Books on the Body-Mind Connection

I am really pleased to say that the next blog entry has been written by Dr Jennifer Leigh, an expertise on yoga and somatic education.  I asked Jennifer to recommend five books on a genuinely fascinating topic - and one that is of great relevance to both sport and education - the body mind connection.

When I was asked to recommend five books on mind-body connection I have to say that my brain froze.  I looked at the (shelves and shelves of) books that I own on aspects of this and was completely flummoxed.  I could recommend lots of them.  Others I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole.  My main concern though, was who I would be recommending them for.So I have decided to recommend one book from five sections of my bookshelves (bar the really freaky ones) with a little bit of an introduction as to why it may be relevant to the mind-body discourse. 

The idea of a mind-body connection is not exactly universally accepted.  The ascendancy of the mind over the body and its importance in the development of Western philosophy and later medicine, psychology and sport can be traced back to the days of Plato, the Orphic and Socrates: “the body is an endless source of trouble...only the mind can reach existence”.  For example, Descartes’ dualism was firmly anti-organic, built on earlier notions of the physical world, and described in the words of Alan Watts as, “the domain of corruption and evil”.  The division or schism between mind and body can thus be seen to have affected Western society from its earliest days, with the body being seen as inferior to the mind. 

In contrast, in yoga philosophy and practice a mind-body connection is an assumption.  The purely physical aspect of yoga, asana, has been emphasised in recent years, sometimes to the exclusion of all else, turning yoga practice into an exercise form.  Yoga could be a valuable practice for any sports person.  But which book on yoga to recommend? 

I have chosen Dynamic Yoga by Godfrey Devereux (1998).  Devereux’s approach to yoga is physical, strong and active.  His explanations of the poses are clear, and if you can get over the extremely revealing shorts he wears, the photos are helpful.  The book is comprehensive, covering the poses you would encounter in most Hatha, Ashtanga or Iyengar yoga classes.

Eastern philosophy has a different starting point and language when talking of the mind and body, illustrating “the irrelevance of Western theories to non-Western contexts”.  The traditional Eastern view of the body and mind is that they are inseparable aspects of the same human existence.  A book that explores the martial mind-body connection is Peter and Laura Ralston’s Zen-Body Being (2006).  It is a bit of a how-to manual with exercises designed to help the reader experience a greater sense of their body-being.

The importance of the body-mind (or embodied mind) as opposed to a body/mind split in the philosophy of psychotherapy can be traced back through Freud and his discovery of the power of the unconscious over the conscious and his work on the power-relationship between therapist and client.  Linda Hartley’s Somatic Psychology (2004) traces the history of psychology and its sorry relationship with the body, which has tended to either ignore it (in the context of cognitive or social psychology), or treat it as exclusively functional (in biological and neuro-psychologies). 

In a discussion of Eastern philosophies and their resemblance to Western psychotherapy, Alan Watts states that both are concerned “with bringing about changes of consciousness”.  Western psychotherapy has as a primary concern with the study of the mind or psyche as a clinical entitity, whereas “Eastern cultures have not categorized mind and matter, soul and body, in the same way”.  By increasing awareness of the body-mind and its movements, it is possible to increase awareness of that boundary of and relationship with the world (and all others in it).  Alan Fogel’s The Psychophysiology of Self-Awareness (2009) explores how the physiology of the body and psychology interact within a therapeutic situation.  He illustrates this with the use of psychology, neuro-biology and the Rosen Method, a form of somatic bodywork. 

My final book is a collection of writings on the principles and techniques of somatics in Don Hanlon Johnson’s Body, Breath and Gesture (1995).  The book forms a history of the field, including how it has fragmented into the disparate approaches and techniques that are found today.  Johnson focuses on Western somatic body awareness disciplines, many of which were developed after the turn of the last century.  Some of the practices outlined may fall into that ‘hippy’ section, however I find it to be a book that gives a very clear sense of the broadness of the somatic field and the scope of work and practice that people are engaging in to increase their sense of a mind-body connection.

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Jennifer Leigh is an accredited Somatic Movement Therapist, a Qualified School Teacher and an experienced Yoga Instructor.  Her doctoral research was a study on children’s perceptions of embodiment. She is currently working as a Research Associate at the University of Kent on a study looking at Costs and Outcomes of Skilled Support for Individuals with Complex Needs and an evaluation of ‘Imagining Autism’, a drama intervention for primary school children with autism.  She also has a killer pair of legs.

