This theoretical paper aims at a critical review of recent developments in sport sciences and reviews the fascinating as well as unsettling 'special discourse' of neurodidactics concerning movement. During the last 5 years an increasing number of job offers as a sport scientist with the specification ‘neurosciences’ turned up within the German Sports Science Network. After a period of dramatic reduction of sociological and pedagogical positions utile for psychology and management we again have to reconsider the context and outcomes of actual policy shifts. The paper will shortly reconstruct the genesis of the neuro-didactical discourse in pedagogy in Germany, the results for PE and focus on sense-making theoretical landmarks in the international discussion.

The notion ‘body knowledge/knowing’ has become increasingly important in contemporary sociological and pedagogical discourses to come out of the state of a leading metaphor and enter theoretical foundation (Wulf et. al. 2016, forthcoming). The term has to be explained on the basis of its historical origins and according to findings in praxis research: „the knowledge that I have of my own body differs altogether from the knowledge of its physiology (…) But suppose that tacit thought forms an indispensable part of all knowledge, then the ideal of eliminating all personal elements of knowledge would, in effect, claim at the destruction of all knowledge. The ideal of exact science would turn out to be fundamentally misleading and possibly a source of devastating fallacies.” (Polanyi 1966, p. 20)

Body Knowing has to be introduced in clear difference to knowing what and knowing how as the implicit integration of both aspects and rooted in processed sensual experience. Hirschauer, Knoblauch, Keller & Meuser did recently some theoretical work from a sociological perspective concerning the body, and neuro-philosophical approaches reinterpret Merleau-Ponty’s lived body anew (Damasio, Nöe, Gallagher, Shapiro a. o.) - not to step into the methodological trap of radical subjectivism as misleading bulwark against positivism. The embodiment metaphor (Varela, Clark, Harré, Frank & Ziemke et. al.) has to be illuminated as well in the context of neuro-didactic short circuits who want to teach ‘happiness’ and ‘mental strength’ (!) at school (e. g. Knörzer & Schley, 2010). The medicalisation of pedagogical discourses and the cerebralisation of learning commonly follow the tendency for self-tuning and end up in the confusion of supplanting humanities by sciences.

Abraham (2002), Alkemeyer (2011), Bockrath (2008), Bockrath/Boschert/Franke (2008), Bongaerts (2007), Bourdieu (1997), Damasio (1994), Franke (2008), Gallagher (2005), Goodwin (2000), Gugutzer (2012), Hirschauer (2008), Keller & Meuser (2011), Kendon (1996), Klinge (2008), Knoblauch (2005), Kraus (2012), McNeill (2007), Nöe (2004), Pfadenhauer (2010), Polanyi (1966), Reinders (2007), Rost (2004), Schatzki (1996), Schatzki/Knorr-Cetina/Savigny (2001), Schön (1983), Schindler (2011), Schmidt (2008), Shapiro (2011), Streeck (2009), Tomasello (2003), Volbers (2011), Wacquant (2003), Wulf (2010).