Review: Jones: Collected Papers

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Alexander Technique Review 8.20.11

Reviews

Frank P. Jones* + Theodore Dimon* + Richard Brown (eds.)

Collected Writings on the Alexander Technique

1999 pb, 376+xx pages, illustrated, USA: Alexander Technique Archives.

In print: Mouritz.

1. Review by T. D. M. Roberts

2. Review by Jonathan Drake

1. Review by T. D. M. Roberts

An abbreviated edition of this review was first published in The Alexander Journal no. 17, 2001.

This book is a collection of 40 short papers by a classicist turned scientist who had been a pupil of both the Alexander brothers, A.R, and F.M. The set is described as “the most comprehensive scientific body of research on the Alexander Technique to date”. In assessing this claim it is necessary to have regard to the significance of the word “scientific”. In my own claim to have pursued a scientific career, I have taken it that the contribution of the scientist to society is to formulate explanatory descriptions of the state of affairs in such a form that they have predictive value. In this interpretation, most of the great collectors and classifiers of the last century have to be regarded, not as scientists as is often the case, but as “natural historians”. This is not in any way to denigrate the role or status of natural history, but merely to characterise an important difference in function, as between the natural historian and the scientist, the two roles not being mutually exclusive. In each case precise mensuration plays an important part, raising the crucial matter of the choice of what to measure. For the naturalist, mensuration reveals the range of natural variation and contributes to decisions as to classification. For the scientist, on the other hand, mensuration forms part of the process of challenging preliminary versions of a prediction and helps to sort out useful predictions from fantasy.

Frank Pierce Jones applies mensuration to various movements of humans with or without the application of the Alexander Technique. This is a laudable endeavour in that it is not easy to decide which measures will reveal the details that one wishes to investigate. The recording medium favoured by Jones is multiple image photography with markers on various parts of the subject’s body in the form of small lamps or of reflective tape illuminated by flashes. Clear distinctions are revealed in the details of how such everyday tasks such as sitting down in a chair or rising from sitting to standing are performed by men or by women.

There are clear differences to be seen attributable to the signals conveyed to the subject by the Alexander teacher’s hands. The figures intended to illustrate these results are, unfortunately, rather poorly printed. Either the lettering referred to in the text is buried in the general overexposure of the photographs or, in the case of line diagrams, the essential lettering is much too small to be read. While on the subject of book production, I am astonished to see that, in a work attributed to a respected classical scholar, a well-known quotation from Ovid’s “Medea” (printed as “Media”) is repeated in full three times within a very few pages, each time with a different misprint.

The earlier papers in this collection are dominated by discussions of the role played in the subject’s behaviour by Sherringtonian reflexes and the postural studies of Magnus and deKleyn. This is an attempt to explain how the changes in behaviour attributable to the Alexander treatments might be brought about. Much of this material is of historical interest only. The relation between reflexes and voluntary behaviour is seriously misunderstood and the postural scheme put forward by Magnus and relied on here is now known to be invalid.

Sherrington had been struck by the fact that certain responses, such as the withdrawal reflexes, can be elicited in animals whose central nervous system had been very severely damaged, as by separation of the brain from the spinal cord. His detailed studies revealed that, although some part of the CNS was involved in generating the responses in which he was interested, the amount of CNS actually required could, in some cases, be restricted to only a few segments of spinal cord. He proposed a separate category, to be named “reflexes”, for responses of this special type. Although some part of the CNS was found to be necessary, it was clear that, in such severely reduced preparations, there could be no question of the involvement of consciousness or of the will.

Sherrington set out the principle that a “reflex involved several elements arranged in what he called a “reflex arc”, The starting point is a sense organ or sensory system that distinguishes an environmental change that is appropriate (the “adequate stimulus situation” ) to the generation of a specific reflex response ; messages are passed from the peripheral sensor, along “sensory nerves”, to a “reflex centre” inside the CNS, from which other messages are reflected back, along “motor nerves”, to the periphery, where they initiate activity in effector structures. These may be muscles or glands. An essential feature of the scheme is the need for a message transfer process connecting the relevant sensory and motor nerve-fibres. Sherrington coined the word “synapse” for the site of such transfers, necessarily within the CNS.

