Feldenkrais and Sensory 'Maps'--Carie as a Bat

I love the Feldenkrais eye lessons, and even more lessons that attend to the visual processing as much as the ocular muscles. When I was taking such a series I woke up one morning and in that nanosecond between sleeping and waking I 'saw' — I imagined visually — my cervical spine and occiput and its muscles and stuff as though from all sides at once. I still have a trace of that in my mind. I saw it the way an echolocator would, well, hear it. (Holy Perception, Bat Man!) And so I have spent years groping my way toward that insight, from anatomy to predictive processing: what would it be like to be the blind mountain biker not just for the bike ride but for abstract thinking? If bats were capable of abstract thought, what would their biases be? If snakes know their world from vibrations through their belly, what does a snake-map look like? (And doesn't everyone think about stuff like this while washing the dishes?) The bat or snake thought experiments aren't just whimsy. They ask whether the structure of a sensory system shapes the structure of thought. Likewise, when we ask how people with dominant foveal habits differ from people with dominant peripheral ones, my musing isn't totally impractical. That kind of question takes us to the next one: are we in choice? Can we influence the structure of our perceptions, lean into a wider repertoire of perspectives, moods and insights? Yes. That's one of the things Feldenkrais gets at.