My Visit to Kyoto University's Human Posture Lab

In May 2007 I was sitting on a plane on my way to New York. One of the highlights of my visit was to ask advice from Lucy L. Brown Ph.D. at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, on our BodyData project in BodyChance at the time.*

As preparation for our meeting, I was brushing up on her Alexander orientated speculations by re-reading her Paper on Sensory-Motor Contagion† from the first Lugano Conference in Switzerland.

As luck would have it, a young Japanese man sitting in the next seat was also absorbed in scientific literature. I couldn’t resist the temptation to ask him what he was the topic of his paper. “Nutrition” was his simple answer, then he politely enquired about mine.

Five hours later, we had scheduled a visit to the Kyoto University’s Human Posture Laboratory where he was working on his post-graduate degree. He was within a section of the University’s multi-disciplinary Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies.

As is often the case with neuro-scientists, he had never heard of Alexander's discovery. After 5 hours with me, he was both fascinated and sceptical, and suggested a visit to his lab to put it to the test.

The equipment at the Lab was straight out of Frank Pierce Jones own experimental set-up: a force platform in front of a chair, with a high speed camera pointing at it, and a bevy of computational power to record, analysis and produce results to tickle the imagination and cause more research.

Yamada-san had gathered together a group of post-graduate students to watch me give a Frank Pierce Jones-like demonstration of “unassisted” and “assisted” sitting and standing.

I did a particularly good “assisted” rise out of the chair – which was caught by the high-speed camera - and the geek of the group quickly pecked away on the computer until he had a slow motion view of both the assisted and unassisted standing displaying simultaneously on one screen...

The was a long, dumbfounded silence as they viewed – again and again – the footage of their friend rising from a chair. They knew it was different, but for the life of them they could articulate what they were seeing.

They had no idea of Alexander's discovery, therefore they did not see what caused the change.

Fascinating. I then started to point out why the two images were different, and they immediately began to see it. This led to many spirited discussions.

One of the scientists told me that the key issue they had in the laboratory at this time was finding a calibrating concept for all the metrics they were collecting. He explained that they could not find any quantifiable means to assess whether a movement is efficient or not for its purpose.

Part of their dilemma stemmed from how they got their funding.

With the agification of the baby boomers, the Japanese government was willing to plough substantial funds into research on the elderly. On the flip side, the leader of the Lab at the time – Professor Oda Shingo – had previously been an athlete at a National level. He was able to attract funding exploring high performance athletes and sportsman.

Through this funding arrangement, the laboratory had inherited two diametrically opposed study groups – sportsman who could perform staggering feats of co-ordination, alongside an aging group who often had trouble just standing upright. The scientists were befuddled by this arrangement – they had collected vast amounts of data on multiple metrics for each group – metabolic rate, demographic data, medical history, heart rate, blood pressure etc. – and yet they had no way of correlating the data to arrive at any meaningful conclusions.

How do you compare an athlete’s metrics to an old person’s metrics?

With these two disparate groups – how could they determine meaningful KPIs (Key Performance Index) that would be applicable and relevant to both groups?

This was their puzzle, and they had not progressed far in answering this fundamental question. In a sense, they had no underlying theory about what constitutes optimal performance, against which the data could be compared and calibrated.

I immediately intuited that Alexander's discovery was a way out of this conundrum. When the relationship to head and spine is recorded as a key reference point against the other metrics, you could start arriving at some meaningful conclusion. It would start to make sense of the data.

The working condition of the head/spine relationship offers a reliable, unbiased metric by which you can calibrate other metrics collected within the same timeline.

Anecdotally, teachers of Alexander's discovery know this to be true.

Just yesterday I had a clear example of this in action. I worked with an 18 year old piano player who wondered why he could not make the sound he imagined as clearly as he wished. He was already highly skilled, and puzzled.

Pretty esoteric and abstract you’d think, right?

Except, at critical moments, in order to ‘feel’ the music, he would use his head to increase the curves of his spine – something easily captured by a high speed camera – and this involved an increase in muscular effort, in turn increasing the rigidity of the co-co-ordination of his arms and hands. At the precise moment he needed them most, he was compromising the optimal efficiency of his fingers in a misguided attempt to ‘feel’ what he was playing.

Obvious to us, puzzling to scientists with no direct experience of this phenonomen.

As I encouraged a head/spinal plan to replace this unnecessary effort to ‘feel’ his music, the sound that flowed from his piano was profoundly different – moving towards the quality he had originally imagined. Of course he was both delighted and mystified, as people often are when they first encounter this work.

I explained some of my teaching stories to these young men, in an effort to help them grasp how this overriding insight into human movement worked out in practice…

One of the more inquisitive and challenging of the group, finally sat back in his chair, looked at me with a quizzical and incredulous look and said:

“As a person I am utterly fascinated and intrigued by what you are saying. However, as a scientist, I remain utterly sceptical.”

And there you have it folks.

To bring home the bacon and situate Alexander's discovery in its rightful place, decades of rigorous research stretch out in front of us. One day Alexander’s work will stand as one of the most profound and far reaching discoveries of the 19th century.

Until then, our job is to touch as many people as we can by creating sustainable teaching practices that subversively re-engineer the thinking that guides the activities that people love to do. Join me in this exciting mission by signing up below to find out exactly how you can do that!

*We have since abandoned BodyChance’s foray into data collection. All the of the data we collected over a 4 year period – tracking 7 different metrics on the progress of our trainees - was deemed useless by the academic experts I consulted. The standards we needed to attain left me with a renewed respect and awe of the rigorous requirements necessary for meaningful scientific research.

†Read more about my thoughts on Lucy Brown’s paper here.