“Action is movement with intelligence. The world is filled with movement. What the world needs is more conscious movement, more action.” B.K.S. Iyengar

During the IYENGAR® Yoga Convention in 2016, Jawahar Bangera - Iyengar senior teacher from Bombay, India) - mentioned that in Iyengar yoga there is an activation of both motor and sensor neurons. I did not understand the meaning of this statement until I heard Prof. Corrado Sinigallia, philosopher of the mind and cognitive scientist at the University of Milan, to explain the functioning of mirror neurons and the phenomenon of simulation and embodied resonance - "embodied simulation" and "embodied resonance" (Gallese and Sinigallia, 2018).

Discovered in the early 1990s by a team of Neurophysiologists from Parma led by Prof. Rizzolato, these neurons of the premotor cortex play a very interesting role in brain dynamics. In fact, mirror neurons have the characteristic of being activated whether an individual performs an action or is simply observing it being performed by someone else.

But how do they work? Let's take the famous example of the laboratory experiment in which food is offered to a macaque: the macaque brings the food to its mouth and the mirror neuron discharges; the macaque observes the researcher to bring the food to the mouth and the mirror neuron discharges equally. The discovery is sensational: an observed action performed by someone resonates in the corresponding motor substrate of the observer!

Not only that, a more recent research shows that mirrors also work for movements that are not strictly finalized (such as bringing food to the mouth or the use of tools), for example dancing or playing a musical instrument.

So, what happens in our yog-asana practice? And how is it possible to exploit this mechanism for learning?

We could speculate that - given the existence of the mirrors - it is enough to 'look at what someone does' to 'learn how to do it'. In this case, we would not need teachers, lessons, or to repeat a motor gesture again and again before acquiring it. Well, you are right: the ability to respond to the motor action seen by another person depends on the ability of one's own motor system to transform the action observed into an embodied motor gesture. In other words, we could say that just seeing a gesture makes our motor system resonate, but the way in which our motor system resonates is not the same as that of the person observed. What can significantly change is the motor proficiency.

Let's take the case of an Iyengar Yoga class. The teacher performs Trikonasana and the students imitate him by performing it, but less precisely. Why? The proficiency of the teacher's motor system is more refined compared to the student’s one. What should happen to improve the proficiency of the motor gesture? The necessary ingredient is the so called sensory afference. Sensory afference means that afferent nerves (or sense nerves) carry nerve impulses from sensory receptors located in the periphery to the motor system located in the central nervous system. Here such sensory information can be processed in order to repeated the gesture in a more refined way.

In other words, the motor system needs to feel and perceive the effect of the action, through sensory afference, in order to incorporate the new motor gesture into one's vocabulary of movements.

It is a feed-back mechanism: execution of the gesture à sensory afference à correction by the motor system à repetition of the gesture à new sensory afference à re-correction and refinement of the motor gesture.

The response to seeing the action of others is linked to the ability of the motor system of the observer to reproduce it with the same ability. There is therefore a primacy of the motor system over the visual system. Seeing is not enough: it is necessary to do and train one's motor system to perform the gesture in an "intelligent" way, B.K.S. Iyengar would have said.

This physiological mechanism through which our body can enrich its own vocabulary is of paramount importance in the practice of Iyengar yoga. Learning in Iyengar yoga is an embodied process of feeling, perceiving and refining, from the gross to the subtler.

Differently from movement, action is a motor gesture grounded in the mechanism of sensory afference. Intelligence of the body is the capacity of our motor system and, broadly speaking of our whole embodiment, to learn through a process of trial and error, without prejudices and hetero-direct external conditioning.

Well, the intelligence of the body that Iyengar spoke of is the feedback mechanism between sensory afferent and motor system. Intuitively, B.K.S. Iyengar has built his teaching didactics on a physiological mechanism, succeeding - through his precise and punctual instructions - to make resonate in the body of the students, what resounded in his own body.

[Prof. Sinigallia has studied the functioning of mirror neurons with particular reference to intersubjectivity, the concept that describes the continuous and reciprocal interactions through which human beings "progressively" come to know the mind of others through their own cognition.]

References

V. Gallese & C. Sinigaglia (2018). “Embodied Resonance”. In A. Newen, L. De Bruin, S. Gallagher (eds) Oxford Handbook of Cognition: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended Oxford University Press, Oxford.

G. Rizzolatti & C. Sinigaglia (2016). “The mirror mechanism: a basic principle of brain function”. Nature Reviews Neuroscience doi:10. 1038 /nrn.2016.135.

F. Caruana e A. Borghi (2016). Il cervello in azione. Il Mulino.