Dancing The Present. Body Memory and Quantum Field Theory, in Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen (eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, London, Routledge, pp. 458-472.

This chapter is intended as a preliminary attempt to draw a theory of body memory. It argues that memory processes have to do not only with the mind, but also with the body. The way of thinking the relationship between mind and body (originated by Descartes’ works) is questioned, so far as the conception of the body that tends to reduce it to its physical part. Three other conceptions of the body are illustrated: Steiner’s, Gurdjieff’s and Merleau-Ponty’s. By applying the implications of Eastern religious and philosophical beliefs on the one side and of quantum field theory on the other, the common notions of space and linear time are questioned and an alternative notion of consciousness that articulates the “space-time of the body” is proposed. It is suggested that by entering in this particular state of consciousness through different techniques, body memory can be transformed. Some empirical cases related to subjects, who seem to have entered in the “immanency”, are illustrated.