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Baby Plays Ping Pong Like a Pro

This video of a baby table tennis protege is going viral.  But just in case you've missed it ....




Please let me know if you know of any similar remarkable early specialisers.

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A couple of great pictures - science and exercise

(Alastair Dryburgh via Daniel Pink)

The first image is a lovely representation of the growing evidence of the value of behavioural prompts for physical activity.

I like the second image partly because it is just funny!  And partly as it hints at a world where the sane and the reasonable cause as much fuss as the crazies.

(thanks to Prof Glynis Murphy, via Dr Jen Leigh)

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Bodies and Minds: even more on philosophy and sport

Philosophers are nothing if not an argumentative bunch, and many different arguments have been offered against Dualism.  One school of philosophy that is particularly relevant in this regard is phenomenology.  This approach is unusual because as opposed to almost every other school of philosophy, it is mainly concerned with describing, rather than the explaining, the things we experience.  Hubert Dreyfus captures the spirit of the phenomenological stance when he wrote:

“In explaining our actions we must always sooner or later fall back on our everyday practices and simply say 'this is what we do' or 'that's what it is to be a human being'.  Thus, in the last analysis, all intelligibility and all intelligent behaviour must be traced back to our sense of what we are.” (cited in Wrathall, 2000, p. 94)

According to Dreyfus, the biggest problem with dualism is that its account of action just does not relate to what it is really like to move.

So, phenomenologists reject the Cartesian splitting of the mind and body in favour of an integrated view that emphasises the notion of embodiment, or the central importance of human experience as lived through a body.  In other words, while dualism generally regarded the mind as the driver and degraded the body to a mere machine or vehicle, phenomenology countered that the body was the bridge to the world:  “Our senses are the portals that lead from inner to outer space.  Robbed of them, we become an island unto ourselves, lacking the ability to interact with the world” (Hunter and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 8).

At the heart of phenomenology is the view that to be in the world is to have a body or be a body.  It is only through being a body that I am what and who I am.  And it is only though my body that I can experience and learn about the things that make up my world.

This might seem a rather abstract idea, but some writers have suggested that a lot of what goes on when people actually play sport does not seem to fit the dualist idea of a mind working a mechanical body, no matter how fit and efficient.  The psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who we have just met above, suggested that there were certain experiences that were common to many sports players in which thought and action seem inseparable.  He used the word ‘flow’ to refer to experiences in which a person feels on top of the world, in total command of the situation and feeling that his/her limits are being pushed to the limits.  He quotes the words of an elite skater:

“Everything else goes away. It almost happens in slow motion, even though you're doing things at the correct time with the music and everything.  Nothing else matters; it is just such an eerie, eerie feeling. The audience fades away, except for the brief moment when they were clapping so loudly - actually that was just a part of us. It was all a part of our experience; it never took us out of our focus”. (Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi, 1999, p. 73)

Numerous sports players have spoken about these types of experiences: of ‘being in the zone’; of ‘going with the flow’; and of ‘playing out of my mind’.  Together, they point to an experience in which the body and the mind are inseparable.

“Basketball is a complex dance. To excel, you need to act with a clear mind and be totally focused on what everyone on the floor is doing. Some athletes describe this quality of mind as a "cocoon of concentration." But that implies shutting out the world when what you really need to do is become more acutely aware of what's happening right now, this very moment.” (Great basketball coach Phil Jackson; 1995, p. 116)

So, what do you think?

Is this just an illusion or a trick of the mind?

Or is it just the consequence of highly trained athletes just thinking that they are not thinking?

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Old farts and sexy skirts

The former England cricketer Ed Smith has claimed that sport is a condensed form of life, and it has a lot to teach us about 'the game of real life'. I suppose he is arguing that sport is like a model village that we can look at and study from different angles without getting run over. And in some ways he is right.

In other respects, though, sport is very different from real life. And nowhere is this difference more pronounced than in that strange land called sports administration.Administrators are the people who attend meetings, make rules and punish wrong-doers. They run their sports because nobody else has the time and inclination to do so.

