Simplicity, generality, power

I am reminded of a saying by one of my heroes and great contemporary numerical mathematician, John Skilling, that simplicity yields generality, and generality is power. Skilling and his colleague Kevin Knuth appealed to that self-exemplifying principle in a recent paper (Skilling and Knuth 2021) that advances a remarkably simple theory to explain a broad array of mathematical patterns in probability theory and fundamental physics previously thought to be quite unrelated.

By analogy, we too may ask: is there perhaps such a grounding theory for Alexander Technique (AT)? Can all the concepts that surrounds AT (such as the primary control, inhibition, etc.) be explained in terms of something simpler, more general, more powerful? I do think so: many feel AT to be simple and deep at its core. And it certainly is very general and powerful. At the same time, many approaches to it exist, and some of these can get very technical… this is inevitable as truth becomes institutionalized.

So what is that grounding theory for AT? Spoiler alert: it is just the fundamental asymmetry between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.1 How these two hemispheres produce and affect consciousness and thereby govern the world as we know it is described in the books of Iain McGilchrist, the well-known psychiatrist, neuroscientist and literary scholar. I first came across one of them via a blog post from Michael Ashcroft,2 and I would like to expand on what he wrote about its relevance to AT in terms of Skilling’s principle. I think it is very relevant indeed, because for me personally it grounds many — if not all? — of the concepts that are part of the Technique into the structure and functioning of our brains.

That of course is not new in itself (see for example the work of Cacciatore, Johnson, and Cohen 2020), but what is very appealing about McGilchrist’s thesis is that it is very simple, and simplicity means generality means power. Its simplicity is precisely what makes it a plausible explanation for me. We all feel that AT is a means whereby to something fundamental… and it is fitting that something fundamental like that is expressed in a fundamental way physiologically.

Cacciatore, Timothy W, Patrick M Johnson, and Rajal G Cohen. 2020. “Potential Mechanisms of the Alexander Technique: Toward a Comprehensive Neurophysiological Model,” 15.
Skilling, John, and Kevin Knuth. 2021. “The ABC of Physics.” Physical Sciences Forum 3 (1): 9. https://doi.org/10.3390/psf2021003009.

Footnotes

  1. Left hemisphere (LH) and right hemisphere (RH) differences are part of neuro pop culture, of course, but these pop conceptions tend to be about WHAT the hemispheres do (for example: language faculty is located in the LH), not about HOW they do it. And this is a vital distinction: while functions of the brain are indeed localized (lateralized) to some extent, the brain is a highly interconnected system, any two regions being connected to various degrees, so pinpointing down functions in brain regions could be rather misleading. Instead, the HOW question is much more revealing, and indeed the answer to it is of a simpler kind. ↩

  2. I reviewed another one here. ↩

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