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From: Andreas Starke
Date: 10/12/02
Time: 4:31:58 AM
Remote Name: 217.227.31.35
Hi, Heidi:
Guess you know that your name, at least in part, sounds very German. It reminds me of my 4th grade elementary school love, Heidi Faber. I believe that it was not you, since it is about 50 years (!) ago. Back to business.
Thank you for reacting to my paper. Yes, what I do is very much related to the concept of mindfulness. Repeatedly I am reminded by Feldenkrais experts how much similarities exist between my approach and the Feldenkrais Method [ http://www.feldenkrais.com ].
> Do you have any recommendations based upon your experiences that would assist a client in achieving active awareness of tactile, proprioceptive and kinesthetic feedback while speaking? Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
1. One thing that may help is to first do some exercises in TPK feedback when performing gross-motor movements like it is done in the Feldenkrais school. The tactile sense is familiar and accessible to most clients, the sense of position (proprioception) is much more remote to most clients and the sense of movement (kinesthesis), i.e. the reception / perception of position changes is the least aware one in most people.
2. When it comes to speaking I find that a thorough training in "slow motion speech" does the job in almost all clients. "Slow motion speech" is the result of an effort to duplicate pieces of natural speech (a word or small word groups) with only one variable willingly altered, which is speed. Ceteris paribus – everything else is supposed to remain the same. Mathematically speaking the goal is a time-expanded proportional map of natural speech.
Of course that is not possible for physical reasons. The ballistic properties (effects of inertia and gravitation) change when you slow down. The person has to replace (passive) ballistic movements by active movements (relating to inertia) and checked movements (modifying the effect of gravitation). But anyway, the effort to get a close slowed proportional map forces the client to attend to every small detail of the articulatory movements (tongue, lips, jaw, velum), air flow, air pressure, tactile pressure (hope that’s the correct English expression), voice function and, with a little luck even awareness for the adduction / abduction of the vocal folds.
When you try to teach this, first, of course, be sure you can do it yourself. Use acoustic models very sparingly, but try to use insight of the client in his movements when speaking normally. It is very effective to have the client say the same word over and over again starting with normal speech and slowing down gradually until be reaches the goal (e.g. 5 times slower) in the 10th repetition or so.
3. You can also boost the TPK awareness by letting the client focus on one detail of the speech movement when saying a word or a small word group. Such details would be: lip-lip contact, lip-teeth contact, tongue contacts in various places in the oral cavity, jaw movement (use fingers under the chin or mirror to promote awareness for the movement), etc. Please note that the proprioceptive feedback from the tongue is absent or very weak by nature, this muscle is not linked to a joint. On the other hand, tactile feedback from the tongue is very strong, at least potentially.
In general, it is possible to train the reception / perception of any non-constant stimulus by carefully pairing this stimulus with another stimulus that you can control. When you stand in your garden with a friend and hear a particular reappearing noise (or a bird’s song) that your friend doesn’t hear (provided there is no substantial hearing loss) you can direct your friend’s attention to that sound event by saying "now" every time the sound appears again. Sooner or later your friend will say, "Okay, I can hear it now very clearly."
Many clients don’t believe and unfortunately many colleagues don’t know that perception can be trained by this, but you have to be patient, sometimes it takes a while until it "clicks." Your music teacher, by the way, did the same when he wanted you to hear the appearance and re-appearance of the second theme in the first movement of a Beethoven symphony or a certain leitmotiv in a Wagner opera. He either sang the first three or four notes of it or he said a word like "here" or "there" or "now" or something else whenever the target object (re-)appeared.
As I said, don’t expect this to happen fast in all clients. Some get it in 20 minutes or less on the first day, others get it eventually on the third day, with a training time total of 60 minutes or more. But I can say that I very rarely, if ever, had a client who never learned it.
> Thanks for your thought-provoking article -- I plan to read more regarding your topic.
For me Ratcliff / Ratcliff: Thinking Zen was kind of a revelation, because there I found so much justification and reinforcement of my "phenomenological tendencies."
Please let me know whether this makes some sense.