An instruction can make complete sense and the body still won’t follow it. Patrick Oancia, founder of Baseworks, and Ksenia Asia Shcherbakova, its director of research, give a talk in London, open to the public, on why that happens and what it shows about how people learn.

What the talk is about

What the research shows

Many people picture movement as a chain of command: the brain decides, and the muscles carry out the decision. Research in motor control describes something different. In the affordance competition hypothesis of Paul Cisek, the brain prepares several possible actions at once, and perception specifies which of them are available to choose from. Asia connects that picture to her research on body awareness: telling bodily sensations apart is a skill people develop, and it comes before being able to relate to those sensations or use them.

How the method was built

The Baseworks Method grew out of years of teaching in which every instruction had to meet one requirement: it had to produce the intended movement reliably across very different people. When an instruction failed, it was rewritten. When it kept failing after the wording had been ruled out, the problem was usually something the learner couldn’t yet perceive. Patrick describes how that iterative refinement, with more than 10,000 learners, shaped the method, and what it shows about teaching and learning any skill that depends on the body.

Who it’s for

The talk is for anyone interested in how people learn: movement educators and performers, occupational therapists and others who help people relearn everyday movement, people interested in health and physical practice, and creatives looking at how they develop their own skills. You’ll try a few short exercises in your seat, so no special clothing or preparation is needed.

Format

Doors open at 18:45. Patrick and Asia’s talk starts at 19:00 and runs for one hour, including questions.

Previous presentations

The talk draws on research Asia presented this year at the 8th Annual Body Representation Network (BRNet) Meeting in Padova, Italy, and at SCAPPS 2026 in Ottawa.