Sensitivity as a Trainable Skill

How attention to muscular sensation develops body awareness, proprioception, and perceptual skills that build across every domain

Patrick Oancia

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WordPress Metadata

Excerpt: Most physical practice is oriented outward — what the practice looks like, what it accomplishes. The internal experience of doing the movement is rarely on the curriculum. This article describes the skill of attending inward, beginning with muscular sensation at rest, and how that sensitivity carries into every domain that depends on noticing what isn’t asking to be noticed.

SEOPress Title: Sensitivity as a Trainable Skill: Body Awareness, Proprioception & Perceptual Skill SEOPress Description: How attention to muscular sensation develops body awareness, proprioception, and perceptual skills that build across every domain. By Patrick Oancia.

Categories: Body Awareness, Movement & Cognition Tags: Body Awareness, Proprioception, Sensorimotor Learning, Baseworks Method, Inner Attention, Muscular Sensation, Perceptual Resolution, Attentional Carryover, Sensitivity

Featured Image

Title: Sensitivity as a Trainable Skill — Article Banner (with title overlay) Alt text: Article banner for Sensitivity as a Trainable Skill by Patrick Oancia CDN: https://media.baseworks.com/blog-articles/sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill/baseworks-sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill-featured.webp

Hero Image (ACF article_image)

Title: Sensitivity as a Trainable Skill — Studio Practice Banner (no overlay) Alt text: Patrick Oancia in a Baseworks studio session, kneeling with arms crossed at face level in a Star form, two practitioners in foreground/background CDN: https://media.baseworks.com/blog-articles/sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill/baseworks-sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill-banner.webp

In-Post Infographic (between “How that sensitivity builds across domains” intro and the developer example)

Title: Attentional Carryover — Radial Infographic Alt text: Attentional carryover: a radial diagram with five domains — developer, CEO, teacher, farmer, forester — connected by hairlines to a central cyan circle representing the shared skill of sustained attention CDN (WebP): https://media.baseworks.com/blog-articles/sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill/baseworks-sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill-attentional-carryover.webp CDN (PNG fallback): https://media.baseworks.com/blog-articles/sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill/baseworks-sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill-attentional-carryover.png Source SVG (archive only): originals/baseworks-sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill-attentional-carryover-original.svg on the NAS — 16:9, scales cleanly. PNG/WebP rendered from this via rsvg-convert at 1920×1080.

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What I keep noticing across disciplines

I’ve dedicated a lot of time to learning different skills throughout my life. It started with sports and continued through music and other disciplines that all demanded a lot of focus. In parallel, I’ve worked directly with thousands of people in person at our studio in Tokyo and workshops in other countries. Across everything, one observation has stayed consistent in a way that’s always been obvious. Most people doing physical practices are focused on what it looks like. The body becomes something to manage from the outside, tracked through what the practice visually presents, what it accomplishes, what the aesthetic result of the effort is. The shape, the achievement, the thing you can point at. What’s actually happening internally sits in the background or doesn’t register at all.

The pull toward the visual is reinforced almost everywhere. Open Instagram or TikTok and a substantial portion of what circulates is physical performance eye candy. Fit and agile bodies. Skills executed at a fast pace. The internal experience of what the person feels like from the inside isn’t part of what gets shared, because it can’t be photographed. The visible has gravity, and more often than not shapes both what people look for in a practice and what they consider to be valid.

This isn’t a critique of physical practice. The forms of activity that emphasize visible outcomes have value. What I’m pointing at is a quieter observation that becomes harder to ignore the longer you spend in a teacher/practitioner type of collaboration. The focus on internalization is rarely included in a meaningful enough way in the structure of most pedagogical environments. There’s no obvious reason it would be. Strength, flexibility, and technique all produce results that someone else can see. Inner attention doesn’t. It doesn’t show up in a photograph, and it doesn’t translate into the categories most physical practice is organized around. So it gets left out, even by disciplines that respect what it means.

If you want to test what internalizing sensations feels like, there’s a useful place to begin that most people have never checked.

A muscle at rest, and the vocabulary problem

What does a muscle feel like from the inside, when nothing is happening to it?

Not when it’s sore. Not when it’s stretched. Not when it’s burning from effort. Not when it’s loaded. Just at rest. Sitting there. What’s the sensation?

