Motor Memory Consolidation

[Servaas]

like to cruise Robert Schleip's website now and again.. he always has a new article or two up. Found this tidbit just this morning, although it was first published in '97:
Quote: Respecting Motor Memory Consolidation

- Research News for Movement Teachers

Posted in the email forum ‚FELDigest’ 1997, by Robert Schleip

For those of us interested in how to best change everyday movement (and postural) habits:
Researchers at the MIT have published several studies in the last 18 months on "motor memory consolidation". :

„Learning a motor skill sets in motion neural processes that continue to evolve after practice has ended, a phenomenon known as consolidation. Here we present the psychophysical evidence for this, and show that consolidation of a motor skill was disrupted when a second task was learned immediately after the first. There was no disruption if four hours had elapsed between learning the two motor skills, with consolidation occuring gradually over this period.“.

(Nature 1996 Jul 18;382(6588):252-255)

Recent studies with functional imaging of the brain have shown that when someone (our client!) learns a new movement pattern this is first stored in the prefrontal areas of the cortex. In the following 6 hours this is shifted to more dorsal areas (premotor, posterior parietal, and cerebellar structures) for consolidation, which is then associated with an increased functional stability.

(Science, 1997 Aug 8, pp.821-825).

Possible consequence:

to learn a tennis "forehand" on 1 day, and the "backhand" on the next day - and NOT on the same day in order to avoid erasing the consolidation process of the first skill.

For professional movement education trainings (like Feldenkrais, Rolfing Movement, etc.): not to focus on any other movement skill for at least 4 hours after one has just learned some valuable details on one type of movement (e.g. trunk rotation, or spinal extension, etc.).

For somatic practitioenrs who combine structural and functional work: Maybe this new line of research speaks for integrating movement education elements into a structural sessions, rather than practicing pure movement sessions. Then it is much easier to give the client just ONE NEW THING to focus on at the end of the session. Whereas if we do a 60 minute pure movement session, the chance is probably higher that we give more than one thing at a time, and thereby interfere with this consolidation process in the brain.Schleip's site is www.somatics.de (http://www.somatics.de/)

Hi Diane,

Thabks for bringing this up! It is good stuff.

My question always is:
What about movement patterns that are already in your system but have forgotten to move ? The ones that are on your hard disc ?

Hitting a tennis ball can be seen as a new movement, but lying on the floor and rotating your spine in a similar manner as the onset of rolling from supine to prone is an organic movement.

What do you think of that ?

In other words:
yes, indeed, sometimes I focus on certain dimensions of movement and yes, sometimes I work many different dimensions of movement.

Years ago, when I just started out with somatics, I sometimes had clients that felt sore and stiff when they came off the table. i realized I only had worked one dimension of movement with them. From there on I always integrate all diimensions in the session, even if it only takes 2 minutes. The result: that pain and stiffness hasn't happened at all.

Full organic patterns of movement necessary for walking are a combination of them all.

Would be great to do more research !

Servaas Mes
www.somatichealthcenter.com (http://www.somatichealthcenter.com)

[emad]

Hi Diane:

Interesting thread &Topic .

If thus right ,to learn certain motor skill we have to give our brain chance to memorize it , thus will change our thinking /manner of work.

cheers
emad

[Diane]

Hi there,
Servaas, you made a number of points:
My question always is:
What about movement patterns that are already in your system but have forgotten to move ? The ones that are on your hard disc ?

Hmmnn.. true that there are movement patterns already in the hard drive.. But I wonder if they go offline because culture intervenes and has us stop using the muscles and making the movements that would otherwise be able to keep "refreshing the homonculi" (as David puts it..)?

The other point about that, is, what about the fact that we don't get fully developed frontal lobes until we are 25 or whatever? If we don't take the time to "reboot" our movement programs from time to time, and run them past all the new brain that is growing all those years, would those patterns not be simply buried under whatever patterns the culture we grow up in deems to be proper "adult" patterns?

I think that a human is a process through time and space. Just as many movement modules (eg: fish locomotion ) are still in our brains, just buried by our genotypes, I'm sure that our babyhood movement modules get equally buried by our phenotypes.

Hitting a tennis ball can be seen as a new movement, but lying on the floor and rotating your spine in a similar manner as the onset of rolling from supine to prone is an organic movement. Probably there is something "more familiar" somehow about an organic human movement, regardless of how buried it may be, true.. but to a pair of frontal lobes, parts of which may have never experienced the "sensation" of rolling from supine to prone in an "organic" (from the core) sort of way, it will likely be just as hard to learn as tennis moves. Except for physically talented people among us perhaps. Like athletes.

In other words:
yes, indeed, sometimes I focus on certain dimensions of movement and yes, sometimes I work many different dimensions of movement.

