The body is not a machine
Locomotion studies are ready for a new foundation
The human body is subject to innumerable metaphors: Our brains are computers with immense processing power; our bodies are machines that need to be tuned and honed and oiled and optimized.
But metaphors are just that — metaphors. While they’re useful for interpreting and explaining the world to ourselves, they aren’t always reflective of reality. They’re not always real. The effects of believing in them, though, can have very real-world effects.
The body as a machine, as mechanics, is a perfect example of this. What’s known as “locomotion studies” or biophysical mechanics, is hundreds of years old. Its most established foundations were built by looking at the human body as so much discrete, barely connected parts, and in many ways we’re still left with the legacy of that understanding.
Some of the most in-depth studies on locomotion were done by the Weber brothers — Ernst, Wilhelm, and Eduard Weber, born into an academic family in Saxony (what is now Germany) in the early 1800s. All three of them were fascinated with human locomotion, as I wrote about in A Walking Life:
“It was with Wilhelm, a professor of natural philosophy, that Eduard, the youngest brother and an anatomist and physiologist, co-authored Mechanik…
