Q & A (your classmates’ questions… attempted answers)
Tell me more about how this might help care partners?
Well, this is why having the kind of team we’re building for the class is so exciting—I don’t know the complete answer, I only have some hunches. But together, we will have a good handle on this:
(a) Enjoyment of the class itself. Yes, this class has some serious aspects, but Feldenkrais lessons are relaxing and innately pleasurable—in a way they are all about finding pleasure for yourself. It would be wonderful to offer that to care partners. (But, as you see below, I think this could be more than a spa hour, as important as that is.)
(b) Everyone—everyone—can benefit from more time in the perif head- and heart-space. What this series aims to teach, if nothing else, is how to be aware of the transition from foveal to peripheral awareness—not just in vision, but in how it affects your heart rate variability, your endocrine balance, your nervous system, your mood and thinking. And knowing that, to be able to be more in choice about which state to linger in. For most people this is a very learnable skill. (I am curious about Snow’s ‘gem states’ and how these would make to what I call a perif-head-heart space.)
(c) Being heard and respected - Care partners live with knowledge that researchers and clinicians don't always have. In the before/after class discussions, there is space for their insights = appreciating their expertise, not just "teaching" them.
(d) The depth of impact - "Of course a person who has lost peripheral vision will be startled" is important insight. This class could take the compassion and understanding deeper—”oh, when my partner is jammed into a foveal attitude, these are all the ways they lose their emotional resilience.”
(e) The counterbalance - Care partner stress often involves hyper-focus (vigilance, managing, problem-solving) - exactly the foveal narrowing their partner is experiencing involuntarily. Learning to drop into peripheral awareness as self-care AND as a way to model/support a calmer overall system could benefit the care partner and the care partnership. Peripheral attitudes are contagious.
(f) Teaming? Picking up on a suggestion from a gerontologist, perhaps there are some parts of these lessons that the care partners could do together. Really—that is what hand-under-hand is, in Feldenkrais terms a ‘Functional Integration.’ Almost every lesson we’ll do will have potential for teaming.
(g)Perhaps adaptations? There might be ways to reclaim or slow some of the peripheral vision loss and there certainly are ways to adapt to some of the consequences to the loss. For instance, balance—and the coordination between vision and the inner ear—suffers but this can be remedied to some extent. These lessons will test different ways of mitigating for balance, for changes in breathing that come with a foveal shift, and so on. These are practical and positive shifts the care partner might support. (I put Ruth Asawa’s tree sculpture on this entry because looking at fractal, nature-ish images leans into the peripheral state.)
‘Health Clowns’?
This question came from an expert in memory care. There is a whole cadre of clowning that relates to health—children in hospitals, cancer care, and elder health clowning being three major categories. It doesn’t seem to be as well known in the US as it is in Canada, Australia and Europe. If you are a memory care expert / dementia navigator/ gerontologist—or care partner!—you may find one of these videos to be of interest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tQUiHUxd5I&list=PLyew1KggTnQ48frIaLed9JQhjUArCvqa9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STcyPJEcA40
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qgAHihCfOQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g3b26qqxb0
If you are wondering why I am so keen to include Elder Clowns in this class series = collaboration, it is partly for their insight on their play with people living with dementia, and partly because, always, we could be at risk of taking ourselves too seriously. The topic is serious! The outcome may be really important. And. We can do it with a (usually) light heart. (I’ll confess that Feldenkrais, if not gerontology, tends to be pretty earnest. But play is part of periphery and it is certainly part of learning.)
I’m not trying to embrace Clown skills in this series. Just trying to explain why I think having a Clown involved would be nifty. And, of course, from the Elder Clown’s perspective I think that understanding movement and the peripheral/foveal issues would be essential.
Cause and Effect? Cure versus Adaptation?
Very interesting email about the inter-relationship of fovial/perif gaze, fovial/perif mood and just pure cognitive architecture. And once you see relationships, then there is an enticement to think about prevention etc etc. And of course, for most of this stuff, we just don’t know. (Systems diagram coming up!) There is no doubt that there are negative reinforcing spirals at work: stress, age, impacts to the brain (and the other thinking places—heart, gut, spine, vagal nerve?), progressive lenses, screen time, less movement (less proprioception), stiffer shoes (less vibration), loss of balance, isolation, fear.
What About Normal Peripheral Vision Loss?
Yes, we lose a few degrees a decade. And it may be noticeable starting at 40. At 70’s to 80’s, their may be a 20 - 30º loss from the edges. And yes, it is a combination of field of vision (an eyeball, nerve thing) and mental processing (a brain thing). But the optometrist only measures the field of vision, so this underreports the problem. And yes, there’s oodles of information about training and gizmos that can reverse some of the decline. (Younger people more ‘reversible’ than older.) What’s not much researched: cultural differences, underlying causes—progressive lenses, anyone?)—disuse, anxiety…? Lack of movement? My ai said: They went straight from "we can measure a problem" → "we can sell a solution" without the messy middle work of understanding the phenomenon. Sigh. The big article is old, almost as old as my eyeballs: Ball, K. K., Beard, B. L., Roenker, D. L., Miller, R. L., & Griggs, D. S. (1988). "Age and visual search: expanding the useful field of view." Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 5(12), 2210-2219.
How much of Peripheral Vision Loss is Cultural?
Aï. In a way, this overlaps the un-researched question above—what causes the loss and is it preventable? There appears to be almost no research across cultures or occupations. Except, this is cool: cultural differences in how people use their visual field show up early. By 12 months of age, Japanese infants already show different brain patterns than Austrian infants when processing background versus focal objects. East Asian adults attend more to context and background, while Westerners zoom in on focal objects. This isn't about wetware—it's about learned attention patterns, transmitted through something as simple as how parents point at picture books. Japanese parents reference background elements significantly more than American parents, and babies' brains wire accordingly. So when we talk about peripheral vision "loss" with aging, we might ask: loss compared to what baseline? A culture that's been training foveal-only attention for decades, or one that's been practicing holistic visual awareness since infancy? Nobody's studied whether these different lifelong attention patterns affect the trajectory of age-related peripheral vision decline.
Chua, H. F., Boland, J. E., & Nisbett, R. E. (2005). Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(35), 12629-12633.
Heise, M. J., Nayer, N., Brown, G. L., Trzecinski, B. H., & Fausey, C. M. (2025). Cultural differences in visual attention emerge in infancy. Infancy, 30(1), 108-134.
Köster, M., Kayhan, E., Langeloh, M., & Hoehl, S. (2023). Cross-cultural differences in visual object and background processing in the infant brain. Imaging Neuroscience, 1, 1-26.