Proprioception from Latin proprius, meaning “one’s own”, “individual”, and capio, capere, to take or grasp, is the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement” – Physiology of behaviour.
Despite not being in my word processor’s dictionary, proprioception is perhaps our most ever present sense – were you for some reason floating weightless in a pitch black, silent, dark and scentless chamber you would still be receiving constant sensory feedback from within your own body. We could not function without it and yet we take the fact that we can feel our own body’s internal movement very much for granted. Research is beginning to show however that some of us are much better at it than others. Also that some of us are much more adept at feeling some parts of our bodies than other parts, and that we can even lose this sense completely from some parts of our bodies. In fact most people today suffer from some degree from what Thomas Hanna called ‘sensory motor amnesia’ or the loss of the sense of what it is we are actually doing with ourselves. Continue reading