RESPECT THE SEAHORSE!
Moshe Feldenkrais said a person can't change without a new experience. The hippocampus (which means "sea horse"), located in the brain’s temporal lobe, plays a fundamental role in the formation of new memories about new experiences. And it helps consolidate our short-term memories to long-term memory. It is also associated with emotion and motivation. Through its connection to emotion, motivation and memory, the hippocampus is critical to all our learning. Interestingly, It also plays an important role in our orientation in space - through what are called "place cells". These special hippocampal cells encode spatial information and are critical to our representation, cognitive maps, of our environment.
By contrast, the hippocampus lies immediately behind its opposite - the amygdala - which is more activated by stress and anxiety and linked to immediate sympathetic response in the autonomic nervous system. The amygdala, for emergencies’ sake, is only one neuron away from the hypothalamus (which governs autonomic response) to assure that, when we need it, fight or flight can kick in almost instantaneously. When the amygdala is activated it inhibits the actions of the hippocampus, and therefore, when we are anxious or under stress, it is extremely difficult to learn anything! Prolonged stress will actually cause neurons in the hippocampus to atrophy, shrinking it in size!
This leads us to see that it is all important that we heighten our quality of touch - only then can learning take place. Touch that evokes pain will accomplish the neurological opposite of what we need - activating the amygdala, not the hippocampus. If the organism perceives the touch as too sudden, too deep, too mechanical, the therapist will not evoke a feeling of trust and safety, and then we limit the learning that could happen. This again is one of the ways that mechanical or overly aggressive approaches to massage, applying deep tissue that is painful, may have a fascial impact but not result in any learning.
Respect the seahorse!
