From The Elusive Obvious: The Convergence of Movement, Neuroplasticity and Health by Moshe Feldenkrais, published by North Atlantic Books; Reprint edition copyright © 2019. Reprinted by permission of publisher.

Many things are not obvious. Most psychotherapies use speech to get to unconscious, forgotten, early experience. Yet feelings go on in ourselves long before speech is learned. Some pay attention not to what is said but to how it is said. Doing this enables one to find the intentions behind the structure of the phrasing, so that one can get to the feelings that dictated the particular way of phrasing. In short, how one says what one does is at least as important as what one says.

Familiarity makes things, actions, and notions obvious. We are so familiar with speaking that everything about it seems obvious. Familiarity with our body makes most of our overall notions about it obvious. The same can be said about learning, thinking, dreaming, and about almost all the things we are familiar with. My contention is that speaking is not thinking, although we “obviously” consider them as the same thing. Most people have difficulty in admitting this to be correct. I would rather say that the obvious to us contains all our scientific ignorance, and it needs more fundamental under-standing and relearning than anything we think we know.

We know very little and often nothing about most obvious phenomena. How is it that a box of matches looks to us the same size and form at any distance or position where it is still recognizable? How do we swallow? Young children can think long before they can speak. Helen Keller could certainly think before she learned her own way of speaking. Animals often behave so that we believe they can think even though they cannot speak. Speech, and even more the written or printed word, has played a part of inestimable importance in our development as a species. Many believe that it is com-parable to our genetic endowment. Speech provides us with the information and the ability to do what other animals do instinctively. Human instincts are as weak as our bodies when compared with strong animals or even weak animals. Even so, thanks to speech we have available to us the experience of thinking. Our inheritance is so great—artistic creations, knowledge of our predecessors, immense cultural treasures in book form on mathematics, music, poetry, literature, history, sciences, geometry, anatomy, and medical writings in general, physics, and so many other disciplines, philosophy, linguistics, semantics—that we have difficulty in deciding whether homo sapiens is the product of his biological makeup alone or consists also of his intellectual endowment made available because of speech in its different forms.

Yet, I contend that in self- knowledge speech is a formidable obstacle. When it is used in all the various therapies avail-able to analyze people’s minds it takes years to disentangle what goes on in us to make us say what we say, which is being analyzed. In self-knowledge one cannot get at fundamentals without undoing the link between thought and speech. We were not born with thought and speech being indistinguishable. As we spend much time in learning to speak, unnoticed to ourselves, we have acquired the erroneous notion that speaking and thinking are synonymous. Words are symbols and not signs, as in mathematics. When I say, “I want” I may mean I desire, I need, or I lack. What do I think when I say “I want”? I believe that I am selecting from my thinking only one of several shades of meaning and that is the one that I wish to communicate to another thinking human. I discover a new shade, which is obvious to me, but speech is a means of communicating only one aspect of my thinking to somebody else. Therefore, unless I am very careful I may communicate an aspect of my thinking, which I never intended to communicate. Moreover, my interlocutor may understand another aspect of it, which I never intended although he clearly heard it. You can see how treacherous this ground can be! I say I want to be a writer, but on examining myself I find out that when I say “I want” I am only describing what I lack. I am not a writer—it is only a wishful thought or a desire—so to myself, as to my interlocutor, my speech is really not thinking but a vague symbol indicating a large domain or an assembly of notions which may even contain their negations.

Suffice to think what God, truth, justice, honesty, communism, fascism, and so on mean in different human societies to see that much of our trouble lies in the fact that we confuse speaking with thinking. Thinking is a much wider function which contains many forms of possible expression. Speech is a serial event, as words come one after the other in time and by their nature cannot communicate the thought which may contain an immense number of aspects. There is always more than one way of expressing a thought. Most irate discussions and differences between humans are due to confusing speaking with thinking. Nearly every delegate to a disarmament conference thinks that disarmament is desirable, otherwise there would be no conference. The thoughts are dressed in the garments of expression and what is said is so varied that nobody can recognize the thoughts in the speeches, as these thoughts may be so multiple as to necessitate several decades of pronouncements, speech being a serial event in time. It has always struck me as particularly incongruous that all the functions of the so many different constituents of the brain (corpus striatum, globus pallidus, the pituitary, amygdala, hypothalamus, thalamus, hippocampus, and the two different hemispheres) should not have more than one set of muscles to operate. Sure enough, muscles can do more than one kind of contraction; there are muscular tremors, clonic movement, spastic contractions, etc. But should there not be some kind of corresponding localization of functions in the body and in its muscles? The fact that only one set of muscles serves all the different parts of the brain gives me a clue to understanding the unity of the nervous system and the localization of the different functions. The movement of animals as well as man shows a parallel organization. In the body, fingers and toes serve differently from elbows and knees, shoulders and hip joints. For any use of fingers, be it playing the piano, counting banknotes, or writing, we must displace the entire skeleton with all its muscles to the piano, to the bank, or to the desk. Delicate movements need wrists, fingers, ankles, and toes but the entire musculature is involved in bringing the finer extremities to the place where they perform. The shoulders and the hips are necessary where more power is needed, and they are involved in transporting the body to the place where delicate fingers are necessary. Elbows and knees particularly are involved in all the skills of the human body. But again, the entire self must be transported to jump, and hands must hold the pole for the vault. Roughly speaking, there is a difference between holding the pole and the vault itself. Localization of movement now becomes a hazy, far-fetched division.

