In the last blog posts, I have already shared some information on the topic of "learning with the senses". To illustrate the importance of our senses - also in personal development - the Humunculus is ideal.
The Humunculus represents a fundamental truth about the brain: This is what a human would look like if his or her body parts were as large as the brain areas they control.
This Humunculus is a sensory representation of the human body. It represents the weighting of sensory perception in information processing in the brain (cerebral cortex).
The areas that are shown oversized, such as the eyes, but especially the mouth and the hands indicate the most sensitive areas in our body. There are more nerves than average there because our brain spends more resources processing the information that comes in here. The hand and mouth thus occupy more than half of our brain area.
All the information coming from the different senses affects certain skills in the brain: Motor planning, coordination, spatial body awareness, self-confidence, (emotional) self-regulation, reading, mood, concentration, balance, abstraction skills, language, rhetoric, planning skills, multidimensional thinking, creativity, etc.
For example, when we exercise our fingers and rehearse a new exercise that involves thinking, the mind is working at full speed. When fingers and hands are purposefully moved, we are doing as much for blood flow to the brain as if the whole torso were active.
The higher (cortical) centers, which are responsible for abstract-logical thinking, language, etc., can only work without interference if the sensory integration of the sensory information is successful. I will describe exactly how this works in my next blog post.
This all applies to our private and professional lives, because after all, we take our bodies along with our senses everywhere we go.
So why not finally integrate the body and its functions into our everyday life and personal development? Our body is the basis for learning, concentration, development of new skills... So it is only logical to use it as a central pivot in Embodied Coaching and to pay more attention to it in general.
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