In the mentoring Robert Steijn
asked me if I do the exercises with the eyes closed, and if so, why? He
considers eyes open as a more natural state even in improvisation with
proprioceptive basis, and that there is “something strange” happening with the
self-experience when the eyes are closed. He told me he prefers to keep them
open, when he goes on a journey and meets his ghosts.
I saw him in performance, and he was closing
his eyes many times for extended periods, and I am wondering now, was he trying to make
it more dramatic for the audience or more real for himself.
The thing about the
vision is that it’s not as neutral as it seems,
because it simply overrides the other senses. The brain decides to trust
it more, maybe because it seems more intersubjective than for example tactile
and proprioseptive sensations.
But even then, vision executes
more power over the other senses than just sustained domination. It can include
them as part of the synesthetic image created, but mostly if they support the
visual assumption. Generally “proprioceptive
signals which overtly disagree with the
visual ones are not used for adaptation, while those which largely agree
with visual ones are used to enhance adaptive recalibration “(Pipereit,k. et.at
2006). The use of mirror in Ramashandran’s therapy of phantom limbs pain is
very much based on this assumption of the visual overriding the proprioceptive.
One man lost his hand in a violent accident provoked
by a machine. The man was operated and did not have phantom sensations
afterwards, but when he received a very expensive and good looking prosthesis he
started to have terrible nightmares, and could not sleep anymore. He decided to
resign from prosthesis and everything went back to “normal”.
It seems that having the
“arm back”, the trauma of losing it so abruptly was back too. I wander if by
some proprioceptive exercises with the eyes closed he could actually develop a
sufficient distrust in his visual system, which otherwise provokes the traumatic
illusion of the prosthesis being a real hand, by using the still active phantom
potential of the lost hand. Could it be that through some exercises the man at the same time could see the hand, but
not allow his proprioceptive phantom sensation merge with it?
