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I have just claimed that as we cultivate awareness, the quality of our movement improves. Why should that be? The answer lies in the feedback provided by our kinesthetic sense, a sense that many people are not even aware they have. We ordinarily think of ourselves as having five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. That’s what we were taught as children. But we actually have an additional sense, a sixth sense. The expression “sixth sense” usu­ally refers to insight or intuition. But insight and intuition are not sensory modalities at all. I am talking rather of a genuine sensory mechanism different from the ones we col­loquially recognize. That we have such a sense is clear from the following example. Suppose you and I each hold one hand above our head. I can see your hand but not my own. I cannot touch, see, smell, hear or taste the hand I am holding above my head, yet I know, by feeling, whether it is in the same position as yours. That is, we can know things about our bodies without deriving the information from any of the traditionally named senses. This information is sensory information in the strict sense: we have special nerve endings, mostly in our joints and con­nective tissue, that gather information about our position and our movement. The nerves that send this information to the brain are not the same as those that convey other sensory information-about sights, odors, sounds, tastes, and textures. These nerves convey information about movement. It is therefore appropriate to refer to this sensory modality as our “movement sense,” or kinesthesia, or the kinesthetic sense.

Our kinesthetic sense informs us of the posi­tion and movement of our bodies. That is, it gathers and transmits information. But what we do with the information is not predeter­mined. We may use it or we may not. We may develop habits of attending to the infor­mation or habits of not attending. If our attention is elsewhere, information supplied by the kinesthetic sense goes unnoticed and unused. The situation is exactly similar to what happens with our other senses when we concentrate our attention elsewhere. If I am absorbed in reading a book I may be unaware of music in the background. Of course, the vibration of the air enters my ears and triggers a nervous signal that is sent to my brain and to that extent I “hear” the music. But if I do not attend to the sound, the music is not part of my awareness. If someone asks me later, “Did you like that music?” I may say, “What music? I didn’t hear any music.”

Similarly, if I play the piano and concentrate just on the action of my fingers, I may be com­pletely unaware of tension or movement in my back and neck. The information is being sent to my brain through the sense receptors of my kinesthetic sense, but I am not aware of the information since I’m not attending to it. As a result, the information cannot function as feed­back, to which I could respond by releasing my back and neck. My back and neck are tense and fixed, but I don’t know it. My playing is less good than it could be, but I don’t know that either. If I do hear shortcomings in my playing I won’t identify the cause as upper body ten­sion and I will probably try to improve my play­ing by continuing to concentrate on the action of my fingers. Thus, in my attempt to improve my playing I just make matters worse. By working my fingers harder I am attempting to compensate for stiffness and lack of appropriate movement elsewhere in my body. My practicing is a practicing of compensations-things that are necessary only because the quality of my movement is poor. Many pianists spend most of their time practicing compensations.