Coming in November, Ipswich QSD Australia:

PHASE 5

Play, As If

Body Schema

Hauntology

Reciprocity

Trauma-Informed Care

Luck

     Antigonish

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there!
He wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish he'd go away!

When I came home last night at three,
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall,
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door... (slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away....

William Hughes Mearns

Phases are different perspectives, different ways of looking at the body/person.

When shall we open our minds to the conviction that the ultimate reality of the world

is neither matter nor spirit, is no definite thing, but a perspective?"     

                                                                                               --José Ortega y Gasset

You can always come up with other ways of looking at things. That's what the Phases gives us, different ways to approach the Body, different portals, different perspectives.

Play -- The As-If Body

Play is Phase 2 of Ortho-Bionomy as described by Arthur Pauls (Philosophy and History of Ortho-Bionomy), and Phase 5 of orthobionomy (that is, my version of Ortho-Bionomy, not necessarily the official version) can be thought of as playing with the As-If body. Doing orthobionomy should be fun and learning should be fun. Serious Fun.

The Body Schema

Body Image is your conscious perception of your body. But underneath your awareness, your brain keeps an operational map of your entire body: its position, its pressure, its boundaries, its threat level; this map is called your Body Schema.

Before the flesh moves intentionally, the movement is emulated in the body schema, the as-if body. We have a biological susceptibility to the as-if.

Hauntology

(not Ontology)

The word was coined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In French the word sounds exactly like ontology, the study of being, existence, and reality. The pun is fully intended. Hautology looks at "things" that are there and not there, having a spectral existence. It is an "as if" kind of being. This has much to do with how the Body Schema functions.

Reciprocity

Most simply defined, reciprocity is a practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit. Mutualism is a related term. 

While theories of evolution have constrained our thinking to focus on competition and "survival of the fittest, there has been another, possibly more important force at work. In the latter part of the 20th century, some biologists, most notably Lynn Margulis, began shifting the focus to the role of reciprocity and mutualism. Earlier still, the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss published in 1925 The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Mauss brought to the fore the role of reciprocity in human relations. This essay continues to resonate deeply.

Reciprocity is a foundational principle of orthobionomy, to the extent that care of the self and care of the other are the same action. The individual body does not exist separate from the social body.

Who is leading, who is following? Meeting in the metaphysical middle.

Trauma

Trauma is a kind of haunting, haunted by the past, haunted by a future different from what was expected. Ortho-Bionomy as exorcism.

Luck –– Chance –– Randomness

Phase 3 of Ortho-Bionomy, a la Arthur Pauls. Play with what shows up.

Introduction

That wily old alchemist and polymath, Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727), the inventor of such things as gravity, calculus, and the laws of motion, looked also into the light and found in it all the colors of the rainbow. We see the rainbow as an array of seven colors, which we name, from top to bottom: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. This is the palette with which we paint the world.

Color perception is a biopsychosocial event. Biologically, just three cone cells in the eye are responsible for all the colors we see: L cones (red), M cones (green L cones (red), M cones (green), and S cones (blue). Some humans (mostly men) have fewer, most commonly lacking red or green; many animals have more; birds, bees, and butterflies have four. The record (so far) goes to the mantis shrimp with twelve to sixteen.

We cannot in any way imagine colors beyond the rainbow; our imaginations are constrained by our biology. Add the impact of your personal history and then your social setting, how you are expected to see things, and that is perception. What color is the dress?

Sensing versus Perceiving 

Reviewing in very simple terms some basic A&P that often gets overlooked and is very relevant to orthobionomy

Most simply put, sensing is a biological phenomenon and perception is biopsychosocial.

We have two kinds of neurons: sensory neurons convey information to the brain (afferent), and motor neurons convey information (commands?) from the brain (efferent). We have a wide array of sensory organelles (a tiny part inside a cell that does a specific job). Sensory receptors are grouped by where they get their signals; exteroceptors detect the outside world, interoceptors track internal organs, and proprioceptors measure body position.

Special senses are the human senses that have dedicated, complex sense organs located in the head. They include vision, hearing, equilibrium, smell, and taste. These contrast with general senses, like touch, which are spread all over the body. Pain reception (nociception) is often included, though recent research on pain disputes this, as the sense of pain is created in the brain (Rachel Zoffness PhD, Tell Me Where It Hurts). What we think of as the sense of touch involves at least six different kinds of receptors. If you want to get deeper into the anatomical and biochemical weeds of the subject I would recommend a text such as Biology of Sensory Systems by C.U.M. Smith.

For our purposes, the salient point is that approximately 99.9996% of human sensory input happens in background (unconscious) processing. The human nervous system takes in roughly 11 million bits of sensory information per second, but the conscious mind can only process about 40 to 50 bits per second. The body responds, but the conscious mind is usually completely unaware of what it is actually responding to. 

This is particularly important in what I call sociception (a non-standard term). We are social animals, and our bodies are fine-tuned to sense the state of those around us and our relationships. We are wired to respond without knowing what we are responding to, subtle changes in expression, skin coloration, vocal tone, postures, positioning, etc. With mechanisms known and yet to be elucidated (mirror neurons come to mind, our bodies know, to some extent, the intentions of those around us.

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