About Brain Gym ^®

More and more children and adults are now discovering the amazing ability of sessions with a Brain Gym® consultant to improve their lives. The technique can help you to move on beyond old negative habits and beliefs, whether they be emotional, physical or cerebral, to take control of your life in a positive and creative way.

    Brain Gym® is an eclectic technique that helps to improve performance through simple coordinated movements. It can help you improve learning difficulties, confidence, memory, concentration, body co-ordination, eye-strain, chronic stress, and phobias. It employs physical and mental exercises and movements to stimulate the senses, and Kinesiology as the diagnostic tool. The Brain Gym technique is often used to help children to be much more successful at school, to gain in confidence and self-esteem, and to overcome dyslexic, dyspraxic, attention deficit and behavioural problems. Growing numbers of schools in the UK are using a selection of the basic Brain Gym movements as a routine part of the day with positive benefits for learning and concentration.

What does Brain Gym do?

New brain research shows that the brain is plastic and brain wiring can be altered at any age. We now know that physical movement actually changes the brain’s wiring. Brain Gym uses a combination of simple physical and mental exercises and movements, chosen to suit the unique needs of the individual. These appear to give the mind and body a second chance at completing its development, thus allowing you to take control of your life. Many people who use the technique report that emotional, academic or physical problems then disappear.

How does Brain Gym work?

We actually don't really know how much of Brain Gym works.  The technique was developed by Dr Paul Dennison following more than a decade of research into the relationships between body movement and learning, during which he investigated the effect on learning and emotional states of many movements, and gained a PhD for his work. He found that 25 movements had the most significant positive effects for a significant number of students. In the early 1980's he put these together into the system now known as Brain Gym, which includes a very powerful balance structure to help clients to move forward towards their goals.. So the technique is based on observation, not theory.

    I have developed some hypotheses about how the Brain Gym movements may work based on modern neuroscientific discoveries, but please remember that these are just suggestions, which have not been tested by research! 

Figure 1: Cross-section through

human brain, showing the position

of the cerebellum.

   I think that the cerebellum (see picture) may be the key to understanding how coordinated movement affects learning, when most of us will think that this is an unlikely link! It has been known for a long time that the cerebellum coordinates body movement and stores learned movement patterns such as riding a bicycle or driving a car, which you use without consciously thinking. New research has dramatically upgraded the importance of the cerebellum in brain function, and current studies show that the cerebellum is active during cognitive and perceptual activities (e.g. reading, identification of phonemes such as "ph" and "th", memory, attention, scheduling and planning of tasks and emotion). This body of research shows that certain specific regions are important for specific individual skills or tasks. For example,. Zhan et al (Cognitive Brain Research v16, p91-98, 2003), shows that certain parts of the cerebellum are active in short term memory recall. Ivry and Fiez, 2000, "The cerebellum, recent developments in cerebellar research", (New York Acad. Sci. publishers), show that damage to other areas of the cerebellum affect the discrimination between different sounds or phonemes.

    The controlled movements of Brain Gym build up learnt movement memory in the cerebellum and different movement patterns will be stored in different parts. It is quite possible that the scientific link that might explain WHY some exercises improve short term memory, while others improve sound discrimination (for example) will come through better understanding of the particular functions of specific areas of the cerebellum.

Other aspects of Brain Gym may affect how we use our left and right brain hemispheres. Nobel Prize-winning scientists Sperry and Ornstein discovered in the 1960’s that the left and right sides of the brain have different functions. It has been suggested that many people with learning difficulties have problems coordinating activity between their left and right brains. Dr Paul Dennison (the originator of Brain Gym) developed a series of physical movements that appear to integrate the left and right brain into an efficiently functioning “whole brain”. This repatterning definitely has profound positive benefits, even though it is not possible to say exactly what it is doing in the brain!  This is just one of many Brain Gym techniques that seem to help the brain work more effectively in many different ways, by providing increased stimulation to visual, auditory, balance, kinesthetic and mental brain systems.

Neuroscientists are now exploring the possibility that effective cognitive activity is produced by synchronised firing of neurons across patches of the brain, instead of adjacent neurons firing at random intervals. It is possible that the commonly observed effectiveness of the bi-lateral Brain Gym movements (which coordinate both sides of the body) in improving general cognitive function might actually be caused by promotion of an increase in the synchronicity of neural activity in both brain hemispheres. Wouldn't it be great if we could persuade neuroscientists to investigate how Brain Gym works!

The Oxford Brain Gym   Tel: 01865 776578

Brain Gym ^®  is a registered trademark of the Educational Kinesiology Foundation/ Brain Gym International.

Text and Layout, Copyright © Dr Buffy McClelland, 2007. All rights reserved.