For most people, the honest answer is nothing. The signal isn’t absent. The attention to detect it hasn’t been built. Muscular sensation at rest is a perceptual territory that almost no part of mainstream movement education touches, and the result is that an entire layer of internal information sits unused in most people’s experience of their own body until they die.

Look at the words available for muscular sensation. Sore. Tight. Stretched. Burning. Cramped. Fatigued. Each of them describes some event the muscle is responding to. For many, the sensory vocabulary for muscles is entirely event-based. If nothing is happening, there’s no word for what’s there. The vocabulary problem and the perceptual problem reinforce each other. Without the vocabulary, there’s no attention on it. Without attention on it, no language develops.

This is a perceptual blind spot, not an absence. Over time, some people find a quiet, neutral presence that was there all along. In her research, Asia Shcherbakova has been calling this the hum: a low-grade tonic sensation present in resting muscles, intensifying proportionally with even mild contraction. It’s a perceptual finding that sits outside existing scientific frameworks. That’s why it’s mostly unnamed in the literature she’s been investigating for several years.

The hum, or whatever you find when you check, becomes available only when inner attention has somewhere to show up. The first time, most people find silence. Over time, the silence starts to fill in.

Sensitivity is what’s actually being trained

A muscle at rest is the most overlooked place to start. The signal is so subtle that almost nothing else in daily life prompts you to look for it. There’s no soreness to manage, no stretch to lean into, no burning to outlast. The only way the signal becomes available is through sustained attention, without any external reward.

Internalizing this attention is the actual skill. The muscle is its training ground.

What develops over time is what we call perceptual resolution: a finer-grained capacity to detect distinct internal sensations and hold attention on them long enough for something to register. The perception-gap makes a parallel case from a slightly different angle, framing it as sensory resolution that develops through structured practice. The two ideas describe the same underlying capacity from different sides. Perceptual resolution is what changes. Inner attention is what builds it.

Two specific techniques in Baseworks generate the sensory information this kind of attention can work with. Micro-Movements, the subtle positional adjustments used as calibration mechanisms, keep the body engaged with continuous internal signals. Distributed Activation, the simultaneous isometric engagement of multiple muscles in conscious co-contraction, amplifies proprioceptive input across the body at once. Both are structured ways of internalizing attention.

These techniques allow attention to be developed deliberately, over time, in a domain where the signal is subtle, the feedback is internal, and nothing external rewards you for paying attention. A capacity built without external reward is one that doesn’t depend on external reward to be applied later, in any other domain.

How that sensitivity builds across domains

The capacity being trained doesn’t stay confined to the body. It carries. There’s a good term for this: attentional carryover. A perceptual skill developed deliberately enough in any domain becomes accessible in others.

A software developer reads code more carefully, catching the small inconsistency that would have become a bug. Knowledge of the codebase isn’t usually what makes the difference between catching it and missing it. The difference is whether attention stays on a passage that doesn’t look like it needs scrutiny on first read.

A CEO senses temperature in a room before deciding how to open a meeting. The information was available to everyone present. The attentional capacity to register and use it is what separates the decision that makes itself obvious from the one that misfires.

A preschool teacher notices which child has gone quiet in a way that’s different from yesterday. Nothing obvious has happened. The signal is small enough to miss, and missing it has consequences that a stronger external cue would have prevented.

A farmer reads the soil and the weather and the look of a crop as a single ongoing pattern, not a checklist. The early indication of a problem is rarely a single event. It’s a slight shift in something easy to overlook, picked up by a person whose attention has been trained over years to register changes most people would walk past.

A forester picks up the early signs of a tree under stress before they’re obvious to anyone else. The skill isn’t taxonomic knowledge alone. It’s the capacity to keep noticing.

These are all instances of the same underlying skill. Sustained attention on signals that aren’t shouting for it. Most of what matters in any field sits in that category. The obvious things take care of themselves. The subtle ones need someone whose perceptual range has been trained to notice them. And there are very few domains in modern life that train this kind of attention deliberately. Physical education, when it’s oriented toward inner attention rather than external outcome, is one of them.

