Til Luchau on Somatic memory

There are many explanatory models for memories and emotions that sometimes surface during hands-on work. The (now somewhat quaint) Reichian explanation was that since we tend to contract our musculature and hold our breath against the expression and experience of unpleasant emotions, over time, this immobilization would “armor” the body into a chronically immobile and unfeeling state. Deep hands-on work (and hyperventilation) was used by Wilhelm Reich to “break up” this armor, leading to recall of memories and cathartic expression of the “held” emotions. Ida Rolf and many others referenced Reich’s model as an explanation for the memories and emotions that surface during their systems of deep bodywork.

The state-dependant memory model discussed on the previous article is more nuanced and sophisticated, and so arguably more useful. It brings to mind a book I’m currently reading: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions are Made (2017, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 9780544133310). In her “theory of constructed emotions,” Barrett builds on the idea that our brains are structured to predict what we will see, taste, here, and feel. Apparently, there’s good evidence that the brain only processes things it does not predict. In this model, preloaded but widely networked caches of information (concepts) and meaning (valence) are used to minimize the brain’s energy use and maximize processing time.

Interestingly, she writes that the brain’s wiring causes internal sensation and body signals (interoception and proprioception) to reach the brain’s processing centers before external perceptions (exteroception), such as sight, hearing etc. This sets up the brain to rapidly predict what it’ll perceive exteroceptively, based largely on past bodily experience (as well as language) what’s going to happen outside. In other words, we take in sensory information only until our brains can predict what will happen.

This is the proposed mechanism behind both perceptions and emotion: for example, in this model, we are not reacting to our perceptions with emotions, we are neurologically predicting what will happen, and it is our predictions that shape our perceptions, emotions, and actions.

This model sheds an interesting light on phenomena like phantom limb pain; baseball batters’ ability to hit a 90mph fast ball (which requires most of the batter’s swing to be complete before the ball has even left the pitcher’s hand); police seeing non-existent guns in hands of threatening suspects; and maybe expectancy and conditioning (which are the mechanisms of many placebo responses), psychological projection, traumatic memory, and more.

From our somatic perspective, the role of interoception in her model is particularly interesting. Though I’m only part way through her book, so am probably speculating well beyond the author’s scope, it could be that bodywork-induced memories are another prediction-based phenomenon: our bodies and brains “producing” a memory by matching present sensory phenomenon to neurally stored (but somatically informed and predisposed) presets of past experience and meaning.