Dramatic Personae

RF – Roland Fischer
ID – Ida Rolf
JS – Julian Silverman
JL – John Lilly

RF. To start out, just a short recapitulation of the discussion yesterday of the sensory motor ratios in relation to the perception-hallucination continuum at higher levels of allotropic arousal…

Instead of saying that hallucinations are perceptions without an object, we define hallucinations and dress as high sensory to low motor ratio phenomena, specifically we can say that dreams and hallucinations are intense sensations with a simultaneously inhibited and blocked ability to “check out” those intense sensations in terms of voluntary motor performance in physical space time. The experience is in mental space-time, and the checking out would be in physical space time. However, the ability to do so is blocked and inhibited you are unwilling and unable. This is happening, of course during the dream, where there is little movement, and you are not interested in checking out what you are experiencing. If you are really insisting on verifying, you wake up.

JS. Just to get more towards what Ida is doing — both you (RF) and I in different places have mentioned the relationship between situations in which there is sensory overload, and minimal motor activity, whether it be a sensory isolation situation, or a dream state, or an acute schizophrenic catatonic state, or a psychodysleptic drug state. In all of those instances, there is high sensory input or increased data content with out increased information processing.

RF. Yes, in poetic terms “a lot of inner sensation” which means high sensory to motor ratios.

JS. Now what we have been interested in electromyographic work (hooking up electrodes to various muscle groupings in the body) is that in high arousal states there is often not increased large muscle activity, but the muscles themselves show tremendous increases in electrical potential. Associated with increases in electrical potential is not activity but a kind of shutting down of large muscle movements. At the same time there are changes in muscle chemistry. In the psychedelic drug state, for example, there are increases in excitation in primary sensory pathways leading to the brain, increases in electrical activity in the muscles, and increases in the amount of a muscle enzyme called creatine phosphate kinase (CPR). All of these occur together in the hallucinatory state…

RF. What is blocked is the voluntary motor performance the willingness and the ability to go and “check out”. But simultaneously, there is increased muscle action potential.

JS. Yes. Now Meltzer suggests, on the basis of his CPK findings, that one can predict days beforehand when a man is going to have an acute exacerbation of his schizophrenic reaction when there are increases in the muscle enzyme. You also can produce this kind of increase in CPK in rats by overcrowding them so that their movements are severely restricted. The implications of this for space travel are important. You can have guys freaking out not because they simply have been sensorily deprived, but because the sensory to motor ratio has changed so that there is not enough motor activity relative to the amount of sensory information being registered.

Here there occurs a break in continuity as a result of the first part of the tape ending. When recording resumes, the conversation has shifted…

IR … and I think that this business of the very small muscles, the very deep muscles is primary to the original movement.

RF. You are right also, for during the dream phase there is tooth grinding, all kinds of little movements. All of the gross voluntary movements are blocked, and the little movements abound.

IR. That’s right. When you wake up in the morning after a good nightmare, what is it that gives you that feeling of tension? It is the shortening of the cartilaginous muscles, and it doesn’t take much shortening. This is what gives the guy a headache, and he says, “My head is just being pulled.” All of this sort of thing is shortening in tissue that can only be called muscle tissue, but isn’t ordinarily thought of as muscle tissue by people who don’t really work closely with the body.

JL. Ida, which muscles are you talking about, can you be more specific in terms of anatomy?

IR. Yes. I’m talking about any intrinsic muscles, muscles that go between bones instead of connecting across joints. Muscles that are very deep lying next to the spinal vertebrae, the rotatores, etc., the fibres that hold the cranium to the occiput, and so forth. These are shiny, cartilaginous structures that the ordinary person doesn’t think of in motor terms, but they are all involved in this, and I think that they form another agonist and antagonist system. I believe that the short muscles as a whole balance against the outside long muscles, and individual short muscles balance against individual long muscles. I think that this is the balance that the golfing induces that is new to all of you and gets you looking at this with wide-eyed wonder because it is just a different balance that you have never had, except by the accident of good luck some time or other (i.e., a balance of extrinsic and intrinsic systems, ed.) People have always been looking at balance in terms of “the rectus femoris is balanced by the gluteus and the psoas, etc.”

RF. To compare it with something that we already know, would you say, then, that the state of mind associated with golfing is closest to a dreaming, hallucinatory state.

IR. Yes, I think so. And from time immemorial the metaphysicians have been saying, that the whole thing starts as a mental process, as a mind process. But this is where it starts, this is the closest to that “mind” thing that you get in the body, I think.

JL. Excuse me, is there any relationship between the control of the short muscles and the long muscles and the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system?

