Jj is for Jottings 138.  Brain Gym.

WHAT IS BRAIN GYM?

Brain gym is a series of movements which claim to enhance whole-brain learning.  An alternative term is “educational kinesiology”.  The word “education” comes from the Latin educare, which means “to draw out”.  “Kinesiology” is from the Greek root kinesis, which means “motion” and is the study of the movement of the human body.

A previous post on movement and learning discusses the role of movement in learning, unsurprisingly.  The articles learning, Part 2 and neuroplasticity talk about the effects of stimulation – movement, sensory, emotional etc – on the brain.  It all looks as if everything we do stimulates the brain in some way and leads to increasing neural pathways.  And this, of course, is a Very Good Thing, because it leads to increased abilities in many areas of life.  However, there are some things we do or which happen to us which have the opposite effect.  It seems that we sometimes “switch off” communication pathways in the brain – not intentionally.  And blocking these communication pathways means we don’t function as well.

IS BRAIN GYM BASED IN SCIENCE?

Well, there appears to be no hard scientific evidence to support brain gym having positive effects on learning, and thus it is considered a pseudoscience.  However, brain gym can’t possibly do any harm, and I have seen some results of brain gym in action.  So I thought it worth a mention in a post, and readers can take or leave it as they choose (as with every article.)  I also have the belief that you don’t really know whether something will work unless you give it a proper go.  This does not include things like taking drugs or anything else which is known to be harmful to self or others.

A BRIEF GENERAL OUTLINE.

Brain gym exercises are divided into three categories:

1. Midline Movements.

These focus on the skills necessary for easy two-sided movement across the midline of the body.  You need to be able to cross the midline visually in order to read and write; to hear with both ears; and to reach across the body to write.  And so on.  Some of these movements are adapted from activities used in behavioural optometry.  See the section on cross crawl below.

2. Lengthening Activities.

When we find a task challenging, we tend to withdraw or hold back.  This can occur in any new situation until we feel comfortable enough to proceed.  As a result, we contract our muscles in a reflex which dates from babyhood.  You can imagine the number of situations in which this reflex would be set off in a child who is finding learning difficult in school.  Some of the lengthening activities are the stretching exercises that athletes use in their warm-ups.

3. Energy Exercises and Deepening Attitudes.

These help to re-establish nerve pathways between the body and the brain, so everything is working together.  Some of these exercises have their origins in acupressure systems.  See the section on Hook-ups below. The first “exercise” in this section is simply to drink enough water.  Apart from all the well-known effects of proper hydration in the body, dehydration leads to mental fatigue and an inability to concentrate, affecting all areas of learning.

SOME OBSERVATIONS ABOUT BRAIN GYM.

I will comment about three aspects of brain gym, just to give you a bit of an idea about it.

A Teacher’s Observation.

One of the teachers with whom I worked had worked at a school which had a brain gym session at the start of the day.  It may even have been after every break i.e. at the start of the day and after recess and lunchtime, I can’t remember which it was.  The school played music through the speakers, so every classroom spent 5 minutes doing brain gym exercises to music.  The teacher said that the students worked and concentrated better after these sessions, compared with before the regimen began.   Apart from anything else, those 5 minutes would provide a good transitional time between play time and work time, so the positive effects may not have been entirely due to the brain gym.  Or even not at all, but my other observations lead me to suppose that the brain gym itself was also useful.

Midline Movements/Cross Crawl.

It is a generally recognised scientific fact (so there is some science involved!) that one side of the brain controls the other side of the body.  The two hemispheres of the brain are joined in the middle by a thick bundle of nerve fibres called the corpus callosum.  So the message from one side of the brain must cross the corpus callosum to control the other side of the body.  When a child – or anyone, for that matter – crawls, they are using both sides of the brain together.  That’s because crawling involves left leg and right arm simultaneously, then right leg and left arm.

Cross crawl is an exercise which has many variations, but the whole point is to be using the left and right sides of the body at the same time.  The most common way is to lift the left leg and touch the (left) knee with the right hand.  Then lift the right leg and touch the (right) knee with the left hand, and so on.  You are always crossing the midline with the arm and using both sides of the brain.  This exercise also involves balance, but if that is too much all at once, you can get around the balance aspect by having the child do the exercise seated or leaning against a wall.

Homolateral Crawl.

It has always amazed me how many young children cannot imitate cross crawl – they do homolateral crawl instead.  Remember from the article on homonyms, heteronyms and homophones that homo means “same”.  So homolateral crawl is when the person is touching right hand to right knee and left hand to left knee.  In other words, they are not using both sides of the brain simultaneously, but rapidly alternating between hemispheres.  It would be interesting to know whether these children actually crawled properly at that earlier stage of development.  Since I would check the ability to cross crawl only when a child was struggling with some aspects of learning, I have no idea how numbers compared with children who were not struggling with learning.  But I always made sure they did learn how to cross crawl to the point of ease.  After all, it is part of the normal path of child development, so it makes sense that there is a purpose in it.

Hook-ups.

This is quite a complicated exercise in two parts.  If you want to see how to do that and any of the other brain gym exercises, you can easily find them in video form by searching on the internet – they will come up immediately.

I have used Hook-ups very successfully to calm down students who are upset, and help them to focus.  One very vivid illustration was many years ago.  I saw a pair of twins at pre-school, so they would have been 4 years old.  They had been coming to speech therapy for some months.  We had a routine of mother reading in the car to one twin while I did therapy with the other.  Then we swapped.  On this particular occasion one child threw a tantrum and wouldn’t even come through the doorway.  This particular child was always a bit more behaviourally challenging than his brother.  So I put him into Hook-ups position part one, waited a couple of minutes and then changed to the second part.  He was as good as gold for the rest of the session.  I told his mother what had happened and showed her how to do Hook-ups, recommending that she do it daily with both boys.  Two weeks later she reported that the difference in his behaviour at home was huge, and that he was now the better-behaved child.

So, even if the scientific studies don’t support brain gym, I still think it’s worth a try.  As you can see, they can’t do any harm, and just might do some good.