Tip Attentional control and motivation: harnessing this in manual treatment..

[Diane]

Attention control is critical for changing/increasing/altering motivation

I came upon this excellent blogpost at LessWrong today. Loved it.
I want to start a discussion about how manual therapy/therapists might harness (maybe) motivation by handling, physically, a nervous system(with a "person" inside it)'s motivation.

Excerpt:

A man is sitting in his living room, in front of a chessboard. Classical music plays in the background. The man is focused, thinking about the next move, about his chess strategy, and about the future possibilities of the game. His neural networks are optimizing, making him a better chess player.

A man is sitting in his living room, in front of a chessboard. Classical music plays in the background. The man is focused, thinking about the music he hears, listening to the chords and anticipating the sounds still to come. His neural networks are optimizing, making him better at understanding music and hearing subtleties within a melody.

A man is sitting in his living room, in front of a chessboard. Classical music plays in the background. The man is focused, gritting his teeth as another flash of pain comes from his bad back. His neural networks are optimizing, making the pain more intense, easier to feel, harder to ignore.

[Diane]

Check out point 7 in her reference list:

[7] I’m not finding good papers directed exactly on this point, so I’ll just throw this out as a personal opinion (although I’ll say it appears well supported by indirect research). We all like to appear competent and skillful, especially in those areas where we have invested a lot of time and effort. This can lead to a bias where we focus on using those aspects of complex skills we are best at, and training those aspects most intensely. In other words, a tendency appears to exist to do exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. (If anyone has encountered a name for this bias, or has references to suggest, I would be very grateful to hear from you.)

(Gee, doesn't that sound a lot like us? Human primate social groomers I mean? Does anyone know the name for this bias so I can rush to tell her?
It must be something like kinesthetic bias, or occupation bias, or motor skill set bias..)