Sherry I don’t know if you remember, but at the beginning of the summer I found The Thinking Body on the bookshelf and asked if you had read it and if you liked it, and you answered, “It was revolutionary for its time.”
Of course that didn’t answer my question and the next question was, well what does it mean today?
Mabel Todd’s, The Thinking Body, is the founding literary source for a method called Ideokinesis that uses imagery to understand the functionality and relationship among parts of human anatomy. Essentially these images are analogies, which today are commonplace in any good pedagogy. Analogies reframe complex concepts to make the concept accessible to a learner. Research in psychology tells us that they help people understand because an analogy makes the material relevant. It offers a package of related information the learner already knows in which to incorporate this new knowledge. Association with already learned material strengthens understanding of new material. When the “material” is a behavioral or muscle pattern, a mover cannot voluntarily make the nervous, muscular, and skeletal systems operate in a new way because those processes are automatic, but the body does know how to embody the flowing of a river. The image provides an association, like an analogy, but this is a kinesthetic qualitative perceptual shift that calls different muscles to act, enabling the mover to embody a new pattern to initiate change.
So maybe the approach through imagery is not understood as a revolutionary method of education today. Similar approaches exist in many other fields. The insight of Ideokinesis, however is that this method is distinct when it is applied to movement learning because what is being learned exists in the physical realm, and information is absorbed through imagination and kinesthetic sense, instead of reading or memorizing.

-Julia Moser-Hardy