© Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
The following is an excerpt from an article in Bonnie’s book, Sensing, Feeling, and Action.
Traditionally, in many cultures, learning is considered to be a function of the nervous system. It is my experience that the nervous system is only one aspect of learning – that it is first a recording system and therefore the last system to “know.” It records and stores patterns of movement and behavior and, once stored, it can retrieve them and thereby control experience through habit, memory, and projection. The nervous system records present experience, integrates it with other previously stored experience, interprets it within the context of its history, holds it in memory, and projects the coordination of the whole into the future as expectation.
For new experience to be obtained, release of the nervous system control is necessary so that old habits are no longer directing the outcome and new cellular experience can come into being.
By cellular experience, I mean initiation and awareness directed locally by the cells. Cells learn new experience and tap potential patterns of behavior stored in themselves and in the nervous system. This dialogue between present cellular and past nervous system experience is what I call “learning.”