Thursday, December 19, 2013

Alexander Technique, meditation, vision therapy, and computer middleware

Today was another insightful Alexander Technique lesson with Mark. I will try to develop some of the insights in this post --- I don't really have a better place to put it.

Technical introduction. When web programmers write software for a sophisticated website, they would often think about it in three layers: the front end, the middle layer, and the back end. The front end includes developing whatever the user will see in the browser, the back end involves things like storing user's information in the database, and middleware is everything in between. Computer programmers like to separate software into different parts because then it is easier to make sense of the whole design. The problems with computer software are almost the same as the problems with human beings: there are too many moving parts, and everything is interconnected. You touch one thing, but everything gets affected. Thus, many software developers favor a design with many small, manageable, independent components that are loosely coupled with each other, as opposed to one big, monolithic chunk of code. I am really not sure, how to explain it in simple terms so that everyone could understand...

When people are designing a robust, scalable, reusable software architecture consisting of many independent, loosely coupled pieces, they would try to make it flexible, to add "hooks" to different layers, at different levels, so that future pieces of software integrated into this architecture could be included in many different ways, allowing, so to say, for many ways to fit the puzzle, depending on the particular future, yet unpredictable circumstances.

For example, if you have a web application, you may want to protect it from "CSRF", a common attack used by hackers (search for "cross-site request forgery"). You may manually inspect each page of your website and, if appropriate, add some code to protect from CSRF. The problem is, your application may have a lot of pages, and even if you secure all of them, care should be taken each and every time you are adding a new page. This is painful and unreliable. However, if your design is flexible enough, you may be able to instead add a CSRF protection middleware. It will then intercept each and every request to your website and make sure that it is appropriately protected. In this way, you can keep working on your website without any worries, and the protection will be added "under the covers". Note that the web framework you are using has to be flexible enough to allow you to insert middleware in the middle of the processing.

Now, let's extend the analogy. For the vision, you can think of the eyes as the front end. Once the signal enters through the cornea, retina, optic nerve, etc., it goes through various middle layers, and then you can think of the visual cortex as the backend --- or, perhaps, the visual cortex is yet another middle layer, and the backend would involve parts of the brain forming our physical and emotional reaction to what is seen. There are many different layers or levels of processing for the inputs from all senses, including proprioception.

Remember, as I have just explained, that a well-designed software system is decoupled: it contains different parts that are not too interrelated. This is also desirable for different parts of a human beings, and many different techniques have been invented for this end. In dance, for example, it is desirable to be able to move one's leg without moving one's arm, or vice versa. In politics, we want to talk without changing our facial expression. When playing piano, we want to move different fingers independently. In vision therapy, we are making sure that the new, desirable visual habits function independently, not just in a certain context; this dependency on the context is an obstacle for any change-of-habit type of endeavor. Isolation or separation are words commonly used to describe this desirable property.

It turns out that "our" software or hardware, our brain and our body, is better than we think. This is not a new idea. You may have heard the idea of not reacting from your amygdala, but allowing the inputs to be processed in the neocortex. That is, we, humans, have developed a better version of "hardware", or "software", depending on how you look at it, than what certain lower animals had. (The popular analogy is "hardware", but I personally like to think of parts of the brain as "software", because, well, software is "softer" and thus easier to change.) I am going to make a similar yet different point.

I believe that the design of a human's perceptual system is a good design. That it includes some "hooks" that allow for certain middleware to be installed. That is, the nervous system has connections in the middle of the signal processing that allow us to potentially do certain things with a signal or an impulse in the middle. The essence of the Alexander Technique is, then, developing and installing such middleware. Repeated practice strengthens one's ability to interrupt the signals in the middle and to allow for custom things to be done. All three key principles of the Alexander Technique --- awareness, inhibition, direction --- can be viewed in this light, inhibition being the most obvious one. Similarly, the direction "I wish to free my neck" is done at the middle level, if it is to be done properly: by monitoring all passing signals and filtering out those that tighten my neck, I am able to free my neck "out of being, instead of out of doing".

This is why the Alexander Technique may be considered a "pre-technique": because this is a technique for and of installing middleware in our processing. (I don't really think it is about perception processing, it may be more about processing one's impulses towards doing something. I am really unclear on this distinction between perceiving something and doing something.)  This is why, according to Mark, a really advanced private class in Alexander Technique may still focus on foundations such as freeing one's neck, whereas this would not be the case for a really advanced music class: world-class musicians probably wouldn't be spending hours practicing the C major scale, exceptions notwithstanding.

Not all meditation practices or yoga practices involve this installation of middleware. For example, it is possible to mediate on loving kindness, spend some time cultivating this new feeling, and then allowing the effects to spill into other parts of one's life. This could lead to permanent changes in one's outlook on life, rewiring of the brain, etc.etc. However, there is no middleware mechanism involved. On the other hand,the practice of mindfulness, the Zen are about the installation of middleware so that on every impulse, something can be done in the middle, before it has been completed. I am struggling to make a distinction here between merely controlling or not acting on strong impulses and some other, deeper quality.

Not all processing in humans allows for an easy installation of such middleware. As I know from vision therapy, low-level vision processing functions best when its undisturbed by conscious thinking. That is, it is certainly possible to interfere with low-level visual processing, consciously and subconsciously, but the result is inferior, and is not recommended. Middle-level processing can be useful during therapy, to help break old visual habits and start forming new ones. However, in order to integrate new visual habits, the middleware layer has to be eventually disabled, so that information can flow freely, at the maximum available bandwidth.


5 comments:

  1. I'd like to see this concept simplified

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  2. I was really trying to say that we have the capability to interrupt every impulse inside ourselves, and then either to block it or to let it pass, much like a customs inspector can let people or packages pass, block them, or take them aside for further inspection. Whatever consciousness is, a lot of what is normally unconscious can be made conscious, with possibility for further change. It can be done by "installing" a little piece of conscious attention in the middle of many of our unconscious processes. In this post I tried to explain, what or where this "middle" is.

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  3. This makes sense. Where can I learn more about this intervention.

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  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  5. I didn't quite understand your question at first. I think you are asking about the Alexander Technique. Search the Internet and try to locate a teacher in the place where you live, if possible. There are also books by F.M. Alexander himself and others, but people reported difficulty trying to learn Alexander Technique from the books, as opposed to taking private lessons. Even group lessons seem to have limited value, since they tend to focus on particular practical aspects, but rarely touch in depth on the issues discussed in this article.

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