There are thus several features that must be present before a particular response is properly categorised as “reflex”. The usefulness of the concept is seriously undermined if this principle is ignored. A consequence of the involvement of the neuronal arc is that there is an irreducible delay between stimulus and response occasioned by the finite speed of nerve impulses and the time occupied by the complex processes of transmission from cell to cell.

It had been known for some time that normal balancing behaviour is dependent on the integrity of certain parts of the central nervous system, namely those associated with the labyrinth in the inner ear. Magnus attempted to isolate the influence of the Labyrinth by tilting the whole of the decerebrate animal, head and trunk together. The results, as he described them, would not have a stabilising function, since similar effects were seen in all four limbs in response to a tilt of the head in any direction. His work has been repeated, with different results, each of the four limbs extending or flexing according to which way the skull is tilted. The combined effect, as now described, is stabilising. If the trunk is held in a particular attitude while the head is tilted, as is the most usual situation, effects from the neck come into play. The “neck reflexes”, as described by de Kleyn, have been confirmed, the effect of the interaction between effects due to the tilt of labyrinth and effects due to changes in the neck is to produce stabilisation of the trunk rather than of the head. It has been suggested that the result Magnus described may have been attributable to accidental damage to the cerebellum during the decerebration procedure which he used.

The responses in the limbs attributable to the combined influences from the neck and from the labyrinth, consequent on the motion or position of the skull, if mediated entirely by reflexes, would inevitably be affected by reflex delays. An even faster mechanism for response generation is required to produce the very effective and smooth stabilisation seen in man and other animals.

Such a mechanism is to be found in the recently discovered “anticipatory pre-emptive actions”. The idea behind this concept is that since our sense organs provide information, not only about the structure of our environment but also about movement, such information may be used to construct expectations and predictions about what is going to happen in the immediate future. Appropriate patterns of motor activity can be formulated to reduce the risk of an anticipated but undesirable condition. One’s sensory system may thus detect an imminence of overbalancing and one’s voluntary motor response can be the prompt production of a fall-breaking movement of some sort, which, if quick enough, may suffice to eliminate the risk of overbalancing, at any rate for the moment. Incidents of this kind are common, so that the details and timing of the responses can be polished by repeated adjustment, a fine-tuning not available for innate reflexes. The learned reactions soon become habitual as we cease to pay attention to the signals that elicit them.

It would not be fair to criticise Pierce Jones for failing to take account of these recent views on reflexes and the like. He could be expected only to make the best use he could of the ideas current in his day, and to rely on a scheme of reflexes for the maintenance of balance. It is a pity, however, that he does not seem to have progressed from simple observations to genuine inquiry. He deploys some ingenuity in exploring various techniques for recording movements but what are we to do with his results? For example, in his interesting contribution to observations on the startle reaction, his electromyograph records do not indicate the n ioment of the startle stimulus We cannot therefore distinguish whether the recorded activity is related directly to the observed head movement, as Pierce Jones suggests, or alternatively whether it is a stretch reflex response following a forward falling of the head when all antigravity activity is suddenly interrupted in response to the stimulus. As a basis for arguing for the latter view is the observation that, in the horse, one hears the hooves striking the ground after the startle, as the anti-gravity thrusts in the legs are resumed after the sudden drop of the c of g consequent on their earlier inhibition.

He even lets us down over what it is that the teacher of the Alexander Technique actually does. When his text leads one to expect some detail of this fascinating topic, he retreats into what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the treatment and we are left to guess at the contribution provided by the teacher. For example, on page 6 he says “the difficulty of describing Alexander’s work lies in the fact that mastery of the technique brings with it a change in sensory appreciation and makes possible continuously new experiences in the use of the self. A new experience, however, can never be conveyed to another by words alone”. (Are we to take this passage as referring to the teacher or to his client?) Again, a little further on, “the control of the self which Alexander teaches is based upon a true understanding of how the human organism functions as a whole”. - stated this baldly and isolated from its context, this strikes me as a preposterously unrealistic claim.

In place of a requirement for “a true understanding of how the human organism functions as a whole”, I can offer a more down-to-earth view of what the Alexander teacher is up to, based on a few personal demonstrations on myself by Walter Carrington, spaced out over a good number of years, together with much discussion.

