“The space around your body out to arms length – what neuroscientists call peripersonal space – is part of you. This is not a metaphor, but a recently discovered physiological fact. Your brain annexes this space to your limbs and body, clothing you in it like an extended, ghostly skin.”

Sandra Blakeslee and her son Matthew have collected the research of leading edge scientists of our times in their book The Body Has A Mind Of Its Own – How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better.

Science now recognizes our self does not end where your skin ends, but suffuses and blends with the world, including other beings. That’s a big breakthrough for scientists but is common knowledge through personal experience and tuned awareness for many non-scientists, especially in the natural health care field.

When you ride a horse with confidence and skill, your body maps and the horse’s body maps are blended in shared space. In your own brain the horse is a part of you. Your brain’s map of your body has expanded to include the horse you are riding so you function together as one body.

Modern equipment can map what your brain registers as you. Your brain faithfully maps your physical structure and also the space beyond your body when you use tools. Hold a walking stick and as far as your brain is concerned, your hand now extends to the tip of that stick. Its length has been incorporated into your personal space. If you were blind, you could feel your way down the street using that walking stick as if your hand was touching the pavement to guide your every step.

The map of your body space is not static. It expands when you put on your coat and shrinks when you take it off. It includes your car when you are behind the wheel driving down the road and is why you can gauge the distance from the curb or a passing car or the how close to travel behind the car in front of you. You don’t logically measure the distance, or rely on visuals alone.

You feel or sense the distance between your self, that means your extended self when in a car, with space to spare so you don’t collide or brush when passing. We engage this awareness when walking through a busy shopping mall and pushing our shopping trolley in front of us.

Your brain has many “maps” of you. Every point on your body, each internal organ and every point in space out to the end of your fingertips is mapped inside your brain. Your ability to sense, move, and act in the physical world arises from a rich network of flexible body maps distributed throughout your brain – maps that grow, shrink, and morph to suit your needs.

When learning a new physical skill your motor map changes, new connections sprout between cells and existing ones strengthen. This process is called plasticity.

Alvaro Pascual-Leone is a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Centre for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He says, “The brain changes with anything you do, including any thoughts you might have.”

He ran an experiment with volunteers who didn’t play a musical instrument and had never learned to type either. He taught them a five-finger exercise on a piano keyboard connected to a computer and used a metronome to set the pace. The participants practiced for two hours every day for one week.

By the end of one week the muscle map in the brain for each finger had increased. That to me is amazingly fast. Plastic remapping like this occurs when you learn or improve any physical skill.

He had half the group continue to practice for the next four weeks and half stop practicing. In the non-practicing group the finger maps returned to pre-practice size in one week. This brings home the old adage of use it or lose it.

The interesting thing was that the practicing group’s enlarged finger maps also shrank over four weeks even though their performance continued to improve.

Seems a consolidation occurs as your skill level improves, becoming better integrated into your brain’s body maps basic circuitry. With continuing practice you are no longer a novice but have become proficient and can perform automatically without great conscious effort. Your skill is now hard wired and a fundamental part of your being.

All forms of learning create increased new circuitry in the early stages and as the learning advances and mastery develops less circuitry is required to apply the skill and the necessary circuitry is now hard wired. When adding to an existing skill, the original circuitry is reinforced, new circuitry is added in early stages and then pruned once the skill is mastered.

This is how we “grow into ourselves”, extend our ability, develop our potential. It seems there is no limit to how many times we can do this process of growing new circuitry, then consolidating and pruning what is no longer needed once mastered.

The brain registers there are no existing networks for something we are trying to do. But as we make that extra effort, copy what others are doing easily, follow their lead, are guided by their instructions, read, think, process, put into action as we learn, our brain grows extra links to develop multiple options, works out the most efficient ones, then discards the others.

This brain mapping of the new learning reinforces stages of learning:
– Don’t know what we don’t know – Unconscious incompetence
– Do know what we dont know – Conscious incompetence
– Focus and learn till we do know – Conscious competence
– Know and apply without focus – Unconscious competence

We are indeed amazing in our ability to learn and grow physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. It can be tough going at first but with persistence we can get to mastery. Now science is telling us how we do that. Our brain is designed so we can choose to keep growing all our lives.

Happy learning.
Cheers
Anna McRobert
anna@annamcrobert.com.au