Will Carling famously described the Rugby Football Union committee as "57 Old Farts", and was punished by losing his captaincy of the England team; a severity of punishment reserved for those who have unwisely and willfully stated the bleeding obvious. I have been told that things have changed a lot in recent years, but, now I think about it, my informant was a sports administrator. I have absolutely no doubt there are young, smart and forward-looking people, just as I have no doubt there are also ridiculous old farts smelling up the system.

Evidence?

One of the best-known examples of silly old men reveling the extent of their distance from normal, civilised life was Sett Blatter's suggestion a few years ago that women footballers wear sexier, tighter clothes: "Female players are pretty", he said. "Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball".

On another occasion, when asked about possible difficulties for gay people in Qatar, hosts of the 2022 World Cup, Blatter's advise was that gay fans "should refrain from any sexual activities".

Now, this is not the opinion of a random old man in a park; Blatter was (and still is) the President of the world body for football.

Boxing, not surprisingly, has its own old farts. Women's boxing first appeared in the Olympic Games at a demonstration sport in 1902, and a mere hundred and ten years later it will return in London. It is well-known that many of the old-guard of boxing are still horrified by the very idea of girls hitting each other, but their influence is clearly waning as women are showing themselves to be equal to their male counterparts in skill, fitness and heart.

Losing the argument on the grounds of boxing, the old farts have recently tried another angle. The AIBA, the world body for amateur boxing, which is ultimately responsible for the sport in the Olympics, has suggested that women boxers wear skirts to help them stand out from the men.

'Stand out from the men'? I think the AIBA is confusing elite athletes with Bangkok ladyboys. Why is it necessary for boxers to be obviously men or women? Surely the main criterion for their value is their boxing ability.

Or perhaps I am being naive. Some have suggested that the main motivation for this move is what we might call the 'Beach Volleyball Strategy'. In other words, the claim is that the AIBA wants to sex women's boxing up. This was, of course, Blatter's plan with football.

Is this marketing, 1950s style? Or are there more libidinous thoughts here? Frankly, I don't know. I do know that the suggestion is crass, and reveals a lack of confidence in women's boxing just as it is about to be properly launched into the world.

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DARWIN’S DELICIOUS IDEA

If the voice of the people is indeed the world of God, then Winston Churchill is the Greatest Briton. Brunel comes in at Number 2 and Princess Diana is third. My choice was Charles Darwin, who was ranked fourth, so it shows how much I know.

This was the result of a BBC poll a few years ago. Across the country parents and teachers rung their hands in anguish for the appalling job they’ve made of children’s education. Churchill is, perhaps, a reasonable choice. The engineer Brunel, although a surprise, at least DID SOMETHING in his life. But not many of us living in the twilight zone of reason would have guessed that Diana was a more significant person than Shakespeare, Newton and Faraday. In my book, she’d come some way behind Lily Allen, Timmy Mallett and that woman from the Shake-&-Vac adverts.

But I digress.

I wanted to take the luxury of this blog to reiterate the case for Charles Darwin, who 200th Anniversary is being celebrated this month.

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An apocryphal story tells of a prominent English Victorian lady, the wife of a bishop, who exclaimed to her husband, after hearing of Darwin’s theory of natural selection:

“Oh my dear, let us hope that what Mr Darwin says is not true. But if it is true, let us hope that it will not become generally known!”

What Mr Darwin said is true, at least in general terms. Zoological, archaeological, molecular chemical and anthropological evidence all support his central claims. And this is despite 150 years of the most heated challenges levelled at any scientific theory. But even more remarkable is that the extraordinary advances in biology since Darwin’s insights all seem to corroborate and compliment the central tenets of his theory of evolution by natural selection, including the other major component of modern biological thought, genetics.

I agree with the American philosopher, Daniel Dennett, when he said:

“If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. But it is not just a wonderful idea. It is a dangerous idea.”

However, despite its near universal acceptance among the scientific community, Darwin’s dangerous idea continues to cause controversy. Copernicus and Galileo may have moved us from the centre of the universe to a small and peripheral body, circling a remote star. But Darwin has moved us from the centre of God’s creation to a tiny twig on an enormous tree of life, with all of the twigs connected by descent, and the entire tree growing by a natural and undirected process. Moreover, the tiny twig that is the human lineage has been around for only the briefest fraction of the time that life has been on earth.

