Human movement may represent one of the earliest and most enduring forms of memory. Long before autobiographical memory emerges, the developing nervous system learns through sensation, relationship, balance, gravity, and movement. Experiences occurring during this preverbal period are encoded not as stories but as patterns of autonomic regulation, procedural learning, postural organization, and motor behavior (Schore, 2001; Porges, 2011; Squire, 2004). These adaptations may persist throughout life, influencing how individuals stand, breathe, walk, distribute load through their joints, and respond to instability. This paper introduces the Movement as Memory framework, a developmental-biomechanical model proposing that posture, gait, balance, and breathing function as enduring forms of implicit memory. Building upon the DOVE ACEs framework (Developmental Overwhelm, Vulnerability, and Exclusion), the model suggests that early relational experiences shape procedural motor strategies that become continuously rehearsed through everyday movement. Over decades, repeated rehearsal may influence biotensegrity, joint loading, movement efficiency, mobility, and fall risk. Central to the framework is the proposition that developmental adaptations become embedded within sensorimotor and procedural systems before autobiographical memory emerges. Through repeated enactment across the lifespan, these adaptations may contribute to recognizable biomechanical patterns, including chronic muscular guarding, altered gait organization, reduced movement variability, diminished gravitational trust, and subtle posterior displacement of the center of mass. The framework identifies the backward lean as a potential biomechanical signature of protective movement organization and proposes several testable hypotheses linking developmental experience, movement behavior, and healthy aging. 1 Rather than viewing trauma solely as something stored within the body, the Movement as Memory framework proposes that developmental adaptations may be continuously expressed through movement. The model offers a conceptual bridge connecting developmental neuroscience, attachment theory, trauma studies, biomechanics, rehabilitation science, geriatrics, and fall prevention.
Austin Gontang (Sun,) studied this question.