We are normally able to avoid falling over, even when moving about, and this seems so easy that most of us never give it a thought. Close study reveals, however, that the actual neural machinery needed to make this possible is of mind-boggling complexity. The first requirement is a mechanism to recognise, from the sensory messages from many parts of the body, that the changes in these messages indicate the imminence of overbalancing in a particular direction and at a particular speed. It is also necessary to determine how rapidly the point of application of the resultant thrust against the supports is approaching the perimeter of the available area of support. Then an appropriate pattern of motor control has to be formulated and put into action to develop a new thrust against the available supports appropriate in magnitude, in direction and in point of application to arrest and reverse the momentum that is developing in the undesired direction.

If locomotion is called for, rather than just stability in a particular posture, the body has first to be allowed, or encouraged, to topple a little in the direction of the proposed motion. Then a delayed and enhanced rescue thrust throws the body upwards and forwards for the initial step, during which the weight is borne entirely on one leg while the other is swung forwards ready for a delayed catching pattern at touch-down. Variations in the intensity of the throwing and catching thrusts are used to produce alternating multiple steps as well as the different locomotor patterns.

It may readily be observed that, when attempting to balance a tall object on a small base, the horizontal force needed falls off very substantially as the point of balance is approached. Indeed, the balance point itself is an unstable situation, calling for very prompt correcting forces to intervene in the appropriate but

unpredictable direction whenever toppling starts. For the human body, with its large number of irregularly shaped bones, precise balance without muscular activity is not physically achievable since this demands that the vertical thrust line pass successively through all the contact areas between the various bones that are piled on top of one another. In practice we rely on muscular activity to keep the structure from collapsing. The amount of effort exerted by each of the muscles involved is dependent on the posture adopted for the body as a whole.

What the Alexander teacher does is, by the very gentle contact of his hands, to suggest to the subject that he adjust his posture slightly, and in various places, until the degree of effort noticeably diminishes. The subject is also encouraged to make himself aware of the proprioceptive sensations associated with his adjustments. Such sensations do not normally rise to consciousness but can do so if we pay particular attention. With practice, we can become more and more aware of our proprioceptive sensations and can learn to modify our habitual strategy for supporting our weight until we acquire that lightness and feeling of ease that are therapeutically so valuable. The muscular activity by which we maintain whatever posture we choose to adopt is voluntary rather than reflex, The environmental conditions in which balance has to be maintained change so much and so frequently that a fixed innate pattern of motor response to change would not be effective.

Indeed, a fully effective system of stabilising reflexes would have the effect that any attempt at movement would be resisted by these same stabilising reflexes. If on the other hand, we envision a switching off of the stabilising system to make a voluntary movement possible, then any such movement would lead at once to overbalancing.

It is natural that the book should reflect the atmosphere of thinking at the time that the individual papers were written. Its publication is thus valuable as an historical record, and perhaps one should not ask for more.

References:

1). Professor J. McVicar Hunt (book jacket quotation).
2). “Aldous Huxley and F. M. Alexander”, pp. 315-327.
3). p. 315.
4). p. 324.
5). p. 6.

2. Review by Jonathan Drake

First published in STATNews vol. 5, no. 3, 1999.

Frank Pierce Jones’ posthumously-published book, Body Awareness in Action, (now, thankfully, once more in print, entitled Freedom to Change) appeared shortly before I embarked on my Alexander training course. It confirmed me in my belief that I might be on the right track and I have revisited it again and again over the years. Apart from Alexander’s own writings, there are few original contributions to the growing literature on the Alexander Technique. Jones’ legacy to us arose out of his need to understand, explain and justify Alexander’s work, not only to every man and woman but also to a hidebound scientific community. (Hence his transformation from classics scholar to experimental psychologist.)

This collection of research papers and articles - some of which have never been published before - should be read by all teachers and students of the Alexander Technique. Ted Dimon has penned an informative biography of Jones, and the editors have prefaced each of the papers with a helpful introduction.

The papers can broadly be divided into two groups: experimental and descriptive. The value of Jones’ scientific research and its relation to mainstream knowledge will be reviewed in depth in the next issue of The Alexander Journal. In the descriptive papers what is striking is his clarity of thought about the Technique and freshness of insight into the “thinking- in-activity” which characterises our work. There are fascinating accounts of Alexander’s relationships with John Dewey and Aldous Huxley (the latter was first published in The Alexander Review). And the papers derived from lectures given to academic colleagues or to musicians - models of elegant and clear expression - are a pleasure to read.