IR. I think so. About 20 or so years ago there were some people who put out a short paper claiming that the short muscles were innervated though the sympathetic and/or parasympathetic, and the long muscles through the central nervous system. They made quite a good case of it, but at the moment I didn’t know that 20 years later I was going to want that paper, and I didn’t hang on to it… Doesn’t somebody know about this paper? If this is true, you see, then you have another one of the agonist-antagonist systems. At least you have a balance of the general type of agonist-antagonist.

RF. How long would this dreamlike state persist after the Rolfing?

IR. It depends upon the individual and they have got to go into it deliberately. I mean they have to be willing to release old muscle patterns and accept a new muscle pattern, and put themselves into their bodies and organize themselves in terms of the balance that we specify.

RP. They must be “field-independent” people who easily float from one layer of consciousness to another ..

IR. Well, they don’t do it so easily’.’ (laughter) It’s an interesting experience as anyone who has had it can tell you.

JL. I found that it would go on for three weeks at least.

IR. Well look man, you have only had seven hours!

JL. After the seventh hour it took me three weeks to get out of that dream state.

IR. Well, I’ve never heard of anybody taking that long or being that much into it, In fact it is usually the case that they will be marching around the room for fifteen minutes, and they will manage to stay in it for that long. But then they get to thinking about the fact that after all they have to take the car over to the garage, or they have to get the car out of the garage, or do we have enough stuff in the house for supper? …

RF. It’s just like with the LSD, you give somebody a good stiff kick in the and out with the experience’

IR. That’s right. All you do is to get them talking, and they will go back into their old characteristic motor patterns.

RF. This is beautiful, because if hallucinations and dreams are defined as high sensory-to-motor- (ratio) experiences, it follows that any motor activity has to stop the hallucination. In dreams you know that if you try to move, you awaken. I have referred to a paper in which a therapist tells an hallucinated patient to hum, and that will stop hallucinations. The use of the speech muscles themselves will stop hallucinations.

IR. That’s the same sort of story.

JS. You know, it has been observed that during the height of an acute schizophrenic reaction, patients will report not being able to move, or being afraid to move because when they move, perceptual patterns dim-organize. The information analyzing system is overloaded (when you move) to the extent that familiar perceptual experiences are fragmented. It appears that movement generates more sensory input through kinesthetic feedback activity which, in such a highly aroused state, may lead to a “shutting down” of higher cortical activity.

JL. This relates to the acute schizophrenic kids who want things always the same. They get completely freaked out if the cup isn’t on the table just as it was yesterday.

JS. An unfamiliar stimulus pattern is something that has more sensory and less structured perceptual characteristics. In the case of the highly aroused nervous system such a stimulus pattern “overloads”.

JL. There is also the competition for apparatus, i.e. which parts of the central nervous system are devoted to hallucinatory and which to cognitive kinds of processes. If you are disconnected from your external reality, you don’t have a sensory-motor problem to work out in the external reality. Instead, you have that machinery available for the internal hallucinatory. And other kinds of processes. And if that machinery is available, then you use it. Then when something comes up in the external reality, you’ve got to turn that machinery back to its proper use proper use in the sense of solving something in the outside world.

RF. So you need a positive feedback to maintain …

JL. Not “need” or “not need” you just do. You turn that machinery over to that problem, because that’s the problem.

RF. This is what you do when you are doodling, for instance, when you are listening to a lecture. (Geometric patterns often come out of this). On a still higher level of arousal you dance, you sing, and the trance dance would be the highest rhythmic motor activity to maintain. To maintain a state you need rhythm, and doodling would be the lowest level arousal rhythm. In order not to be deflected, when you tune in to a lecture, for instance, you maintain a steady sensory to motor ratio. To maintain this at higher and higher levels for hours would be poetry, rhythm of the language. To maintain a feeling state, various types of poetry arc all maintained, because it is sometimes not so important what the words are, but whether they come in the same rhythm to maintain the feeling state. Speech is not something which has to communicate through symbols, sometimes it communicates through its very rhythm.

JS. You know we seem to be on the way to elaborating a model of personality development that substantially takes into account sensory-motor learning from the earliest days of life. From the beginning of life learning one’s reality requires a sensory-motor memory. Consider, for example, Piaget’s strong emphasis on the most primitive of sensory-visceral experiences, the breast. This very early developed schema in the child’s experience is one that has important motor as well as sensory aspects to it. Indeed, every schema that is object-related has a motor component. In the course of development there is simultaneous structuring of both sensory and motor aspects of experience, and this organismic process necessitates a memory system which is operative from the earliest days of life. Until recently most psychologists maintained that when a child was a year old he couldn’t remember experiences and things well because he had diffuse concepts about them. This argument is moat unsatisfactory and downright misleading. There are memory systems which are in tact in the first days of life, they are simple physiological response systems, and are inferrable from habituation responses to sensory stimuli. (The works of Wagner Bridger and his collegues at Albert Einstein Medical School are a good example of this effect.) We do remember, and our earliest memories are sensory motor ones.

