Rose Baker - Cabeza de Vaca, Movement and Memory

    While watching the film Cabeza de Vaca in class, Dr. Redick talked about the significance of the fetal position and how ingrained it is in our unconscious memory. In the film, the character collapses into a fetal position in grave disappointment after his failed escape. In the past, I’d interpreted the fetal position purely as a protective gesture, as the strongest physical response to despair, but our discussion approached it partly as a grasp for comfort, and partly as a transitory expression, a physical representation of rebirth. The resemblance to an infant journeying from the womb to the outside world was mirrored in the change in self-perception he was forced to face in coming to terms with his circumstances as a slave, and identity as a full member of the environment he’d regarded as alien. The idea was that the fetal position was not simply an instinctual gesture, but a repeated action born from the unconscious memory of fetal life and birth.

I feel that physical memory versus mental memory is a topic that has fallen in and out of conversation over the past century, and one I’ve seen pop up throughout a variety of topics. Recently, it’s been more culturally relevant as a result of books like The Body Keeps the Score, and similar discussions of the complexities of psychological and physical trauma.

The idea that bodily positions can have more of an impact on our brains and memory than we generally consider reminded me of how developmental psychologists used to theorize that autism and other developmental disorders were caused by skipping stages of infant development, like crawling. My mom has told me that when she was young, my grandma took part in an attempt at therapy for a neighbor’s kid. Every week a group of women would come over to help their—already walking—child learn to crawl, each taking a limb and moving the baby through the motions he’d never practiced. While ineffectively applied for autism, similar treatments are often used for paralyzed or previously comatose patients. Even being puppeted by an external force, the simple movement of the limbs can reignite lost connections between the brain and the body.

For another example of the body informing the brain, studies show that body language doesn’t just signal to others how you view yourself and what you’re feeling but can alter your own perception of your identity and emotions as well. We often think of our bodies solely as a tool of the brain, as an instrument to transmit external input and sensation, and afterwards as a tool for our expression. But our bodies have their own narrative that is an input of its own. Our actions of slouching, smiling, shouting, feed into our bodies’ expression, and circularly, the expression teaches us how we should feel.

Every position we inhabit throughout life teaches us something, instills something into our being that we often can’t even perceive.