The science underneath

The experiential side of this work is what I’ve laid out here. There’s a research side as well, and that’s where Asia Shcherbakova comes in. We met in Tokyo in 2015. After her first month of practicing with us at the studio, she agreed to join the team as a research associate, with the role of mapping the outcomes of Baseworks onto the natural sciences. Since then, her contributions have included research, the creation of educational materials, and a number of articles that connect the practice to the underlying science. One of those articles, The Mystery of Proprioceptive Awareness, covers the neural mechanisms behind muscular sensation at rest, the original survey data showing how widespread this perceptual phenomenon is across practitioners, and the structural reasons it has gone largely unnamed in existing scientific literature on proprioception.

If you’d like to dig a bit deeper into the concepts and research in person, there are two upcoming opportunities:

• May 11, 2026, Montreal. Asia presents at the 27th Neuropsychology Day at The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute). Her talk is on degrees-of-freedom control and predictable failure patterns in non-habitual movement. Free and open to the public.
• June 8 to 9, 2026, Padova, Italy. We’re presenting related research at BRNet 2026, to the body representation research community.

To experience the practice itself in person, our events page lists upcoming sessions, and the Primer program is the structured entry point for working with the method.

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Related

• The Mystery of Proprioceptive Awareness — Asia’s research-grade companion piece
• What You Can’t Feel, You Can’t Change — Patrick’s earlier piece on sensory resolution as the bottleneck
• What Does a Muscle Feel Like from Inside? — Brain Fodder seed (April 9, 2026 newsletter) that this article expands
• Four years deeper into a mystery — newsletter where the seed Brain Fodder appeared
• Baseworks at Neuropsychology Day 2026 — Asia’s May 11 presentation at The Neuro
• BRNet 2026 — Padova, June 8–9
• Proprioceptive Awareness — core concept
• Distributed Activation — referenced technique
• Micro-Movements — referenced technique
• 3 Types of Body Awareness — framework introduced at BRNet
• _blog-index — blog articles index

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Draft Notes

Status: Round 5 — clean copy, 2026-04-22. All red font stripped (changes accepted); “esthetic” → “aesthetic” applied per Patrick’s note. Body voice-clean and ready for photo selection and WordPress publishing. Author: Patrick Oancia Word count: ~1,300

Source material:

• Brain Fodder “What does a muscle feel like from inside?” (April 9, 2026 newsletter) — original seed
• what-does-a-muscle-feel-like-from-inside — earlier draft outline file (this article supersedes it)
• mystery-of-proprioceptive-awareness — Asia’s scientific article (cross-link target, source of “the hum”)
• 2026-03-perception-gap-body-awareness — Patrick’s adjacent earlier article (cross-link target, source of “sensory resolution” parallel)
• Patrick’s voice + KB conventions (memory and voice guides)

Terminology real-estate strategy (deliberate, per advisor):

• New terms introduced and italicized at first use, then reinforced: muscular sensation at rest, sensory vocabulary, perceptual resolution, inner attention (also in subtitle, used 6+ times verbatim), attentional carryover
• Baseworks-owned terms reinforced by exact name: Micro-Movements, Distributed Activation, Proprioceptive Awareness, “the hum”
• Avoided as branded framing (crowded by adjacent modalities): embodiment, mindful movement, somatic
• The intent is to start building Baseworks as the source-of-truth for these terms over time, across multiple articles

Outstanding (in order):

• Patrick editorial pass (in-progress)
• Voice/terminology revision based on edits
• Photo selection and compression
• Upload to WordPress media library
• Create draft article on baseworks.com via /publish-article
• Set categories, tags, SEOPress meta, ACF fields
• Patrick final review and voice check on staged WordPress draft
• Verify all URLs are live before publication
• Add inbox item for Asia (cross-domain audience: McGill / BRNet community)

Open question for Patrick:

• Should we add an inbox item proposing a separate scoping task for a terminology real-estate map in voice-guides/ (a tracker of which Baseworks terms are owned vs. crowded vs. open territory worth claiming)? Asia probably wants to weigh in given she’s mining the proprioception literature.

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Editorial Notes

2026-04-22 — First draft generated

• Drafted by Claude Code on Patrick’s Mac in conversation with Patrick. Title, subtitle, section outline, opening paragraph, voice rhythm, and terminology targets agreed iteratively before drafting. Body written in one pass against locked parameters. Cross-referenced against 2026-03-perception-gap-body-awareness and mystery-of-proprioceptive-awareness to ensure distinct territory. Voice-checked against unified guide + Patrick’s guide (no em dashes, contractions throughout, no contrastive AI defaults, no “embodiment / mindful movement / somatic / fitness / coaching / transform” framing).

