Redrawing Your Brain's Body Maps
Boosting Emotional Health + Longevity
Several years ago on a crisp, sunny November day, I was in a car accident. The velocity of the other car was so great that the impact broke my dominant wrist in two places.
The first week in a cast frustrated me endlessly. Like most people, I used my dominant hand to do everything; my left hand merely assisted. Now even the simplest tasks like brushing my teeth or turning on a faucet felt clumsy, and took more time and energy to complete. All week, I felt irritable. Hemmed in and thwarted. I worried over the logistics of an upcoming work trip, including a conference in Florida and workshops in the Middle East.
The following week, on a four-hour train ride to New York, everything changed.
As I’d done with many other actions for the past eight days, I opened a thermos of coffee with my left hand. This time the action felt noticeably different: The movements were smooth, assured. I had a visceral sense of something clicking into place. It felt as though my brain had mapped my left hand in more strongly. Most surprising, though, was the aftermath.
The trauma of the accident fell away. My body felt powerful—invincible, even. A tremendous elation flooded me. This sense of well-being endured for days. It wasn’t the one fluid motion to open the thermos that did it, I realized, but the countless awkward lefthanded tasks (a form of practice) that preceded it.
This was a life-changing moment. The experience confirmed what I’d noticed as a yoga teacher and yoga therapist: that building in new ways of moving benefits mood and well-being.
As someone who integrates seemingly disparate fields (science, psychology, sociology, contemplative practice, fascia research, and social justice among them), I’ve often found that embodied insight and clinical observations don’t immediately have the support of research—sometimes, as I pointed out in last week’s column, because scientists just aren’t studying it yet.
Today, I’d like to share with you the insights gleaned from nearly a decade since the accident. These insights owe thanks to the generosity of many practitioners, clients, students, and teachers in training in my global community. They’re infused with the wisdom of scholars in a range of related fields, and with insights from my own bodied experience connecting the dots between them.
So what exactly happened here? Why would the integration of a new physical movement yield such profound emotional benefits? The answer may lie in a surprising capacity that our bodies and brains create together.
Our Brains Create Maps of Our Bodies
Our brains create an impressive collection of maps that correspond to each of our sensory systems and many of our movement systems. We have them for vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell, movement, and many other abilities.
We’re not alone in this: All our animal relatives have them, whether winged, furred, feathered, finned, or otherwise embellished.
Let’s look at the brain’s mapping areas for movement.
Our Primary Movement Maps
We have an array of movement maps are distributed throughout multiple regions of our brains. Perhaps the most foundational one lies in the primary motor area, M1. This map corresponds to specific body parts and to the most important or complex movements we make. Here, the face and hands have a greater allotment than areas like the trunk. This is because movements involving the face and hands require greater fine motor control—and because, like reaching for a tool or feeding ourselves, they are central to our survival.
If scientists briefly stimulate an area in the movement map, they’ll elicit the blink of an eye or the twitch of a muscle. But as neuroscientist Michael Graziano and his colleagues discovered in the early 2000’s, longer stimulation results in complex reaching and grasping movements that involve multiple parts of the body.
This spectrum of responses reflects the key ways we interact with the world: producing speech, reaching for and grasping objects, and defending the space around us.
Our location and movement maps overlap, and are sometimes called sensorimotor maps.
Recent research has enriched this view of the primary motor area, giving it partial responsibility for coordinating the body as a whole. This research also suggests that our moving self integrates information about activity in our digestive organs, lungs, and heart, as well as to an area of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, which deals with sensory signals, pain, and decision making.
These kinds of interactions with other areas are what integrates sensations and movement such with other functions, and therefore gives it such therapeutic potential. Movement is not just physical, but cognitive, social, and emotional too.
To help us make sense of this information, I’ll organize it through three guiding principles.
1: The Brain’s Maps Degrade with Age
As we age, we don’t just move less; we also lose key movements, like getting up and down off the floor on our own. Over time, our body-brain circuits don’t practice those movements. We start to “forget” how to do them.
Here’s an example: After a series of hip surgeries years ago, I went to the gym with the intention to add “baby plyometric” exercises to my routine. I stood on the floor in front of a very short series of steps. Bending my knees, I issued the order to “jump” up to the first step. Nothing happened. Again, I readied myself and gave the command. Still nothing. After two more tries, I gave up.
In this moment, my heart beat a little faster with anxiety. It had just become clear to me that even the smallest of jumps had “left” my repertoire of movements. More importantly, I hadn’t noticed it until it was gone.
That’s the nature of movement loss: silent, invisible, and profound just the same.
To be clear, this loss doesn’t stem from a deficit in our movement “maps,” but rather a deficit of movement itself—and in our body-brain dialogue.
Our maps reflect what we practice.
Think of this as a kind of call and response exchange. Our movements and the way we use our bodies go out like a “call” to the brain; the brain reorganizes its maps and its movement repertoire in response.
Early life is critical; when we’re young, our brain maps are incredibly plastic, meaning mutable. But as we age, our maps trade some of their adaptability for stability. Our maps are shaped by the movements we’ve made over and over again. Those are the movements we’re most prepared to make in the future.
And yet, our movement maps are also flexible. Even as adults, they can change in response to what we practice. Engaging in regular map-expanding practices, over time, scaffolds new connections in the body and brain. This is part of what makes movement so therapeutic.
2: Movement Maps Affect Our Emotions
As the story of my broken wrist suggests, movement loss may not only be a factor of aging. It may also relate to emotional health, particularly depression.