Years ago, when I just started out with somatics, I sometimes had clients that felt sore and stiff when they came off the table. i realized I only had worked one dimension of movement with them. From there on I always integrate all diimensions in the session, even if it only takes 2 minutes. The result: that pain and stiffness hasn't happened at all. By "dimensions", Servaas, do you mean spatial dimensions? I must admit to having had a strange and unfamiliar sort of back pain temporarily that came on a few days after the somatics workshop, nothing debilitating, just a sore back which I put down to the unfamiliarity of it...exercise type pain. It went away and hasn't come back, and I've not had it again.. continue to do exercises everyday..

Full organic patterns of movement necessary for walking are a combination of them all.

Would be great to do more research !

Ditto that!

Emad said If thus right ,to learn certain motor skill we have to give our brain chance to memorize it , thus will change our thinking /manner of work. Yes, and not try to do too much in one session!

Cheers,
Diane

[nari]

This rather rings a loud bell about the practice of flogging the patient with questions, information, exercise sheets, expectations - and then wonder sometimes why they are not compliant; simply because the input is flopping about on a floppy disc that has not an association with the HD.

(Despite the fact that the brain is NOT a computer, there are some useful analogies)

Interesting points, Diane - then the issue of implicit and explicit memory arises, and that is a another complexity!


nari

[Diane]

Hi Nari,
then the issue of implicit and explicit memory arises, and that is a another complexity!

Ooooh....say more about that please!
Diane

[bernard]

Just to links =>

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15054127
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=14761660

[nari]

Diane -

I must have had a busy week- I replied to your post asking about implicit/explicit memory in the wrong thread......the reply is sitting in the right brain/left brain thread under Gen Discussion.
I don't know how I did that! :oops:


nari

[Diane]

Nari, I've copied/pasted your reply (under right brain/left brain in general discussion) to here.
Posted: Fri Jun 25, 2004 11:15 am:
It is thought all animals have two types of memory - implicit and explicit.

Implicit memory is involved with successful performance of a task without reliance on conscious recollection; it's also called procedural memory. If you rode a bike at 11 years of age, and did not go near one until 20 years later, you could still ride one. Amnesiacs rely on their implicit memory to enable them to learn, even though they cannot recall the episodes of learning. Subliminal advertising sneaks into the brain this way without awareness of it.

Explicit memory requires conscious and often difficult recollection of a previous experience. There is awareness of having learnt something in the past but retrieval is a battle! Like sitting down to an exam paper...or trying to remember Aunt Annie's 2nd cousin's name.

With brain injury, implicit memory seems to be less affected than explicit.
I remember a 15 year old whose hippocampus was severely damaged, and his short term memory was almost non-existent, yet he returned to school and was successful, provided he checked his diary every ten minutes to recall what was to happen next. His implicit memory (mostly temporal lobe stuff) enabled him to learn without knowing he could learn.
His left brain was OK, so he had speech and cognition largely intact.

Animals survive the way they do with enormous reliance on implicit memory, then explicit develops as they grow and acquire skills. Or that is one theory I know of- I am no expert!!

Nari
Thanks for your extrapolation on this! It DOES add a whole other layer to the discussion, for me anyway.. Where do you think infant movements belong?

I'm starting to think they might be "explicit" memories: the infant has used them as bridging to get to whatever object it has an eye on, part of its rapidly unfolding brain, but they are easily degraded/overwhelmed /replaced by desired/culturally reinforced adult movements .. shortcuts. The infant builds on them but "forgets" them
1. as their little bodies change/inrease in weight and bulk, and as their centers of gravity shift downward...
2. as the world around continues to be fascinating/attention grabbing
3. as they are no longer "needed" to gain control of the environment.. appendicular movments gain favor and space on the 'hard drive.'

Animals grow up very fast, (sexually mature within months or under a year, most of them..) and don't bother to grow the great big cap over their reflexes that we do, called the neocortex. Seems to me that they would have a greater shot therefore than we do at
1. retaining their infant/organic movements as implicit memories
2. practicing them into adulthood (cultural inhibition missing)
3. transferring them into adult level survival skills (hunting/ reproducing/ child care/ defence etc. )

Not to say that humans don't have our own strategies for recall, like making these movements part of a cultural fabric and retracing them, relearning them as adults in a new context, (e.g. somatics classes!) for health/increased function level reasons! :) Just that we have to strain ourselves and our motor learning through such a large set of frontal lobes! (They get in the way sometimes!)

What do you think Servaas? I have heard you refer to the somatics movements as innate. Would you say they are explicit as opposed to implicit?
Cheers,
Diane

[bernard]

Nari, as a moderator, you can move a reply, edit, delete...
I dit it for you.

Diane,
Hope I have a bit time to reply, here. I emailed Robert by the way.

[Jon Newman]

For more on implicit motor learning, read here (http://www.somasimple.com/forums/showthread.php?p=49666#post49666)