Round 2 revision (2026-04-22)

• Reviewer: Patrick Oancia (in-file edits) + Claude Code on Patrick’s Mac (subsequent voice/principle pass)
• Patrick’s in-file edits (preserved): Tightened sentence rhythm in section 1; reframed several phrasings (“oriented outward” → “focused on what it looks like”; “valuable” / “valid”; “movement practice” → “physical education”); added darker close to muscular sensation at rest sentence (“until they die”); shortened forester closing; replaced “lands” metaphor in CEO line (“the decision that makes itself obvious”); added personal context paragraph about Asia’s joining the team in 2015 in section 5; flagged closing line as repetitive; flagged Micro-Movements paragraph and opening sentence as too long.
• Claude voice/principle pass (red font marks all changes):
  • Section 1: Broke the long second sentence into two; fixed typos (“on the internally” → “internally”; “in a fast pace” → “at a fast pace”; “what the person is feels like from the inside, isn’t” → “what the person feels like from the inside isn’t”).
  • Section 2: Tightened “some people eventually find” → “some people find”; collapsed “It isn’t a figure of speech. It’s a perceptual finding…” into a single positive statement; cut the “For the purposes of this article, the point is simpler” scaffolding opener.
  • Section 3: Joined the fragment “A muscle at rest is the most overlooked place to start Which is why its useful” into a single grammatical sentence; rewrote the Micro-Movements paragraph to fix the fragment, parallelism, and typos (calibratioin → calibration; mechanizms → mechanisms; mucles → muscles); cut redundant “That last part matters” sentence.
  • Section 4: Removed two stray commas (comma splice in section opener); rewrote the developer example for clarity per Patrick’s flag — clearer mechanism (knowledge isn’t the differentiator; sustained attention to a passage that doesn’t visibly need scrutiny is).
  • Section 5: Rewrote Patrick’s Asia-joining paragraph in the article’s voice rhythm; clarified that The Mystery of Proprioceptive Awareness is one of her articles, not her only one (“a number of articles that connect the practice to the underlying science… One of those articles…”); fixed typos (“dig in a bit deeper” → “dig a bit deeper”; “in person’” → “in person”; “there two” → “there are two”); added hyperlinks for events page and Primer program; cut the closing “they sit next to each other on purpose” line per Patrick’s note (the experiential-vs-research framing is now established at the top of section 5 by the Asia paragraph, so the closing was redundant).
• Patterns extracted from Patrick’s edits and applied throughout (also added to voice guides):
  1. Drop appositive clauses that don’t add information (“X, one that Y, Z” → “X that Y Z”).
  2. Eliminate “land / lands / land on” as a metaphor for attention or arrival; use direct verbs (show up, register, form, develop).
  3. Cut negative-referencing openers (“X isn’t Y. The thing is Z” → just say what it is).
  4. Tighten emphasizers and intensifiers (“more than it sounds,” “real value,” “actually” where redundant).
• Voice guide updates pending: Two new entries proposed for VOICE-GUIDE-UNIFIED.md (the “land” metaphor ban and the appositive-clause pattern). Patrick to approve before incorporation per VOICE-GUIDE-GOVERNANCE.md.

Round 3 revision (2026-04-22)

