The following is intended to be my first contribution to what I hope will be a fun and useful brainstorming session.  These ideas should not be considered as anything more than a starting point - a set of ideas for you to agree or disagree with, add to or take away from.  Indeed, I am not even proud of what I've written here - but I felt it more important to get something out soon than to get something carefully developed later.

As for process - I do not anticipate a large enough volume to mandate setting up a bulletin board with the requesite user accounts and overhead.  For now, please just e-mail me any contributions you'd like to make to the discussion and I will post them here!  My e-mail address is dav at alum dot mit dot edu.
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At this point, I have encoutered a number of people who seem to hold some mutual interest with me.  There is a problem in that we all seem to have a lot of trouble giving a name to this mutual interest.  Following is an incomplete list of names that are not quite right, but which point in the right direction:

• Somatics
• Mind-body practices
• Holistic or Integrative neuroscience
• Somato-sensory learning

These like-minded individuals come from a number of different backgrounds, and I don't expect to get everyone to show up in one place and agree on a single direction.  What I do hope to provide is a seed around which a critical mass of interested scientists and practitioners can begin to undertake a collaborative effort to increase our understanding of the biological underpinnings of a variety of currently ill-understood methods for the improvement of movement and human functioning in general.

A number of lines of thought converge on this line of inquiry:

• Exploring the biological primitives or building of movement and the perception of movement
• There are a number of modalities for exploring behavioral neuroscience which could all be brought to bear on the above: psychophysics, learning and memory, and patient / clinical studies are the most obvious to me.
• Research on the modulation of mental states
• Embodied, ecological and dynamic systems theories of mind (including "reason" and "emotion")
• Decision making, neuro-economics, reward, salience, value, pain, pleasure, etc.
• Meditation, awareness, mindfulness, etc. techniques
• Physical / Occupational therapy
• Positive psychology / self-effficacy
• Practitioners of "holistic" disciplines, e.g. Feldenkrais, Alexander technique, chiropractic, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Yoga, etc.

A conference or an organization would depend largely on the makeup of it's members.  Likely contributors to an early effort at this point include:

• Osher Center for CAM research at Harvard Med
• History of Science at Harvard and / or MIT
• Feldenkrais Guild of New England
  

This list is by no means meant to exclude anyone - it merely represents the organizations with members that I have personally interacted with and which seem likely to contribute significant resources to such an effort.

An example of a conference focus that I could envision given the above:

An exploration of the development of "interesting" theraputic or training practices alongside of a continuing development of our understanding of the human organism (and potentially other animals).  Focuses could include an evaluation of effective transfer between disciplines, degree of agreement or "Conscilience", identification of points of apparent contradiction and proposed research directions for solution of those contradictions.

Such a conference would likely elicit contentious ideas.  The relationship between hard neuroscience and accupuncture is tenuous in many cases.  However, there is a strong community in the Boston area which has some experience with successfully bridging exactly such disciplines.

Finally, here are two examples of real abstracts that exemplify the kind of talk that I would personally find most interesting:

Brain Basics of Touch for Alternative Medicine Therapies:

The distributed brain signal that you don't see, and can it help future research?

First, this presentation will show data about the anatomy and physiology of the somatosensory system in mammals.  Second, the presentation will cover fMRI studies in humans that use somatosensory stimuli and reveal distributed activated systems as well as the effects of attention shifts.  Third, the presentation will briefly make the point that individual differences are readily visible in physiological studies, which are important for the therapist and for potentially identifying non-responders.  Finally, I hope to provoke discussion of the best possible questionnaire studies for existing touch therapies or sytems like the Alexander Technique and the Feldenkrais method, given the data that we have now from the brain.

A conclusion of the presentaion that may be most helpful for people who use or experience the therapeutic effects of touch: even touch without behavioral meaning significantly activates a widespread system in the brain at conscious, unconscious and emotioanl levels.

Somatosensory Cortical Areas as Neural Correlates of Meditation and Acupuncture

Dr. Catherine Kerr's research looks at whether acupuncture and meditation work by eliciting changes in neural systems that underlie our bodily sense of self. She will present results from two recent studies suggesting that acupuncture and meditation may effect changes via a common "embodiment" pathway.

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I'm looking forward to your suggestions!
Dav