Ida Rolf’s work is consistent with the premise that when you speak about development, both normal and abnormal, it needs to be done in terms of the integration of brain areas in relation to body areas. In the course of development, it is not simply that “the brain tells the body what to do”, the body also “tells the brain”.

RF. It is as though if hypnosis is one way to produce a state through sensory channels, then you would approach this from the motor component.

IR. Definitely.

RF. You can put golfing and hypnosis on two opposing ends of a continuum of sensory-motor ratios. You can influence the ratios by raising the sensory, and lowering the motor or by raising the motor and lowering the sensory.

NOTE: The editors disagree with RP’s hypothesis, because in the actual Rolf processing, the ratio is high sensory to low motor, not the opposite, as RF suggests.

IR. Well, of course there is a quality difference in the golfing that is not simply on a plane do you know what I mean? The whole quality change that you get in the muscles and in the output of muscles offers another variable that you’ve got to take into consideration here. It is not just a shutting off, and a putting in.

JS. In a preliminary analysis of brain wave patterns (EEG evoked response amplitudes before and after golfing) in nine out of thirteen subjects, we found amplitude increases several fold. Evoked responses got larger. We would interpret these changes to mean that following golfing there was a disposition to be aware of sore of the environment than before. Other of our evoked response measures are consistent with this inference.

RF. I can see more and more analogies between the hypnosis and golfing, because you cannot hypnotise somebody if he doesn’t want to. Your subjects also have to submit to you and be willing to play along, don’t they.

IR. I wouldn’t say that that’s true, would you?

JS. No because once you are down on the mat you can fight being intruded upon until you are blue in the face, and it’s O.K. Eventually you will stop resisting.

RF. But you cannot do this with everybody. In other words you cannot hypnotise somebody to re experience something if the fellow is just a small standard deviant and can only remember, and not re experience. You cannot make the most of intense sensory experience from everybody, only from some.

IR. Yes, but you can make a Rolf experience from everybody.

JL. Let me correct the rumor that seems to be developing here that golfing has only to do with the motor systems.

IF. Thank you.

JL. So far as I can make out the hyper-active portion of this is sensory. Anybody who has been golfed knows this. For example, the fifteen thousand different kinds of pain that Rolf can bring out. They are absolutely incredible in their complexity, and in their relationship to your past life, and all of your activity. The concentration on muscles that’s the final result. But during the process, all of the central nervous system is active autonomic and cortical and everything else, and the central gray, especially.

JS. Here is a good example of how such dualities as mind and body or sensory and motor can become confusors, rather than clarifiers. When you talk about integration the way Dr. Rolf does you are talking about order and pattern, and you are talking about sensory and motor variables in a very complex interrelationship.

JL. You are re wiring the sensory side just as much as you are the motor side.

IR. There’s no doubt about that.

JL. You are re-organizing overall neuronal patterns all through the nervous system while you are doing the Rolfing.

IR. All right, but I will tell you something in great secrecy. The reason you talk about this in sensory-motor terms is chat it is respectable to talk about it that way, and people will listen to it, whereas if you talk about it the way you are talking about it now they’ll put us in the hoosegow!

RF. You will remember how hypnosis has been discredited a number of years. People are afraid. The psychedelic drugs likewise have been discredited by misusers and over publicity.

IR And then they ask, “Well, what is it that does it?” and all you can say is, “Oh, well, it is a change in the ‘circulation’.” And we know perfectly well that this is the greatest lie (understatement; ed.) that has ever been told!

JL You’ve been re-wiring the whole central nervous system, really.

IR That is right.

JL. Don’t tell anyone.

JS. Then there is the problem of adequate scientific explanation. When you are doing that kind of talking, you usually don’t ever say, “I am interested in doing an experiment: I will consider this variable my independent variable, and this one my dependent variable.” The question ‘What are you changing?” can then be answered in terms of the variables being studied. Well, you are changing body chemistry, you are changing brain wave pattern, you are changing the amount of action-potential in a particular muscle group, etc. …

JL. You are re-wiring all of the dendrites.

JS. Perhaps eventually you could get down to saying that.

JL. Please pay attention to where you are trying to go, that ‘a all I am asking. I think you are already there.

