What you think, and what you think about matters…
More fodder for motor planning and other cortical activities. This article talks about what the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know” is all about; what you think can effect the outcome, but this article is focused on you and your actions, rather than the world around us.
This goes for gait retraining, rehab and a host of other things you may be trying to accomplish (even beyond the world of gait, if you can believe such a world exists!)
What you do matters bascially. And when you do it right, there is neurologic reinforcement of those motor behaviours. And when you do it wrong, meaning you cheat or compensate, there is neurologic reinforcement of those motor behaviours as well.
We often hear it is better to do something right the first time than to have to do it truly properly a second time. There is far more to it than correcting your ways. Now you have to rewrite another motor pattern, while the old one remains stored waiting for you to cheat or take a short cut the next time.
If something is worth doing, do it right the first time. This goes for gait and running form retraining. This is why running form is such a big business these days, so many have been running incorrectly, emulating improper motor patterns.
When Nike said “Just do it”…….we think they meant, “Just do it right.”
The Gait Guys
Front Hum Neurosci. 2011; 5 : 54.
Published online 2011 May 27. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00054
Abstract
Emulations, defined as ongoing internal representations of potential actions and the futures those actions are expected to produce, play a critical role in directing human bodily activities. Studies of gross motor behavior, perception, allocation of attention, response to errors, interoception, and homeostatic activities, and higher cognitive reasoning suggest that the proper execution of all these functions relies on emulations. Further evidence supports the notion that reinforcement learning in humans is aimed at updating emulations, and that action selection occurs via the advancement of preferred emulations toward realization of their action and environmental prediction. Emulations are hypothesized to exist as distributed active networks of neurons in cortical and sub-cortical structures. This manuscript ties together previously unrelated theories of the role of prediction in different aspects of human information processing to create an integrated framework for cognition.
