Trying to explain the Feldenkrais Method isn't always easy. The best way is to experience it, but that's tough on a blog. I give it a shot in words on my blog in the About Feldenkrais page.

A short well-produced video explaining one approach to the Method is available here.

Also available is a remarkable series of audio lessons on the Open ATM Project.

In The Practice of Slowing Down on NPR's This I Believe, mountain climber Phil powers presents a way of slowing down (briefly but firmly) without giving up. Powers learned the principle from a mountain climbing mentor who taught him to rest fully between each step during high altitude efforts. Powers talks about applying the idea fruitfully to his life away from the mountain:

The awareness of pace I owe to my teacher has served me whether I am seeking the world's highest summits, sharing my love for the mountains with others or kneeling to look my son, Gus, in the eye when he has a question.

Neurons Generated in The Adult Brain Learn To Respond To Novel Stimuli. A study at Mass General Hospital finds new neurons develop in the brain well into adulthood. Even better news: those neurons are flexible enough to aid learning and memory. The catch is the brains were in mice and in the part of their brain that deals with sense of smell. No small thing for a mouse; they gotta be able to continuously adapt their sense of smell to survive and do mousely things.

The implications are pretty exciting of course. To be able to adapt these new neurons to repair damaged brain tissue would give hope in a lot of conditions considered fairly hopeless today.

But the thing that interests me most here is the role of experience, of behavior and environment, in using the new neurons. It took placing the mice in a novel environment to reveal just how dramatic this generation of new neurons could be. It takes structure and function together to make meaningful change in almost any context I can think of.

Learning is key. It's what builds on the new tissues to allow change in functioning:

An associate professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, (Jeffrey) Macklis also notes, "These results can contribute to our efforts, and those of others in the field, to repair diseased brain and spinal cord by directed development of specific neurons from precursor/stem cells. Our experiments show that new neurons can join brain circuits and function in complex ways - contributing to learning, memory and potentially to motor function - and that we may need to retrain the brain to use the new neurons effectively."(emphasis mine).

Sometimes writing can be dark and light at the same time. One I ran across recently is Gray Area:Thinking with a Damaged Brain. Author Floyd Skloot gives a well-written account of what it's like to live a creative life with a brain noticeably damaged by a virus almost 20 years ago.

Skloot goes on (and on) about the frustrating everyday experiences he's enduring as a result of the damage. But he also reveals some gems along the way, like how he's learned to manage some of his creative activities:

The duel is fought over and over. I have developed certain habits that enable me to work — a team of seconds, to elaborate this metaphor of a duel. I must be willing to write slowly, to skip or leave blank spaces where I cannot find words that I seek, compose in fragments and without an overall ordering principle or imposed form. I explore and make discoveries in my writing now, never quite sure where I am going but willing to let things ride and discover later how they all fit together. Every time I finish an essay or poem or piece of fiction, it feels as though I have faced down the insult.

and;

In many important respects, then, I have already gotten better. I continue to learn new ways of living with a damaged brain. I continue to make progress, to avenge the insult, to see my way around the gray area. But no, I am not going to be the man I was. In this, I am hardly alone.

Reading the essay is not always easy going, but it's worth taking a peek at this guy's clearly-written experiences.

Lucy was in well into her 80's when I noticed that her walking balance wasn't what it used to be -- in most situations. The one exception was while grocery shopping. By leaning on a rolling grocery cart, she was hard to keep up with. The cart offered her stability that restored (and even improved) her mobility. That's when I got her one of those fancy rolling walkers, the kind with hand brakes like those on racing bicycles.

Fancy walkers might not be the only solution for folks with compromised balance and stability while walking. A research team at the University of Houston is investigating an unlikely alternative that they believe might be the answer to deteriorating balance for the elderly.

Biomechanics professor Max Kurz and his team looked to the animal kingdom for clues to the elderly balance problems caused by deteriorating nervous systems. They came up with, are you ready for this, penguins. Kurz and company observed penguins walking on a runway and hypothesized the side-to-side motion of waddling might help balance.

I think that it means that waddling possibly may be a mechanism to introduce stability and possibly we'll be able to introduce this to humans is wha"t we're hoping," he said.

They're starting with college students, teaching them to waddle like penguins. They hope to learn if this sort of training might help those with mobility problems keep their stability. A researcher at another medical center finds the approach interesting and "perhaps could help prevent her patients from falling."

And maybe save on grocery carts.

There's been a lot of glittery stuff about how brain imaging reveals where stuff happens in the human nervous system. Searching for the person in the brain makes the point that the brain has become a pop star of sorts with all this stuff about what's going on where in the brain. But if I understand what this author is getting at, sure, they'll locate the area of the brain where these activities show up during a brain scan, but that won't mean that imaging is a tool to understand people. That's because the images don't see the complete series of complex interactions in the brain associated with this activity. Maybe it will someday.

In the meantime, though, we can be misled by the images into thinking we're really on to something here. But even some in the neuroscience field are wise to the shortcomings.

"Any new method in neuroscience is powerful in terms of evolution of the field only insofar as it tells us that something we thought we knew is wrong," said Dr. J. Anthony Movshon, director of New York University's Center for Neural Science. So far, he said, brain imaging has not done that.

The technology, he said, though now central to brain science, "is in one sense disappointing, in that so far it has told us nothing more than what a neurologist of the 19th century could have told you about brain functions and where they're localized."

And others see risk in investing in the glitter over the substance.

"The risk is that seeing the neural activity allows people to take away or excuse responsibility for a behavior — to take away the individual person," said Dr. (Lucy)Brown of the Einstein School of Medicine in New York.

I agree that it can be entertaining to read about the studies and even to imagine that we know what's going on. But I like even more the idea that the striking distinctiveness of each individual goes beyond connections of neurons or whatever else.