of the techniques used by the CIA to interrogate prisoners.
sensory rebalancing

So what's the solution to this epidemic of sensory amnesia and distortion? How shall we rediscover our bodies? The short answer is to cut back on the visual stimulation and get back to some raw physical experience.

Here’s one prescription:

* More barefoot walking.
* More scrambling in the mountains.
* More exposure to dirt, trees and bushes.
* More massage.
* More rock climbing, rugby and martial art.
* More gardening and woodworking.
* More sculpture and finger painting.

And above all, we all need to get more outdoor movement, especially multi-plane, multi-joint, exuberantly playful movement.

You just might rediscover your physical self.

Frank Forencich, is the Chief Creative Officer of the Exuberant Animal Vision. Exuberant Animal is both a philosophy and an organization. As a philosophy, it promotes health, positive physicality and physical happiness. As a company, it offer seminars, workshops and training for individuals and organizations. For more information visit http://www.exuberantanimal.com

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