Alexander Bartmann

How do you feel about senses?

What can we know about the conditions of reliability and credibleness of human senses? This workshop presents some of the latest results of an ongoing research of the Alexander Institute Heidelberg in the field of sensory appreciation. The topic is related to an increasing understanding of the relevance of a reliable sensory achievement. As F. M. Alexander stated, faulty sensory appreciation and debauched kinaesthesia are strong restraining forces in human development, in the individual as well as in the social aspect.
Even in this case it is a question of use and not a matter of the senses itself.
How can we comprehend the focusing on kinaesthesia, as Alexander did? May we understand it only as a paradigmatic example for other sensory modalities?
Alexander mentioned less senses than Aristotle already knew. As the concepts of brain function have changed since ancient Greece, so have the concepts of senses. Nowadays we are allowed to make use of any available knowledge for the benefit of an improved understanding of ourselves and for a clear comprehension by the public. If we are able to understand the process giving rise to the trustworthiness of our kinaesthesia, we might be able to do so for all other sensory modalities. The workshop supplies the participants with a profound knowledge about sensory modalities, in relation to ourselves, to space and time. We will experiment with distinct potentialities of perception, we will discover the locations of perception and take into account the reference of reliable sensory activity to some kind of immediate presence. This archetype of senses, based on that practical, phenomenological experience, enables us to adopt the latest research findings of modern brain theory into the Alexander Technique.