Pre-linguistic incompetence

Development is nothing more than experiencing the unfamiliar so often that it no longer tastes like risk.

You have no word for what you’re searching for until you find it. It’s not that someone doesn’t know they can’t do something. Rather, they lack the entire internal map on which that “ability” exists. No concept, no feeling, no interoceptive reference, no point of resonance. The goal is not out of reach—it lies beyond imagination. We are talking about a form of pre-linguistic incompetence. The nervous system does not (yet) recognize the quality being sought.

In the past, this applied not only to students but also to many teachers. Both operated within the same limitations and perpetuated a worldview of ignorance. In their eyes, the body was a machine: levers, forces, angles, output. Control through tension, stability through fixation. A logic that blocks potential. The opportunities of elasticity, timing, and permeability were overlooked.

The body is an intelligence. The nervous system behaves opportunistically. It prioritizes usefulness. What works is retained. “Good enough” is enough. Compression instead of permeability, tension instead of elasticity, control instead of trust. Excellence is a risk. It is fragile. As long as the old safety program is active, the high expectations our biomechanical architecture would allow appear antagonistic.

The architecture of the body promises excellence. The nervous system secures survival. Once a demanding experience generates a sense of safety, the original solution becomes obsolete. Opportunistic pragmatism downregulates, and the ability to transform less tension into greater performance begins to unfold. That is the neuromotor high score.

Is this a dirty little secret of the internal arts? Doesn’t anyone who embarks on the long path of counterintuitive reconstruction need a massive “payoff” on their horizon of expectation? And isn’t that payoff precisely the feeling of omnipotence when wave mechanics click?

From blind groping to a map of navigation

The categories of neuroathletics radically transform these processes. “Finding words” happens in advance. Today, we have concepts like proprioceptive clarity, phasic versus tonic musculature, and joint centration available long before the relevant experiences. These are the coordinates on the path to breakthrough. If a student wobbles in IRAS today, we don’t just say, “Keep searching.” Instead, we explain: “If the posterior semicircular canal in the ear isn’t delivering clear signals, the adductor takes over stabilization—it ‘locks down’ to compensate for the uncertainty.”

The body responds to uncertainty with compression. Protective tension is often mistaken for stability. In reality, it is an archaic safety response of the nervous system—a neurophysiological “bracing” to survive. While this strategy protects us from breaking, it simultaneously blocks our elasticity. The program emerged in life forms with which we no longer share much biomechanically.

Protective tension is an energetically expensive chronic state. The nervous system continuously fires impulses to the musculature to maintain the “armor.” But what armor?

Compression as protective tension follows a logic that worked perfectly in the deep sea or in early armored organisms. Maximum density meant maximum resistance to external pressure. Aquatic organisms withstand immense outside pressure through increased internal pressure or through structures that are non-compressible. When we respond to psychological pressure today with protective tension, it is almost as if our system is trying to generate hydrostatic counterpressure to avoid being crushed. Our earliest vertebrate ancestors developed neuropeptides and hormones to regulate neural signals more than 500 million years ago. These early mechanisms were designed to react instantly in a world full of predators and extreme physical conditions. Freezing is one of the oldest responses to life-threatening danger.

A biomechanical anachronism

We are using hardware optimized for marine or early terrestrial life forms in a world that requires elasticity and complex adaptation. Once, rigidity meant protection against mechanical forces. Today, rigidity blocks the cognitive, emotional, and subcortical flexibility we need. The proverbial saber-toothed tiger in evolutionary psychology is often just a placeholder for a much older, cellular fear embedded deep in our tissues.

The chronic background tension of a nervous system in “deep-sea mode” is hard to measure. For the person experiencing it, it feels normal—because they may no longer even know elastic states.

We are trying to solve time pressure and social anxiety with a response that was originally designed to prevent us from being crushed by a prehistoric predator.