The Neuroscience Behind Baseworks

Body awareness as a set of trainable perceptual skills, and what that means for learning movement

How Baseworks connects to movement science

Baseworks is a movement education method developed through years of iterative refinement with 10,000+ learners. Every instruction had to meet one requirement: it had to produce the intended movement reliably across very different people. We call this communicability.

When an instruction kept failing after the wording had been ruled out, the problem was usually something the learner couldn’t yet perceive. Over time, this led the method to train perception directly. Ksenia Asia Shcherbakova, Baseworks’ director of research, studies what the method converged on and how it connects to current research in motor control and body awareness. This page summarizes that work.

Why an instruction can make sense and still not work

Any movement instruction leaves most of the body unspecified. The body has far more degrees of freedom than an instruction can name, a problem first described by the physiologist Nikolai Bernstein (1967). The learner’s nervous system fills in the rest from existing habits.

Research in motor control also describes how the brain chooses a movement. According to Paul Cisek’s affordance competition hypothesis, the brain uses what it perceives to prepare several possible actions at once, and these compete until one is selected (Cisek, 2007).

Asia extends that picture to the classroom. When a learner can’t tell two neighboring sensations apart, the brain falls back on the nearest option it can distinguish, and the person does a different movement while believing they’re following the instruction. Seen this way, a learner’s perception sets the range of movements available to them, and widening that range is a matter of training perception.

Three trainable kinds of body awareness

In Baseworks, body awareness is three distinct perceptual skills. Each can be developed with practice, and each is trained through specific Key Principles. The framework was identified by reverse-engineering the method: these are the capacities its refinement for communicability converged on.

Interoceptive awareness is conscious awareness of sensations related to internal organ functioning, stress, emotions and metabolic changes (Price & Hooven, 2018). In practice it includes noticing changes in breathing, exertion and arousal early, before fatigue or strain build up. It’s trained through Intensity Modification and Natural Breathing.

Localized proprioceptive awareness is the felt, localized sensation of muscle activity, present even at rest. It’s similar to touch in how specific it feels, but it arises from inside the muscle rather than from the skin. The most likely source is signals from muscle spindles that accompany muscle activation (Luu et al., 2011). This sensation has no everyday name and is rarely addressed in movement education. It’s trained through Distributed Activation with Micro-Movements.

Spatial awareness is the ability to encode, hold and reproduce body configurations without looking. Research on position sense shows that reproducing a remembered limb position relies on a central memory of body configurations, separate from live signals from muscle receptors (Proske & Weber, 2026). It’s trained through Gridlines & Symmetry and Fixing-Separating-Isolating.

More on each, with examples from practice: 3 types of body awareness.

Telling sensations apart comes first

Within each kind of body awareness, Asia’s research distinguishes three dimensions:

Discrimination: detecting a sensation, locating it, and gauging its intensity.
Appraisal: a person’s relationship to their sensations and states, such as trust, acceptance and aesthetic appreciation.
Use: acting on sensory information, for example in self-regulation, decision-making and learning.

In learners’ written and video accounts of their own outcomes, the ability to tell internal sensations apart was a precondition for relating to those sensations, and separately for using them. Appraisal and use didn’t depend on each other. This relation has been tested in the interoceptive domain; in the proprioceptive and spatial domains it reflects teaching observation so far.

This framework builds on work by Cynthia Price, Wolf Mehling and colleagues, who established body awareness as a research construct and interoceptive awareness as a trainable skill (Mehling et al., 2009; Price & Hooven, 2018). Their work concentrates on the interoceptive domain and on a person’s relationship to sensation. Baseworks applies the same idea of awareness as a skill to proprioceptive and spatial awareness, with discrimination as the first target of training. Four widely used body-awareness questionnaires have no questions on two of the three kinds of body awareness, so measuring discrimination in these domains is an open research task.

How the Key Principles relate to the science

The Key Principles were refined for communicability, and each one can be described in terms of established research. Some of these connections are well supported; others are hypotheses we are working to test.

Distributed Activation with Micro-Movements. Many muscles are engaged at once at low intensity, and small movements keep their state changing. This raises the signal from muscle receptors and keeps it from fading, which may make muscle sensations easier to detect. A pilot surface EMG measurement, presented at SCAPPS 2026, showed Distributed Activation raising activation in all monitored muscles compared with holding the same position in the usual way.
Gridlines & Symmetry and Fixing-Separating-Isolating. These specify many points across the body at the same time: the pelvis level, the ribcage stacked, the arms on one line. Parts of the body that everyday movement leaves free to vary become part of the task, which is the shift described by the uncontrolled manifold hypothesis (Scholz & Schöner, 1999). Fixing-Separating-Isolating moves one joint at a time without a fixed end position, so the learner monitors each change as it happens.
Intensity Modification and Natural Breathing. Working at lower intensity keeps attention available for subtle sensations; strong contractions are easy to feel, so high effort does little for fine sensitivity. Keeping the breath conversational and adjusting intensity in real time train interoceptive awareness directly.
Returning familiar movements to a deliberate stage. Everyday movements are highly automated, which makes them efficient and hard to observe. Baseworks breaks them into small components and asks new perceptual questions about them, which brings them back to the attentive, early stage of skill learning described by Fitts and Posner (1967).

Where the research has been presented

Neuro 2025, McGill University, Montreal: “Perceptual Skills in Movement Education.”
ICNN 2025, Nazarbayev University, Astana: “Perceptual Skills and Movement Miscommunication in Movement Education and Beyond.”
Neuro 2026, McGill University, Montreal: “Predictable Failure Patterns in Non-Habitual Movement: Evidence for Undertrained Degrees-of-Freedom Control.”
BRNet 2026, 8th Annual Body Representation Network Meeting, Padova: “Three Trainable Components of Body Representation.” Poster and panel.
SCAPPS 2026, Ottawa: “Perceptual Skills in Movement Education: Discrimination as a Prerequisite for Appraisal and Behavioural Change.” Poster.

Open research questions

Muscle sensation at rest. Conscious, localized sensation from muscles at rest is described by many practitioners and is little studied. How it arises and how it changes with training are open questions.
Changes in motor cortex. Practitioners report previously unified muscle groups becoming separately perceptible. Mapping motor cortex output before and after training, for example with TMS, could show whether this reflects reorganization.
Measuring discrimination. Tools that measure the ability to detect and locate proprioceptive and spatial sensations would allow these skills to be studied directly.
Fine movement detection and balance. Whether training to detect very small movements affects the automatic monitoring involved in balance, especially with age, warrants investigation.

What practitioners report

Practitioners most often describe developing body awareness as a central outcome. Common reports follow the three kinds of body awareness:

managing energy, stress and effort more easily, and recognizing their own state earlier;
a clearer sense of their own body, and satisfaction in how it moves;
more precise and vivid perception of space and position;
improvements in everyday movement and in learning new movement, including in other physical disciplines.

Baseworks also has observational experience with participants with conditions such as PTSD, autism and anorexia. This is observation, not controlled research. Whether sensorimotor skill-building can complement existing care in these areas is a question we’d like to study with clinicians.

Research collaboration

We’ve worked with educators, clinicians, motion capture specialists, musicians and artists. We’re particularly interested in working with:

researchers in motor control, body awareness and perceptual learning;
clinicians interested in sensorimotor skill-building as part of care;
specialists in motion capture, EMG and neuroimaging;
organizations interested in adapting Baseworks to their own setting.

The Baseworks Practice Platform supports remote training and consistent instruction across participants, which makes structured study designs possible.