The Rhythm of the Brain Water in Anthroposophy

Glossary✦ Anthroposophy✦ 3 min read
The Rhythm of the Brain Water n.

The tidal rise and fall of cerebrospinal fluid with every breath, which Steiner named the outer bodily carrier of the life of feeling.

What is the Rhythm of the Brain Water?

The Rhythm of the Brain Water in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the continuous rising and sinking of the cerebrospinal fluid in which the brain floats, an oscillation governed by breathing and described in his Basel lecture of 6 January 1920, printed in From the Unitary State to the Tripartite Social Organism (GA 334). When a person exhales, the diaphragm rises and the brain water sinks; on inhalation the movement reverses. Steiner assigns this oscillation to the rhythmic system, the middle member of his threefold physiology, and calls it the outer carrier of the life of feeling, just as the nerve and sense system carries thinking and the metabolic system carries willing. The exchange between feeling and thought, he says, arises exactly where the brain nerves meet the moving brain water. Anthroposophic therapy and Waldorf practice still work with breath rhythm on that basis.

The rhythm of the brain water is what Rudolf Steiner found when he looked at breathing from the inside. The brain does not rest on bone. It floats, and the fluid it floats in moves with every breath, dropping as the diaphragm rises on the outbreath and lifting again on the inbreath. Steiner treats that quiet tide as the physical carrier of feeling.

In Steiner's Own Words

Our brain is, however, first and foremost a nervous organ that has to process what is conveyed by the senses. But this brain floats in brain water. And this brain water, which fills our main cavity, our spinal cord cavity, has a special task. When we exhale, the brain water sinks from top to bottom. The diaphragm rises, causing the brain water to sink; the opposite happens when we inhale. So we are in a continuous rhythm of brain water rising and falling. This rhythm of the ascending and descending brain water is the outer carrier of the emotional life in man. And through the interaction of that which the brain nerves experience with that which arises as such a rhythm through the brain water, that which is the exchange between feelings and thoughts arises.

Rudolf Steiner, From the Unitary State to the Tripartite Social Organism (GA 334, Basel, 6 January 1920)

What it Means Today

Physiology long taught that cerebrospinal fluid was pushed chiefly by the heartbeat. That account changed on 11 February 2015, when Steffi Dreha-Kulaczewski of the University Medical Center Göttingen, working with Jens Frahm's biomedical NMR group at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, published Inspiration Is the Major Regulator of Human CSF Flow in the Journal of Neuroscience. Their real-time phase contrast MRI was fast enough to watch the fluid move breath by breath, and it showed that inspiration, not cardiac pulsation, is the dominant driving force: forced inhalation sends the fluid upward toward the head, and breath holding suppresses it. Steiner had described the same coupling in Basel ninety-five years earlier, from the side of the diaphragm rather than the side of the scanner.

Thalira synthesis: what the Göttingen group records as a flow curve, Steiner was reading as a biography, because a rhythm that answers to the breath is also a rhythm that answers to mood, and the fluid he watched was for him the place where a thought first becomes warm enough to be felt.

The practical consequence is old and unglamorous. If feeling has a fluid carrier that breathing governs, then the breath is the most direct physical route into emotional life. Anthroposophic therapy worked from that assumption long before the imaging existed: rhythmical massage in the lineage of Ita Wegman and Margarethe Hauschka, curative eurythmy, and the speech exercises given to Waldorf teachers all address the middle system first.

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