Quote · Huberman Lab
Movement Practice to Strengthen Your Mind-Body Connection | Ido Portal
Where this was said
Art; Movement Models; Awareness Through Movement
At 2:29:17 · chapter starts 2:16:21
Huberman offers the Rothko example: neurologist Bevil Conway explained that Rothko succeeded by eliminating the white frame and combining colours in ways that generate colours the viewer has literally never seen before — a property emergent from the architecture of color perception itself. Portal generalises this: great artists throughout history distorted proportions and perspectives not from ignorance but from intuitive respect for how the brain actually constructs visual experience. [1] — Ido Portal "The Pinocchio illusion — where sensory manipulation makes you feel your nose growing — reveals that the body schema is immediately and radi…" 2:22:50 From there Portal makes a personal disclosure: shifting from thinking of the body as balls-and-levers to thinking in terms of fluid mechanics and pressure changes was a transformative leap in how he moved, occurring in the last decade. The Feldenkrais Method is cited as the clearest articulation of this principle — 'Don't tell me how I'm built. Let me model myself' — and Portal argues that the Pinocchio illusion demonstrates how immediately malleable the body schema is. He closes with a call to invest in model-updating as the single most powerful intervention available for physical health, emotional wellbeing, and cognitive performance.
The Pinocchio illusion — where sensory manipulation makes you feel your nose growing — reveals that the body schema is immediately and radically malleable. This means transformation is not years away. It is available right now, in this moment, through the right kind of attention.
Air sense — the ability to orient and adapt in mid-air — is what separates truly great action sports athletes from technically accomplished ones. It's not physical power or strength. It's the willingness to enter speed and chaos backed by a deep confidence in spatial orientation.
Soviet biomechanist Nikolai Bernstein found that workers who produced the most perfect results actually had more variety in the trajectories of their joints, while their end results showed less variance — more variety in process, more precision in outcome.
Soviet biomechanist Nikolai Bernstein discovered that the most productive factory workers showed more variety in joint trajectories than average workers, while their end results were more precise. More freedom in process, more consistency in output — the foundation of meta-movement.