In the same way, counting money is not localized anywhere in the brain any more than the fingers themselves are money-counters. In every action the whole brain is active as surely as the whole body is involved. Obviously the brain, having transported the entire body to the piano, then has to use the auditory apparatus, the motor cortex for the fingers on the keys, the feet on the pedals, the extensors for sitting, and the head … and the “body” is used similarly.

The scheme would be of little interest were it not for the idea that as the body, in between any two activities whatsoever, must go through the upright standing configuration, so the brain too has a passing neutral configuration. It is the passage from one activity to the other that needs a cleaning of the slate, so to speak. Just as standing can be considered dynamic at a particular point in the process of moving, so the quiescence of the brain is necessary in passing from one activity to the other. I believe that cleaning the slate takes probably a few milliseconds and is, therefore, unnoticeable except when the switching is defective. Thus, I believe that ankle sprains and biting one’s tongue occur when two actions follow each other before the slate is completely clean. These failures occur when we start a new intent while the former is not yet completed. Therefore, the new intent starts before the slate is completely clean. We thus perform two incompatible actions simultaneously.

Think what can be said about a triangle, when the thinking contains all that I know about it and even what I may discover. My interest in this dilemma or problem is practical. I have to communicate something which may help a person who is in trouble, or wishes to change his aches and pains, or is born with a cerebral palsy organism, or has been injured, or has acquired body habits which are self-directed (feeling inadequate) and self-destructive (feeling unworthy). I wish to convey something which may help the person to reorganize the acting of his self through the body with self- direction to make life easier, simpler, or even more pleasant and aesthetically satisfying. It is useful at this juncture to make the point that free choice is closely related to thinking and is gone when spoken and communicated to somebody else or even said to oneself, thereby making the decision. Free choice means essentially choosing between alternatives. In thought, we choose one alternative and communicate it, although several other choices may have existed in our thinking before we decided to dress one of them in words.

In life, no alternative means anxiety and often compulsion. Walk along one board of the floor. You can probably do that and see little point in doing so again at my suggestion, as you are sure that your recovery from any slight errors of balance will be good enough. You have no doubt because you have the alternative to step sideways, correct your balance, and go back to walk on the board. Raise the board in your imagination to one foot and see yourself walking along it; raise it to some ten feet in your imagination; or better still, try a single board poised on two supports and you will see that the elimination of alternatives—in this case no side-stepping—increases anxiety sufficiently to paralyze thought, let alone performance. Your doubt regarding the possibility of recovering balance is well founded, because your ability to balance has never been learned to that degree of excellence. Nevertheless, it can be achieved and someone has walked on a cable from one roof of the World Trade Building to the roof of the next building.

I repeat again, the important issue is that no alternative means anxiety. Free choice means having at least another way. Free choice is meaningless when we are compelled to adopt the one and only way we know. Free choice means having an alternative mode of action available, so you can then choose the way you want most. To elect not to act is really no choice at all—it is not life.

An intentional voluntary movement, say with your hand along a trajectory, can be stopped, recontinued, reversed, or moved to do something else. A voluntary movement means free choice. A defensive, reflexive movement is of the all-or-nothing type; it is primitive and without intention. Such a movement is valid only in the face of danger and self-preservation, and when there is no time for choice. Then we either preserve ourselves or are maimed or perish altogether.

As I suggested above, the obvious is elusive. When we try to reach the main source of our thinking we come to depths where it is not easy to see if the elusive is more obvious than the obvious. Thus, it is possible to consider that free choice exists only in the process of thinking. As soon as the thought leads to an action, albeit only saying it, the die is cast, and the choice is gone forever. Obviously more inquiry and clearer thinking are essential to understand why nervous systems are needed in the world. What is consciousness needed for, and would not just being awake do the job? Regaining consciousness after having lost it usually starts with the question, “Where am I?” Is knowing where I am, and is general knowledge of self-direction, the conscious function of the nervous system? Would we understand the problem more fully if we knew in which part of the brain it is located?

Here we touch upon a very thorny problem. Localization of functions, say of speech or writing, in the brain has had so many successes that it is almost a heresy to cast any serious doubts on the correctness of the idea. Only a few consider function in large groups such as the hindbrain, the limbic system, and the forebrain. Nobody would seriously maintain that speech is a purely neocortical function located in the Broca area exclusively. However, elementary primitive muscular intentional movements are so located on the cortex that Penfield’s homunculus is pictured in most good books on neurophysiology in all languages. The idea is so successful that more and more precise localizations are discovered and confirmed by different laboratories.

Any act can be complexed almost at will. Think of driving a car while smoking, without neglecting your friend at your side, and at the same time listening and seeing all around the car. Caesar and Napoleon are said to have been able to read, listen, and write three letters simultaneously. Yet we cannot act and not act at the same time, which on the face of it is less complex than the complicated situation of driving the car. Is it that an act involves the whole brain as it involves the whole body? Negating an act is somehow similar to changing direction of a moving body. A break, a zero velocity, is necessary in between switching from one to the other.

It may be wiser to stop here before sinking into even deeper waters, and speculate on a quantum of thinking and other functions of the brain. After all, it is a useful way to under-standing most phenomena of energy and its materialization.

Excerpted from The Elusive Obvious by Moshe Feldenkrais (April 23, 2019).