But found that within each movement , practice at the point of struggle , there was often a breakthrough into getting it or suddenly feeling as if my body could perform the movements . Whereas a few moments before I couldn't , one of the more challenging drills , I guess you would call it or practices that IO put me through was one in which he would change the rules within the moments of movement . So that one had to both be paying careful attention to the instruction and to the movement , mid movement and change those movements , which as a neuroscientist , I can tell you has to involve a lot of what we call top down control that is engagement in the four brain circuits for anticipation and learning and rule acquisition .
You could call this dance or you could call this sport . But really what it involved is setting a small number of ground rules or constraints as to how one could or could not move , dictated to me by I do . And that forced me to move in very specific ways that sometimes were very uncomfortable to me , not painful but uncomfortable , meaning that they didn't necessarily bring me to a place of reflexive action .
But of course , nobody knows what clearing the mind is , nor how to do it what this involved for me was making sure that I did not generate any movements until the command was delivered and then taking a pause before generating the movement that I was instructed to do , which at first felt slow and clunky , but clearly led to faster , more accurate execution of the instructed movement . And the second one was to try and forget the rule as soon as I had learned it because indeed , the rules were changing very quickly . There were many other teachings and learnings throughout the day that is IO teaching and me attempting to learn .
Whereas a few moments before I couldn't , one of the more challenging drills , I guess you would call it or practices that IO put me through was one in which he would change the rules within the moments of movement . So that one had to both be paying careful attention to the instruction and to the movement , mid movement and change those movements , which as a neuroscientist , I can tell you has to involve a lot of what we call top down control that is engagement in the four brain circuits for anticipation and learning and rule acquisition . And to combine those with reflexive action and deliberate action .
So essentially what you know was doing was revealing to me or allowing me to reveal to myself the different patterns of movement that are contained in the language of my nervous system . But that I was unaware of prior to the work with him , then we moved on to some other sorts of dynamic movements involving high level coordinations of using feet and hands to stomp on tennis balls , bounce them out , grab them with the hand that was dictated in the moment by IO that was challenging at times to say the least other patterns of movement involved an extreme amount of balance . Again .
