![]() ![]() ![]() Photos courtesy of Hands On: How to Use Brain Gym in the Classroom by Isabel Cohen and Marcelle Goldsmith.īrain buttons is another popular Brain Gym activity, helping to wake the mind, especially after a long day of work or study. Three youngsters demonstrate the brain buttons movements, which help wake up the brain. 4 “The more fine muscle involvement, the more frontal lobe involvement in conjunction with the basal ganglion of the limbic brain and the cerebellum of the brain stem,” Hannaford says, adding that this is the movement she utilizes when she has writer’s block, while others find it helpful before undertaking sport or dance. When done correctly, and at a very slow pace, the cross crawl activates the vestibular system and the frontal lobes. In her book, Smart Moves: Why Learning is Not All in Your Head, Carla Hannaford, Ph.D., says the cross crawl “facilitates balanced nerve activation across the corpus callosum.” 3 When done regularly, she says, “more nerve networks form and myelinate in the corpus callosum, thus making communication between the two hemispheres faster and more integrated for high-level reasoning.” This cross-lateral movement has us walking in place while touching the right elbow to the left knee, and then the left elbow to the right knee. ![]() The cross crawl is really the epitome of Brain Gym in how it works to bring both hemispheres of the brain together. To give some visual expression to the Brain Gym concept, let’s look at one of the simpler movements for reintegrating the brain. “When the nerves of the brain and nervous system are stimulated with these integrative movements, learning becomes easier, faster, and more in-depth.” 2 “Brain Gym stimulates the nerves of the brain to integrate the brain’s activities for whole brain functioning,” says Sher Smith, a registered nurse and polarity therapy educator from Richmond Hill, Ontario. When we’re under stress, we revert primarily to using just one side of our brain, cutting our learning potential essentially in half. So what is Brain Gym exactly? In the simplest of terms, it’s a series of movements designed to create coherence between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, a process that then integrates learning into the physiology. It was word of mouth that became the lifeblood of this growing entity. The cognitive successes he began seeing with the children continued to fuel his work, just as they brought educators flocking to his door for training and eager parents calling to schedule Brain Gym sessions for themselves.ĭennison supporters say he wasn’t looking to build what’s now become a worldwide organization he just wanted to share the positive results of the work. After years of working with these youngsters as director of California’s Valley Remedial Group Learning Centers, Dennison synthesized his work with research coming out of the fields of education, personal development, and developmental vision. Dennison, Ph.D., and his wife Gail, in the early 1970s, Brain Gym came about originally as a means to help children identified as learning disabled. The goal of this bilateral drawing activity is to strengthen eye-teaming skills, eye-hand coordination, and a sense of left-and-right discrimination. Gail Dennison, cofounder of Brain Gym International, shows the Double Doodle exercise, one of 26 Brain Gym activities that opens the mind for learning. In addition to restoring natural communication in the brain/body system, lengthening muscles, relaxing the eyes, and stimulating both hemispheres of the brain, a primary goal of Brain Gym is to simply put the pieces back in order as a way to facilitate learning. Utilizing the gentle Brain Gym movements has shown improved blood flow, better oxygenation, healthier physiology, heightened focus, more discreet listening skills, as well as positive shifts in balance, memory, vision, self-expression, attitude, attention, creative problem-solving, and organization.Īnecdotal accounts of Brain Gym’s capabilities show it has been used to improve a fifth-grader’s reading level, heighten a business executive’s acumen, bring about balance in the physically challenged, and dramatically change the language skills of a child struggling to express himself. This uncomplicated program has created effective change in people from more than 80 countries, throughout thousands of public and private schools, and in the realms of business, art, and sports. The process is called Brain Gym, a sort of gymnastics for the brain, and it’s changing how young minds learn. Its success in restoring optimal learning potential through movement relies on creating a truly integrated mind/body dynamic. For three decades, educators, therapists, and movement facilitators have been utilizing a powerfully simple tool to break through cognitive barriers.
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