What is Sensory Motor Amnesia?
Sensory Motor Amnesia (SMA) is a term coined by Thomas Hanna PhD, the creator of Hanna Somatics, also referred to as Clinical or Essential Somatics. What is Sensory Motor Amnesia? In a nutshell, Sensory Motor Amnesia happens when your brain and nervous system--specifically your sensory motor cortex, the part of your brain that controls and senses movement--have lost voluntary control of how your body functions. All motor patterns --good or bad--are learned. Let's back up a bit and talk about how we learn to move in the first place. When we are actively learning motor patterns--from holding our heads up as babies to swinging a golf club, from eating with a spoon to riding a bike-- neural pathways become well established between your brain and muscles. This learning period takes place in the conscious part of the brain that is eliciting voluntary actions. Over time, once you have mastered a pattern, the learned pattern shifts from the learning part of the brain to the low