Baseworks

On May 11, Ksenia Shcherbakova returns this year to present current Baseworks research at the 27th Annual Neuropsychology Day and Brenda Milner Lecture. The event is hosted at The Neuro, the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University.

Ksenia's presentation this year is titled "Predictable Failure Patterns in Non-Habitual Movement: Evidence for Undertrained Degrees-of-Freedom Control." The work documents a class of predictable failure patterns in healthy adults, where movement coordination breaks down in specific non-habitual tasks regardless of how physically experienced a person is. Last year's presentation introduced the broader framework. This year's is a specific empirical piece within it, and it points to a central process that appears systematically undertrained in the adult population.

Neuropsychology Day runs from 11:30 AM to 5:00 PM. Ksenia's slot is from 2:30 to 3:45 PM. The keynote, "Neurobiological Basis of Psychosis," is delivered by Dr. Bruce L. Miller (UCSF). The day also includes oral sessions across the broader field of neuropsychology, learning, memory, and attention, and is attended by researchers, students, and clinicians from the Montreal research community and beyond. The event is free of charge and open to the public.

More Info: https://baseworks.com/event/neuropsychology-day-2026-degrees-of-freedom-control/

Photos: Andrew Miller

The Baseworks Method was developed over two decades at our studio in Tokyo and across various programs. That work involved a hundred trained teachers, a core group working together for nearly a decade, and thousands of students within the same framework. Very few learning environments offer that kind of sustained exposure, and when in-person activities were suspended in 2020, the question became whether that depth could be made accessible in a format that doesn't require being in one place, with one group of teachers, over a long period of time.

The answer required building dedicated tools from scratch. The Baseworks Primer and Practice Platform are purpose-built around how people actually learn movement. They incorporate feedback loops, non-linear revisitation, and tracking that maps how each person engages with the material differently. The online work feeds directly into guided in-person sessions, and what instructors observe in person reshapes the online experience. Both sides are continuously refined.

The Winter 2026 Study Group in Montreal was part of that process. Seven sessions at Circuit-Est centre chorégraphique, January through March, paired with the Baseworks Primer online course. Twenty-one participants from notably different backgrounds — massage therapists, a preschool teacher, dancers, somatic practitioners, a sociology professor, a visual artist, a writer, and people recovering from injuries. What they had in common was a curiosity about how attention and movement connect.

What stood out to us was the diversity of individual outcomes. A movement educator with a yoga teaching background began integrating micro-movements into her online classes the day after her first session. A participant recovering from a pelvic fracture found that the Intensity Modification framework gave her a way to practice without guessing at her own limits. She described the cumulative effect: "There is a new design of the body after each session." Several people, independently, reported shifts in perception outside of practice: postural awareness during daily activities, changes in movement quality, heightened attention in contexts unrelated to the practice itself.

We also built something new in response to how differently people engaged with the Primer: the PrimerPrint, a visual map of each person's learning path through the curriculum. No two look the same.

A new article by Patrick Oancia documents the full arc of those seven weeks: what participants reported, what we observed across the cohort, and what we built in response. The Spring 2026 Study Group begins in April at Proto Studio in Mile End. Full article on the Baseworks site blog.

Photography: Andrew Miller

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