• Reviewer: Patrick Oancia (in-file edits and comments) + Claude Code on Patrick’s Mac (response pass)
• Patrick’s in-file changes (preserved): Tightened the opening practitioner-count sentence further (cut “well over ten thousand at this point” → “thousands of people in person at our studio…”); replaced “pedagogical structures” with “pedagogical environments” to fix the awkward repetition; rewrote the section 2 vocabulary lines to remove the remaining “lands on” instance (“Without the vocabulary, there’s no attention on it. Without attention on it, no language develops.”); split the section 4 closing into two sentences (“…to notice them. And there are very few domains…”); struck through “which is why it’s useful” in section 3; struck through the cross-link sentence in the Micro-Movements paragraph (his note: section 5 already references The Mystery of Proprioceptive Awareness, so the earlier mention is redundant); struck through “Practice” in “Baseworks Practice onto the natural sciences” (preferred just “Baseworks” in that spot); flagged the section 2 “perceptual finding” sentence as one that could be made simpler.
• Claude response pass (red font marks Round 2 + Round 3 changes — Round 3 changes overlay where applicable):
  • Section 1: Closed the trailing space before period in “teacher/practitioner type of collaboration”; closed double-spaces in “even by disciplines” and “what it means.”
  • Section 2: Simplified the long compound sentence per Patrick’s flag — “It’s a perceptual finding that sits outside what existing scientific frameworks have made room for, which is why it’s mostly unnamed in the literature she’s spent the last several years investigating” → “It’s a perceptual finding that sits outside existing scientific frameworks. That’s why it’s mostly unnamed in the literature she’s been investigating for several years.” Removed the inline comment.
  • Section 3: Removed the struck-through “which is why it’s useful” closing; removed the struck-through cross-link clause in the Micro-Movements paragraph; moved the perception-gap link inline to where the article is named in the preceding paragraph (preserves the cross-link for SEO and readers without duplicating Asia’s article reference).
  • Section 5: Removed the struck-through “Practice” — final reads “the outcomes of Baseworks onto the natural sciences.”
• Capitalization rule (reinforced from voice guide v1.9): When “Practice” follows “Baseworks” as a compound noun, capitalize the P (“Baseworks Practice”). The word “Baseworks” alone is preferred where the compound is unnecessary. Memory pointer added so future drafts catch this at generation time.
• On the “land/lands” ban: Patrick confirmed the v2.7 voice guide rule in this round and clarified the spirit — “It’s just not good to use the goddamn thing everywhere.” The remaining single instance preserved earlier in section 2 has now been removed by Patrick’s edit, so the article is clean of the metaphor.

Round 4 revision (2026-04-22)

• Patrick’s in-file changes (preserved): Final tightening pass on the opening line (cut “and across workshops and events in other countries” → “and workshops in other countries”); shortened the perception-gap link text from “[The perception-gap article]” to “[The perception-gap]” inline; restructured the developer-example closing sentence to put “on first read” at the end (“a passage that doesn’t look like it needs scrutiny on first read”) instead of as a parenthetical mid-sentence.
• Claude small flags (red font): Two minor consistency proposals offered for Patrick’s accept/revert.
  • Section 3: “Internalising” → “Internalizing” (American spelling per voice guide v2.1).
  • Section 4: Dropped the soft intensifier “actually” in “Most of what actually matters in any field” → “Most of what matters in any field” (per voice guide guidance against intensifiers that don’t change meaning).

Round 5 — clean copy (2026-04-22)

• All red font tags stripped — Patrick accepted both R4 flags and all earlier red-marked changes from R2 + R3.
• “esthetic” → “aesthetic” in section 1 per Patrick’s note.
• Section 5 framing confirmed: Patrick chose to drop “Practice” entirely from “Baseworks Practice onto the natural sciences” — the line now reads “the outcomes of Baseworks onto the natural sciences,” covering the broader work in its entirety rather than narrowing to one named module.
• Status: Body is voice-clean against unified guide v2.7 draft + Patrick’s guide. Ready for photo selection, WordPress draft, and newsletter draft.

Round 6 — media added (2026-04-22)

• Featured image (with title overlay, social/OG card) compressed from Patrick’s PNG → 1200×630 WebP + JPG, uploaded to CDN at media.baseworks.com/blog-articles/sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill/baseworks-sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill-featured.{webp,jpg}.
• Banner/hero image (clean studio shot of Patrick in Star form) compressed → 1920×1080 WebP + JPG, uploaded to CDN. Embedded inline at the top of the body via markdown ![](banner.webp).
• Attentional Carryover infographic built from the design bundle (infographic-for-new-article from claude.ai/design, variation 3 — radial). Patrick selected this variation. Implemented as: source SVG → PNG (via rsvg-convert at 1920×1080 for sharp stroke rendering) → WebP. Uploaded to CDN. Embedded inline in section “How that sensitivity builds across domains” between the section opener and the first domain example. Originally drafted as inline SVG (per the vault memory rule), but Patrick called it: PNG/WebP is more portable inside WordPress, so the inline-SVG block was removed in favor of the standard markdown image embed.
• All five domain illustrations rendered correctly: developer (code window with cyan-flagged line), CEO (table with figures, one cyan), teacher (children with one cyan quiet child), farmer (crops with one cyan stressed plant), forester (trees with one cyan stressed branch).
• Source SVG archived to NAS at originals/baseworks-sensitivity-as-a-trainable-skill-attentional-carryover-original.svg for future re-rendering if needed.