Introduction
Rolfing is one form of bodywork. It organizes the body through fascia and through slow movement.
Four years ago, my early-morning Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga practice changed dramatically. My shoulders eased as well. The impression was strong enough that I left my job and went to Germany to train as a Rolfer. That is how I came to be offering sessions now.
Still, when it comes to explaining what Rolfing is, I often find myself at a loss.
Lately I have been using a single phrase: the brain can alter its own structure and function in response to its environment.
When the Brain Was Thought Not to Change
In The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge writes that medicine long held the brain to be unchanging.
He gives three reasons:
- damage to the brain rarely recovers
- a living brain cannot be observed under a microscope
- a habit of seeing the brain as a machine
Behind all of them lies one fact: a neuron, once damaged, does not regenerate.
But through the 1960s and 1970s, attention turned to the idea that the brain changes itself in response to its environment, and the word neuroplasticity came into use — a compound of neuron and plasticity.
We now know that input from outside continually alters both the workings and the structure of the brain.
Keep Using It, and It Changes
The best-known demonstration of this is a study of London taxi drivers.
To get a license to drive a cab in London, a driver spends years learning the street network — what is called The Knowledge. Imaging the brains of drivers who passed the test showed the rear portion of the hippocampus to be enlarged. The hippocampus is involved in memory and in spatial orientation.
The part that gets used grows, physically. The brain changes well into adulthood.
The Route a Sense Takes Is Not Fixed
Doidge’s book gives another example: Paul Bach-y-Rita’s work on sensory substitution.
The first device sent what a camera captured to a blind person as a pattern of vibration against the back. Later versions placed a grid of electrodes on the tongue, which is unusually sensitive to touch and is given a wide area in the brain.
Either way, after a period of use, the person stops saying they feel something on the back or on the tongue and begins saying they see. In Bach-y-Rita’s own phrase, we see with the brain, not with the eyes. Change the entrance, and as long as the brain can take it in, the sense still arrives.
Smell has a peculiarity of its own. Olfactory neurons are among the few that regenerate. Seiji Shioda writes that because of this capacity for regeneration, input through smell may be able to reach parts of the brain that have weakened, or the regions around them.
Pain Circuits Rewrite Themselves Too
What makes this interesting is that even when neurons are lost to age, or degenerate through illness, the same property opens the possibility of improvement.
In his later book, The Brain’s Way of Healing, Doidge presents cases of stroke, autism, Parkinson’s disease, chronic pain, multiple sclerosis and visual impairment in which treatment drawing on neuroplasticity produced marked change.
When pain from an injury persists long enough, the connections between neurons handling that pain strengthen. The circuit reorganizes, the pain signal comes to be detected excessively, and chronic pain sets in.
The physician Michael Moskowitz works against this by having patients perform a specific visualization at the moment the pain arrives — picturing a brain map he has drawn. The posterior cingulate and the posterior parietal cortex, both involved in vision, also take part in processing pain.
So the strategy uses vision, and the brain’s capacity to change, to weaken pain. What surprises me is that it works.
The book also describes the Bates method, which works on the brain’s plasticity to release muscular tension implicated in declining eyesight, and cases in which walking improved the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
Where Rolfing Comes In
All of these draw on the same property: the brain changes itself in response to its environment.
Rolfing, too, is one way of working on the brain in order to teach the body a new way of moving. (I have written before on body image and body schema — see Psychological and Perceptual Change — The Body Map.)
Through fascia, a session gradually tells the brain that a hand is here, a foot is there. Settling into a new habit takes time, which is why sessions are spaced out. What interests me is that stiff shoulders, low back pain and other complaints ease along the way.
Conclusion
Rolfing, then, also works with the fact that the brain changes itself in response to its environment — though the field is still very much in progress.
Neuroplasticity, alongside regenerative medicine, looks likely to develop further. I intend to keep watching it.
Note, September 2026
There is something to add about the London taxi driver study mentioned here.
It was led by Professor Eleanor Maguire of University College London, a researcher who spent her career on the hippocampus and on how memory, spatial orientation and imagination connect. She died in January 2025.
One of her doctoral students was Demis Hassabis. He took his PhD in cognitive neuroscience at UCL between 2005 and 2009, went on to co-found DeepMind, beat the world champion at Go with AlphaGo, and solved the protein folding problem with AlphaFold. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024.
What Hassabis did in Maguire’s lab runs directly into the subject of this article.
Their 2007 paper showed that patients with bilateral damage to the hippocampus lose not only their memory of the past but also the ability to imagine future or hypothetical scenes. Memory and imagination had been taken for separate functions. The same apparatus turned out to serve both.
What came out of this is the view that the hippocampus does not play memory back like a recording. It assembles a scene each time out of fragments of past experience. When we picture something in the future, the same assembly is at work.
The body map has the same shape. There is no fixed diagram filed away somewhere in the brain. It is rebuilt each time out of what keeps arriving from fascia, from the soles of the feet, from the breath. Which is why it rewrites itself when a Rolfing session changes the input. The same thing is happening as in the enlarged hippocampus of a taxi driver.
None of this was visible to me in 2018. I was setting out taxi drivers and sensory substitution as cases I had read about in Doidge.
My own background is in basic medical research. I finished my doctorate in 2001 and then spent years at a pharmaceutical company. Now I offer Rolfing sessions. The story of a brain remaking itself according to what comes in is one I am watching from the side of the body these days.