The body is not a machine Locomotion studies are ready for a new foundation Photo by Kiwihug on Unsplash The human body is subject to innumerable metaphors:

 

Our brains are computers with immense processing power; our bodies are machines that need to be tuned and honed and oiled and optimized. But metaphors are just that — metaphors. While they’re useful for interpreting and explaining the world to ourselves, they aren’t always reflective of reality. They’re not always real. The effects of believing in them, though, can have very real-world effects. The body as a machine, as mechanics, is a perfect example of this. What’s known as “locomotion studies” or biophysical mechanics, is hundreds of years old. Its most established foundations were built by looking at the human body as so much discrete, barely connected parts, and in many ways we’re still left with the legacy of that understanding. Some of the most in-depth studies on locomotion were done by the Weber brothers — Ernst, Wilhelm, and Eduard Weber, born into an academic family in Saxony (what is now Germany) in the early 1800s. All three of them were fascinated with human locomotion, as I wrote about in A Walking Life: “It was with Wilhelm, a professor of natural philosophy, that Eduard, the youngest brother and an anatomist and physiologist, co-authored Mechanik der menschlichden Gehwerkzeuge (The Mechanics of the Human Walking Apparatus) in 1836, which focused on their theory that the pendulum-like way humans swing their legs during walking meant that only ligaments and gravity were involved in the motion, not muscles. While their hypothesis didn’t hold under further experimentation, their theories and experimental methods still influence scientific approaches, and their habit of pulling from several discrete disciplines created a roadmap for more modern cross-disciplinary research. Their initial work alone drew on anatomy, physiology, physics, and electricity to perform their experiments and advance their theories.” The subsequent two centuries built on the Webers’ work, with all varieties of scientific fields leading to our understanding of human locomotion. This research has led to big strides in research on human physiology. In the mid-1800s, German physicist and physician Hermann von Helmholtz’s research on the eye showed that how we perceive the world depends not just on passive reception of sensory signals, but on motion. In 1891 Christian Braune, a professor of topographical anatomy at the University of Leipzig, together with physiologist Otto Fischer, published a book on the human gait that drew from years of their experiments on centers of gravity and mass in segments of the human body. In 1899 American psychologist Robert Woodworth laid the foundation for our understanding of neural feedback systems; around the beginning of the twentieth century British physiologists Michael Foster and Charles Sherrington first used the term “synapsis” (now “synapse”) to describe connections they thought would exist between neurons. How we see and understand the human body has changed tremendously since the work of the Weber brothers, all built on their foundation. But what hasn’t changed is the metaphor — seeing the human body as a machine, as mechanical. While the research of the past couple of centuries has led to scientific advances and greater understanding of the body, its base assumptions might be holding us back. It’s not just that the Weber brothers and others couldn’t take into account senses like interoception and the role that our internal physical states might play in our mental states. It’s that a mechanical view of the body avoids the very idea of embodiment in the first place, of the reality that our bodies and minds are interconnected, and that the whole is in turn connected with the physical world around us. How we interact with that world also has an effect on our locomotion, on our physical being overall. Embodiment research and incorporating ideas like interoception might be the new Weber-ish foundations of locomotion studies. How we move through the world is informed very much by how the world moves through us, and vice versa. What can understanding that tell us about our physical and mental existence throughout our lives?