Divide and Conquer

How Separating Coordination from Exertion Turns Movement Into Intelligence

If you’re not careful, moving "slowly" can sound like a downgrade. A concession. A softness that can't stand up to the sharp edges of real life. But under the right conditions, slowing down creates the conditions for a neurological upgrade—a way to access clearer data, safer coordination, and keener intelligence in the way you move.

In Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell tells a remarkable story. Tracing the biological roots of choice, he shows how higher level organisms evolved the capacity to decouple perception from action—to imagine and predict before reacting. In humans, this process gets highly refined. We don't just move—we anticipate movement. We simulate outcomes. And over time, we learn what to expect from ourselves and the world.

This isn’t some abstract idea. You’re doing it right now—especially if you're in a Feldenkrais lesson. When I teach Awareness Through Movement (the formal practice of refining coordination), I'm not interested in performance. I'm interested in prediction. I'm interested in your ability to sense, imagine, adjust, and learn—in real time.

That’s why we slow down. Not for drama, not for aesthetics.

For the leverage.

In the Feldenkrais Method we go “slower than you know how to do it” because that’s where prediction sharpens. When you remove urgency, your brain gets the space to compare what you think is about to happen with what actually happens. You become a better forecaster of your own movement, and that’s the real heart of coordination. Not muscle strength. Not joint flexibility. Forecasting. This is also called knowing what you’re doing.

And when your knowledge improves—when your nervous system learns to predict better—you stop just executing movements and start evolving them. That's when biological fitness isn’t just strength or endurance, but precision, adaptability, reversibility and smoothness. That's how Awareness Through Movement becomes a neurological training for agency.

Because as Mitchell writes, learning is metabolically expensive. The brain doesn’t waste its time remembering noise. It remembers what matters. What surprises. What holds significance. But it can only do this in a specific context. That’s why Awareness Through Movement deploys attention-getting strategies: constraints, timings, patterns, positions, even asymmetrical ones—not to challenge you arbitrarily, but to elevate your awareness, to make the surprising feel safe and the habitual feel optional.

You’re becoming a better agent. A freer one.