ABSTRACT
It is not easy at first to have your mind, body and emotions respond as someone other than you, a character, would in the unfamiliar and artificial circumstances given by a playwright. You will need to become conscious of how all these mechanisms function within your own psychophysical system. Modern science offers you many insights to enhance your personal experience of your psychophysical instrument. In science, the study and understanding of the functions of living things or their parts is called physiology. The study of how the nervous system, including the brain, affects physical behavior is called behavioral neuroscience. An emerging field that combines psychology, philosophy, and biology is called cognitive neuroscience. Physiology’s concept of proprioception, inner awareness of the body in space, balance and motion, and kinesthetic awareness, an external awareness of movement patterns and proximity to people and space, are also useful in actor training. We will refer to the inseparable connection between the mind, body and spirit as psychophysical, a continuous multi-directional communication system. In books with a scientific basis the term bodymind is sometimes used; however, because Stanislavsky preferred the term psychophysical, we primarily use this term. To develop your psychophysical conditioning and responsiveness, we will draw on the above scientific fields along with new research on rewiring habits, as well as Stanislavsky’s training, which relied partly on Ivan Pavlov’s (1849-1936) conditioned
response. You will need to become conscious of how all these mechanisms function within your own psychophysical system. Another field of wisdom on connecting the mind-body stretching back thousands of years is yoga. Yoga, you will see in Chapter 4: Yoga and Acting, is foundational to much of Stanislavsky’s System.
