What Babies Know (And What We Teach Them to Forget)

What Babies Know (And What We Teach Them to Forget)

Watch a baby in a crib for a few minutes.

There is constant movement. Small, subtle, continuous.

The feet lift and lower. The torso shifts. The head adjusts. The arms reach.

There is fidgeting — but not restless fidgeting.

This is something else.

It is responsiveness.

The baby is doing something essential:

gathering sensory information about the body’s position in space.

Every tiny movement activates the proprioceptive system — the body’s sense of itself.

The vestibular system — the inner ear mechanism for balance and orientation — is continuously refining itself through these small adjustments.

The nervous system is learning:

Where am I?

How am I organised?

What happens if I shift?

This is not a random movement.

This is intelligence.

This is how the nervous system organises itself in relation to gravity.

And then, gradually, we ask it to stop.

Sit still.

Don’t fidget.

Hold still.

Be quiet.

And something begins to change.

The continuous feedback loop — proprioception, vestibular input, motor response — is interrupted.

We teach children that staying still is better than responding.

That holding a position is better than adjusting.

That external instruction matters more than internal sensing.

Neuroscience now gives us a language for this:

When natural adjustments are repeatedly suppressed,

The nervous system learns to tune them out.

This is called learned non-responsiveness.

The signals don’t disappear —

but the brain stops using them reliably.

We haven’t improved the body.

We’ve dampened its feedback system.

By adulthood, the result is familiar:

Stiffness.

Holding.

A reduced connection to the very systems that allow coordination.

People come to us collapsed, braced, or rigidly held —

not because something is broken,

but because the feedback loops have gone quiet.

This is where the Alexander Technique begins.

We are not imposing a new coordination.

We are reactivating responsiveness.

When we work with Primary Control — the relationship between head, neck, and back —

we are working with the same organising system the baby was developing in the crib.

When we invite inhibition — the pause before automatic reaction —

we are giving the nervous system a chance to sense again.

When we offer direction, we are not imposing positions.

We are inviting the system back into its own capacity to organise.

An invitation to teachers

Notice what is missing.

Not only what is tight —

but what is not happening.

The small proprioceptive adjustments that never occur.

The responsiveness that has gone quiet.

The body held in pattern instead of sensing and responding.

Our work is to help reactivate these systems.

By creating the conditions

in which the nervous system feels safe enough to respond again.

Because nothing essential has been lost.

It has only been quieted.

And it is still there —

waiting.