JS. Well, what I get worried about is the temptation to use metaphors and other “impressive statements” (like that one) that make it too easy to believe. As a scientist I want to be able to say, “looking at all our data we see the activity taking place in this area, and in that area. Now what does the overall pattern lead us to believe?” I think one of the most interesting things to come out of our actual data analyses of Rolf project subjects is that the correlation matrices of sensory perceptual, electrophysiologic and biochemical variables which we see in “normals ” are not the correlation matrices we see in the people who have been golfed. The only way we can interpret it is in terms of what Ida has talked about for years in terms of increasing individuation of these systems in relation to each other. Loosely speaking. they no longer operate as one bunch of “glompy” systems working together in some fashion that keeps you alive until you are 55 or 65 and then you are gone. What appears to have occurred is an increased separateness of system functioning in relationship to each other. System functioning is, at the same time, more independent and apparently more effectively integrated, with less energy being used.

With this whole spectrum of variables from chemical to perceptual, we come out with essentially the same kind of statement that Ida makes from her own experience of working with the body itself clinically.

RF. Have any body image measurements been made? That would be something interesting.

JS. No. That’s a very good idea, just to get a sense of how people change their own images of their body. For example we know when you put an acute schizophrenic into a sensory deprivation chamber, and then you remove him several hours later and assess body image changes (Fisher -Cleveland test), you find that the acute schizophrenic subject shows a more effective, more integrated body image with less “holes” in it than when if they had been subjected to ordinary everyday sensory information overload.

RF. This would be a good thing to do. The results would fit into the already existing body of knowledge, which would make them respectable and easy to understand …

JS. Then the next thing is to try some of your people …

RF Established “maximisers” and established “minimisers”.

JS. Yes. Run them through golfing and then ask the question, “What kinds of differences appear in these very different perceivers’ sensory-motor systems?”

RF. It would be good, because on some of these people, we have draw-a-person tests and brain damage tests, we have spatial distortion tests, and whole batteries of others including *TI, and Hyers-Briggs, and if we can’t do anything more with them, the last thing, the ultimate would be Rolfing.

IR. It’s always been that way! (laughter) When they are ready to die, then we get them! But as a matter of fact some of the most dramatic results have been on brain injured children. My son did quite a project on this some years back. He had one ten year old child who couldn’t do such a thing as take care of his own toilet needs. He was doing first grade work and inside of three months the boy was doing fifth grade work including such things a quadratic equations, and was leading a fairly normal life. The problem was that the actual speech center was injured.

RF. In all schools you don’t need an intact speech center to communicate.

IR. That’s right. And anything that he could write was all right with him — as long as he didn’t have to talk.

RF. So miracles happen.

IR. Miracles are happening all of the time. But you see there is no way of understanding this. It just doesn’t make “sense” that if you take one of these little kids that looks like a penguin and straighten him out so that he looks like a human, he should then be able to take his normal place in terms of mental accomplishment. It’s difficult to “explain” in terms of “circulation”.

JS. Does anybody want to make any questions or comments on anything that we have been talking about?

You see, what I think we need to develop is a different model of man than currently exists. One that emphasizes awareness, and differentiation and integration in relation to both body and mind. It is really sorely limiting to talk about these Issues separately. So how do you make an effective marriage of phenomenology and the biopsychological sciences. Well, the kind of approach that you, Ida, have been teaching and the kind of approach that Fritz Perle developed provide one sound philosophical base, for asking, answerable research questions in biopsychological terms. I feel that we are making progress in this direction but it is going to take a lot more studying about how the whole organism works. We have many questions.

RF. People up to now assumed that there is such a thing as mind although they wouldn’t be able to say what it is and there is a body. They would speak about psychophysical correlations, which is nonsense, for if you don’t know what ‘blind” is, then how can you correlate that with what you do know about the body. Also, the correlation between the sensory and the motor is highest in man, so you cannot speak about such dualities. Such speaking is just didactic in order to be able to discuss things.

(It appears to me) that first there are chemical reactions, then there are small circuits, the circuits get bigger and bigger, and when the system becomes sufficiently complex, then the word ‘mind” appears, because new behavior is displayed. You are only aware of new behavior from a certain point on. So mind is not something separate, but an integrated function of parts. The complexity at a certain point is so great in a self-referential system, that some circuitries are involved in the interpretation of smaller feedback systems. This is how we evolved, from small systems to higher complexity. Of course we think now that we are the most complex and the most admirable system, but wait, maybe 200 more million years, and then what will happen? Then we will sit at a new Esalen seminar, and discuss how to further define our baselines a little bit better.

IR. It won’t take as long as that.

RF. Are you in a hurry?

IR. Yes.Roundtable Rap on Rolfing