In my decades of work as a psychologist, yoga teaching, one-on-one work, and teacher supervision, I’ve seen over and over again that losing movement—even when the loss isn’t visible—affects us not just physically, but emotionally and socially too. What’s more, not just moving more but restoring lost movement can improve emotional regulation.
Emerging research supports this idea. In one study of people with depression, researchers employed motion energy analysis, a technique drawn from video recordings of clinical interviews, to measure people’s gross body movements. They found that the fewer gross movements someone made, the higher the severity of their depression. What’s wild about this study: the motion energy analysis tool spotted anomalies of embodiment that both the clinicians and the participants didn’t notice.
This means that movement analysis is a helpful tool. What’s more, I believe that if we train ourselves to notice our movement (and its loss or gain), we can employ movement restoration in the service of well-being.
3: Embrace the Strangeness of Motor Learning
Motor learning is the term for the trial-and-error process you use to master a new skill such as riding a bike, balancing on your hands, or throwing a football. And this kind of learning can improve mood and offset the cognitive decline that comes with aging. (I’ve got much more on this in the book, and will share that once it’s out.)
The problem: Our minds avoid the recognition of movement loss, or try to forget the loss they’ve observed. Most of us feel comforted by the movement sequences we already know, where we can feel adept and graceful. Over time, a return to “traditional” movement patterns can feel like a valid restoration of movement in itself.
The trial-and-error and awkwardness of motor learning is the therapeutic element that boosts mood and well-being. And for that, we need something I speak about frequently in classes and workshops: We need the medicine of novel movement. This is what some movement circles refer to as recovering movements, such as crawling, sitting on the floor, getting up from sitting without using our hands, lateral movement, and more. But novel movement isn’t limited to these capacities.
How To Restore or Build Our Movement
Novel or restorative movement can take many forms, including MovNat or Parkour. Some methods take place outside, in synergy with the natural world, which is a huge bonus. These days, you can find online videos available for free, which brings a much-needed equity to these disciplines.
Tai Chi also offers opportunity for novel movement; if you’ve ever tried it, you’ll know that it’s hard to be “good at” tai chi. In a novel study, my colleague and friend Cathy Kerr and colleagues showed that tai chi is associated with widespread sensorimotor benefits in symptoms associated with depression, but also with proprioception-degrading conditions such as aging and neurodegenerative disease.
And in yoga and fitness, this looks like the following:
adding new movements
exploring new actions within familiar postures or movements
adding fresh sensory (interoceptive or proprioceptive) experiences within “old” poses
opening, strengthening, or releasing parts/areas of the body we don’t usually access
not overusing “sleeping” parts/areas of the body, which are ones that you already easily access
adding new types of movement altogether
Expanding our movement maps is a critical activity, more so than simply adding “exercise” to our routine (or increasing it). Boosting our maps through movement restoration and novel movement can offset cognitive decline, enhance quality of life, boost mood, and improve well-being. Doing so requires bringing careful, curious, deliberate attention to losses, and to the discomfort that comes with repairing them.
Summary:
Movement restoration and novel movement are powerful tools to uplift mood and well-being
Our brains have a series of movement maps, which we shape by virtue of what and how we practice
These maps degrade with age; expanding them may affect not just our longevity, but the quality of our lives
Our movement maps play a role in emotional well-being
If you bolster your movement maps, you also boost your emotional well-being
You can do this by embracing the strangeness of trial-and-error movements, also known as motor learning
Try new movements, accessing “sleeping” areas of the body, new actions or sensations within “old” movements, or new types of movement altogether, such as Tai Chi
Thank you for reading Bodies of Knowledge. This post is public so feel free to share it.
Sources:
But as neuroscientist Michael Graziano and his colleagues discovered: Graziano, M. S., & Cooke, D. F. (2006). Parieto-frontal interactions, personal space, and defensive behavior. Neuropsychologia, 44(6), 845–859. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2005.09.009
Our location and movement maps overlap, and are sometimes called: Umeda, T., Isa, T., & Nishimura, Y. (2019). The somatosensory cortex receives information about motor output. Science Advances, 5(7), eaaw5388. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaw5388
Recent research has enriched this view of the primary motor area, giving it: Gordon, E. M., Chauvin, R. J., Van, A. N., Rajesh, A., Nielsen, A., Newbold, D. J., Lynch, C. J., Seider, N. A., Krimmel, S. R., Scheidter, K. M., Monk, J., Miller, R. L., Metoki, A., Montez, D. F., Zheng, A., Elbau, I., Madison, T., Nishino, T., Myers, M. J., Kaplan, S., … Dosenbach, N. U. F. (2023). A somato-cognitive action network alternates with effector regions in motor cortex. Nature, 617(7960), 351–359. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05964-2
In one study of people with depression, researchers employed motion energy analysis: Sandmeir, A., Schoenherr, D., Altmann, U., Nikendei, C., Schauenburg, H., & Dinger, U. (2021). Depression Severity Is Related to Less Gross Body Movement: A Motion Energy Analysis. Psychopathology, 54(2), 106–112. https://doi.org/10.1159/000512959
In a novel study, my colleague and friend Cathy Kerr and colleagues showed that tai chi is associated with widespread sensorimotor benefits: Kerr, C. E., Agrawal, U., & Nayak, S. (2016). The Effects of Tai Chi Practice on Intermuscular Beta Coherence and the Rubber Hand Illusion. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 10, 37. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00037
This article brought me to tears. Understanding the concept of novel movement could help me with the depression I felt when I had major neck surgery that interrupted my regular, joyous yoga practice. I suspected my mood was connected to the deterioration of movements, some of which were caused by the surgery. For the last year I’ve allowed myself to “accept” that I can’t do certain things anymore. That stops now. Thank you.