Communicability

Communicability is the degree to which a movement instruction reliably produces the intended movement across diverse learners, including learners with low body awareness (LBA).

The term addresses a fundamental problem in movement education: the motor equivalence problem (Bernstein, 1967), where any instruction under-specifies the movement because the body has far more degrees of freedom than the instruction can constrain. The movement parameters that are not explicitly specified are filled in by the learner’s sensorimotor system based on their existing habits and biases — often producing a movement that seems correct to the student but differs from the intended movement in ways that matter.

Three Levels of Failure

Communicability can fail at three levels:

1. Under-specification: The instruction did not provide enough information. The learner simply was not told what to do (or not do) with certain body parts. In typical movement education, this is the norm — instructions specify a target position and leave the path and the rest of the body unspecified.

2. Perceptual capacity limitation (primary bottleneck): The learner cannot access the sensory information they would need to execute the instruction. They may understand the words but cannot feel whether their pelvis is parallel, whether their spine is straight, or whether they are contracting a specific muscle group. Without this sensory feedback, the instruction is not actionable.

3. Habitual override: The learner’s existing motor patterns override the intended movement. Even when the instruction is understood and the relevant sensory information is theoretically available, well-learned movement synergies execute automatically, producing the habitual rather than the intended movement.

Note on the Term

“Communicability” is used here in a specific, technical sense. It is not about the clarity of language or the eloquence of the instructor. It refers to the entire chain: verbal/visual instruction → the learner’s interpretation → the learner’s sensorimotor execution → the resulting movement. All links in this chain must succeed for communication to succeed.

Reference

Bernstein NA. The Co-ordination and Regulation of Movements. Oxford: Pergamon Press; 1967.

Related

• Iterative Refinement — the process by which Baseworks optimized for communicability
• Emergence — what emerged as a result of optimizing for communicability
• Perceptual Skills — the primary bottleneck to communicability is perceptual
• Micro- and Macro-Movements — micro-movement emphasis reduces instructional ambiguity
• The Six Principles — principles emerged from the communicability optimization process