Those of us who accept Darwin’s dangerous idea can find themselves in danger, too. Evolutionary theory is attacked by religious fundamentalists, because it undermines their cherished creation myths. And it is attacked by people concerned that, by embracing this scientific truth, we run the risk of losing long-held comforts: that humans are special, and uniquely so, and that there is some greater meaning in life than simply the here and now.

And also it has been attacked, it ought to be acknowledged, because the concept of evolution has been used and abused by the fascists and the eugenicists, who saw in it a scientific justification of their plans to ‘improve’ the human race, and to rank people within an ‘evolutionary league table’, with (rather like our contemporary league tables) with white, middle-classed Anglo-Saxons at the pinnacle. But ‘Social Darwinism’, as it used to be called, has simply appropriated a scientific name to bolster unscientific nonsense.

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Difficulty with accepting Darwinian evolution cannot be attributed to its complexity. Indeed, it must surely rate as the simplest of the great ideas in science. In fact, it can be whittled down to three key facts, followed by a logical inference:

FACTS
I. All organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive;
II. All organisms within a species vary from one another;
III. At least some of this variation is inherited by offspring
INFERENCE
Since only some offspring can survive, on average the survivors will be those variants that are better adapted to the local environment. And, since offspring will inherit the favourable variations of their parents, organisms of the next generation will, on average, become better adapted to local conditions.

So, perhaps, we can understand Thomas Huxley’s alarm when reading Darwin’s Origin of Species for the first time. He is reported to have said: “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that myself”.

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We are, whether we like it or not, primates. Genetically, anatomically and historically, we are very close relatives of the great apes. We share something of the order of 99% of the active genetic material of chimpanzees and bonobos (my favourite animal, aka the pygmy chimp), which a closer degree of relatedness than tigers to lions, or horses to zebras. Most of us, when we watch wildlife programmes or visit Howlett’s Zoo are happy to admit that we are like apes. We seldom realise that we are apes. Zoologically, there is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orang utans, but excludes humans.

In truth, not only are we apes, but we are African apes. If you do not exclude humans, this forms a natural category. So, perhaps the most accurate label for humans is ‘The Third Chimpanzee’.

We are also, in very many ways, very unlike apes, having created unprecedented knowledge, technology and forms of social organisation. We, alone, have created socialism and liberalism; art and literature; space shuttles and digital watches. Even so-called traditional hunter-gatherer societies are characterised by degrees of social and technological complexity that are entirely absent in the rest of the animal kingdom. These are novel features, and they set human life history on a unique path.

This path is as explicable as any other: all species are unique. The Homo sapiens species is a cultural animal. It may well be the cultural animal. But culture is a result of evolution just as much as eyes and ears. It is unique, unprecedented and unpredictable. But it is not magical.

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I was first introduced to Darwin’s delightful idea thanks to Richard Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene. It is, perhaps, noteworthy, that I was not introduced to it through school (and English children today are still deprived of an appropriate presentation in the National Curriculum).

Aside from Dawkins’ wonderfully clear explanations of the blind and purposeless processes of adaptation and selection, I was most struck by a passing comment in the introduction:

“The full implications of Darwin’s revolution have yet to be widely realised .. even those who choose to study it often make their decision without appreciating its profound philosophical significance. Philosophy and the subjects known as ‘humanities’ are still almost as if Darwin had never lived”. (1976, p. ix)

I suspect that this is still broadly the case. Although there has been a revolution in our understanding and acceptance of Darwinian theory in recent years, there continues to be large-scale resistance to evolutionary explanations of matters that are close to home for us humans. Many social scientists continue to believe that biological explanations are simply incapable of helping us to understand the richness and diversity of human existence. And, moreover, that they are just not very nice.

Perhaps there is a concern stated by Jerome Bruner: ‘Culture imposes revolutionary discontinuity between man and the rest of the animal kingdom. And it is this discontinuity that creates the difficulty in extrapolating directly from evolutionary biology to the human condition’.

But, without an evolutionary foundation, explanations of human development will inevitably be incomplete. This is because human science and its subject matter are Homo sapiens. The nature of this species ought to be of enormous relevance, indeed urgency, to those of us working in the human sciences.


Other posts, resources and information is available from: www.richardbailey.net

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