What is sensory motor amnesia
What exactly is sensory-motor amnesia and how can I improve this?
Sensory-motor amnesia is a neurological event in the brain, not a structural problem in the muscles. With sensory-motor amnesia, the brain’s inability to send nerve impulses to the muscles, combined with disuse of muscles, leads to an impairment of muscle function and subsequent loss of motoneurons.
The good news is that humans are self-aware beings, capable of learning and increasing our awareness.
The remedy for sensory-motor amnesia is re-education of the voluntary cortex through somatic education.
Achieving relaxation of chronically contracted muscles requires that:
new sensory information be introduced into the sensory-motor system through awareness and noticing; and
motor neurons re-learn to voluntarily exert full control over the musculature.
That sounds good, but what exactly is somatic education?
It all comes down to patterns. We (humans) have learned patterns of movement. Unlike animals, we don’t have fixed movement patterns. (In other words, movement is hard-wired in animals - they are born already knowing how to move, whereas we learn to move from our parents or the adult or adults who raise us.)
The point is, we learned to move like this. If we have inefficiencies in how to move or hold ourselves, we need to re-learn. That is where somatic education comes in.
Have you ever tried to break a bad habit? The thing about habits is we can’t just toss what we don’t like. We have to replace bad habits with good ones.
That’s absolutely true of how we move. We can’t stop moving or holding our bodies in space. We have to learn patterns that are easier and more efficient, and unlearn patterns that are painful and inefficient.
While somatic education is not offered everywhere, there are many practitioners around the world who teach online and in person.