Attention and your “functional fovea”—some science and practice.
Once in a while, I come across a passage in a book that explains the neurology behind a functional capacity we explore our ATM sessions at Feldenkrais First (recording below). These moments reveal the importance of resonating with both the inductive, first-person, epistemic practice of Awareness Through Movement and the knowledge base of established science.
This morning it was Alain Berthoz' explanation of our visual capacities of “Imagined Movement and Actual Movement” from his book, The Brain’s Sense of Movement, in chapter ten called ‘Visual Exploration’ (page 212):
Inhibitory gating of execution thus permits the brain to imagine displacements of gaze without carrying them out. [emphasis mine] You can see for yourself that you do indeed have this option. Focus on a point in front of you and dispose your internal gaze—your attention, as some would say, your "functional fovea," as Veguiless would say. You will have the undeniable impression that your gaze is displaced from one point of the room to the other.
The same neural structures thus ought to be used for imagined movements and for actual movements, since it is possible to gate execution at different levels without suppressing the functioning of internal circuits in which gaze movements are developed and simulated. To check this assumption, we compared the cortical areas activated during actual saccades and imagined saccades. We measured ocular movements to make sure that the amplitude of the saccade remained insignificant during the imagined movement. The subject was asked to focus on a point of light in front of him and, first, to make voluntary horizontal saccades, then, with the target obscured by the dark, to make imagined saccades similar to the actual ones. Under these conditions, the oculomotor field, the SMA, and the cingulate cortex were activated during the imagined movements just as they had been during the actual saccades.
For a super simple experience of your "functional fovea": simply stare at an object in front of you. While keeping your eyes on that object, move your attention to another location nearby within your peripheral vision, but without actually moving your eyes. Notice what happens, and what the experience feels like to do.
The ATM session, “Peripheral Capacity” (included at the end of this article), was not planned with the understanding from the passage above. But the resonance is there. The session was inspired by an email correspondence I had with an Olympic skeet shooter from Iran who contacted me after doing some of my lessons. It is the first of five sessions in my series “Thine Eyes” (one of the 16 included ATM series with the basic subscription to Feldenkrais First).
I learned to shoot from my father who took me pheasant, quail and duck hunting in my teens. In that time, I had limited and humbling exposure to the challenges of skeet shooting.
Image courtesy of Pinterest.
In skeet, the shooter stands in an arena and aims to hit a moving target, a 4.33" diameter disc (called a 'clay pigeon) launched from two towers on opposite sides of the arena. The clays fly in a variety of trajectories and altitudes: left-to-right, right-to-left, high-right-to-low-left, in both singles and combination shots called "doubles". The shooter changes to eight different locations around the range so that his aim is challenged from a variety of points of orientation and distances relative to the flying targets. The shooter uses a shotgun (not a rifle) and has typically trained to shoot with both eyes open to preserve his depth perception. He is always leading a moving target, and is thus in a continuous interplay between the trajectory and speed of the barrel relative to that of the target—a much more dynamic and complex task than closing one eye to aim a rifle at a stationary target.
Image courtesy of Field and Stream and Midhudsonsporting.com.
My correspondent asked me how he might apply some of the Feldenkrais "eye" lessons more specifically to improve his effectiveness in shooting. I wrote him about how to setup a clock face on his wall and explore the difference between:
starting with his eyes on the center of the clock and actually moving his eyes gently along the radius to each hour on the circumference and back,
vs. virtually "moving" his attention to the hours on the circumference while keeping his actual gaze on the center.
The idea was to measure the fluidity and smoothness of his peripheral clarity (what Verguiless would call his "functional fovea"), and map out which angles and pathways in his visual array could use greater control and spontaneity. We came up with variations he could do with the shotgun at his shoulder, where he could differentiate between eye movements, barrel movements, and movements of his virtual gaze.
These ideas are explored especially in the first two sessions in the series Thine Eyes. Check out the whole series here.
Enjoy!
—Andrew Gibbons, co-founder, Feldenkrais First