Recently, I had the pleasure of hosting the one and only Ido Portal on the Huberman Lab podcast. I know many people are familiar with Ido and his work, but for those of you that might not be, Ido Portal is credited with being the world expert in all things movement and the person who coined the term "movement culture," which is the gathering in and around movement practices that span from sport to martial arts to dance, gymnastics.

Ido and his colleagues have essentially combined all the different forms of movement that exist out there and expanded upon them to create patterns of movement that utilize all aspects of the nervous system and that can be incorporated not just into sport and dance, etc., but also into daily life.

Having Ido on the podcast offered the unique opportunity to learn directly from him, and so rather than just sit in front of a couple of microphones, which we did, we also spent many hours doing movement practices, the first of which actually involved no movement. It began by lying on the floor, and Ido gave me and Odelia, one of his colleagues, instruction as to how to move out of a motionless state in very deliberate ways, as well as incorporating things like facial and eye movements, which felt very unusual, I confess, but quickly led to an expansion into other forms of movement that were dynamic and involved multiple people.

You could call this dance or you could call this sport, but really what it involved is setting a small number of ground rules or constraints as to how one could or could not move, dictated to me by Ido, and that forced me to move in very specific ways that sometimes were very uncomfortable to me, not painful, but uncomfortable, meaning that they didn't necessarily bring me to a place of reflexive action.

I had to think very hard, but very soon I noticed I was able to carry out the movements constrained by those rules in a reflexive way, which was very surprising and told me that the neural circuits for those particular movements had to have existed before that training with Ido because there's simply no way they could have wired up very quickly in the moment.

So essentially what Ido was doing was revealing to me or allowing me to reveal to myself the different patterns of movement that are contained in the language of my nervous system, but that I was unaware of prior to the work with him. Then we moved on to some other sorts of dynamic movements involving high-level coordination of using feet and hands to stomp on tennis balls, bounce them up, grab them with the hand that was dictated in the moment by Ido.

That was challenging at times, to say the least. Other patterns of movement involved an extreme amount of balance, again, my balance not being terrible, but certainly not being at a high-level skill and certainly not having done these sorts of moving practices before. I struggled quite a lot, but found that within each movement practice at the point of struggle, there was often a breakthrough into getting it or suddenly feeling as if my body could perform the movements, whereas a few moments before I couldn't.

One of the more challenging drills, I guess you would call it, or practices that Ido put me through was one in which he would change the rules within the moments of movement so that one had to both be paying careful attention to the instruction and to the movement mid-movement and change those movements, which as a neuroscientist, I can tell you, has to involve a lot of what we call top-down control, that is engagement of the four brain circuits for anticipation and learning and rule acquisition, and to combine those with reflexive action and deliberate action.

And what I discovered was that there were two things that really helped with that. One was to so-called clear the mind, but of course nobody knows what clearing the mind is nor how to do it. What this involved for me was making sure that I did not generate any movements until the command was delivered and then taking a pause before generating the movement that I was instructed to do, which at first felt slow and clunky, but clearly led to faster, more accurate execution of the instructed movement.

And the second one was to try and forget the rule as soon as I learned it, because indeed the rules were changing very quickly. There were many other teachings and learnings throughout the day, that is Ido teaching and me attempting to learn, and by the end of the day, I confess I felt quite differently in my body.

What do I mean by that? I became not hyper-conscious of every movement, but certainly far more aware of my posture and the various movements that I make, and I have to say that has continued not just for several days or weeks, but for several months after that single day of movement practice with Ido, which I find remarkable and encouraging and has led me to start to incorporate some of those same movement practices into my daily routine.

Needless to say, it was a very special experience for me to get direct movement instruction from the luminary of movement, Ido Pertal, and I also couldn't help myself but to ask Ido to perform some movement practices for us because he is so unbelievably skilled, and he most graciously did.

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