MAKE a C shape with two fingers and the thumb of your left hand. Place on either side of the breastbone just below the collarbone and rub for 30 seconds while holding the right hand over the abdomen and gently gliding the eyes from side to side.
This activity is called “Brain Buttons” and is said to stimulate the carotid arteries (ribs are no obstacle) and increase the flow of blood to the brain, which in turn helps with organisational skills, reading, visual recall and correcting letter and number reversals.
It might also interest you to know that processed foods do not contain water and that to improve memory and cell communication you should hold water in the mouth for eight seconds, which will ensure that the body and brain recognise the water correctly and can then prioritise where to use it.
Wiggling your ears with your fingers stimulates the reticular formation of the brain to tune out distracting sounds and tune into language, and rocking your head back and forth will get more blood to your frontal lobes to improve comprehension and rational thinking!
These claims are made by the originators and practitioners of a system called Brain Gym, which is marketed in more than 80 countries and is aimed at teachers and school children, business people and sports practitioners.
According to Ben Goldacre, author of the book Bad Scienceand columnist with the Guardiannewspaper, hundreds of schools in Britain regularly run Brain Gym activities. It is also widely used in the US. Brain Gym Ireland was set up in 2002 by Padraig King. The descriptions of Brain Buttons and water drinking above are taken from tips he provided on RTÉ's Afternoon Show.
On his website, King states that Brain Gym “is now being used in a large number of schools and colleges throughout Ireland. Hundreds of teachers, classroom assistants, resource teachers, physiotherapists, speech therapists, occupational therapists, nurses and parents have attended courses, seminars and workshops on Brain Gym over the past few years.” These claims appear consistent with the wide usage reported elsewhere.
So what’s the problem? A system with such broad application and claiming such huge success should surely be a cause for celebration? However, Brain Gym and its underlying theoretical foundations have been thoroughly and systematically criticised in the US, UK, Canada and elsewhere.
In the UK the British Neuroscience Association, the Physiological Society and Sense About Science, an organisation dedicated to public understanding of science, wrote to all local education authorities warning that the system relies on “pseudoscientific explanations” and “bizarre understanding” as to how the body works. The latter is evident in my opening examples.
Keith J Hyatt, in a 2007 article in Remedial and Special Education, identified three theoretical categories underlying Brain Gym. These are neurological re-patterning, cerebral dominance and perceptual-motor training. None have been found to be useful in contributing to academic learning skills, and neurological re-patterning, which was popularised in the Doman-Delecato system for treating a variety of disabilities, has been criticised by such bodies as the American Academy of Paediatrics, the American Academy for Cerebral Palsy and the Canadian Rehabilitation Council for the Disabled.
Alongside the scientific refutation of the Brain Gym system, its founder, Paul Dennison has admitted that many of its claims are not based on good science, but on his personal "hunches". Prof Usha Goswami, director of Cambridge University's Centre for Neuroscience in Education stated in an article in Naturethat Brain Gym and similar programmes are based on "neuromyths" and should be eliminated.
Doing physical exercise in class is fine and may wake children up and help refocus them. But a game of “Simon Says” would probably suffice! The main problem with Brain Gym is the teaching of pseudoscientific ideology along with the exercises, which, if simply carried out in imitation without comment, might just raise a giggle with the pupils.
We get some clue as to why teachers (and other professionals) might be seduced in an interesting paper by D S Weisberg and colleagues in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.They found that including irrelevant neuroscience information in explanations of a variety of phenomena resulted in people judging such explanations more favourably.
Science is seen as a road to objective explanations and truth. It is also seen as being difficult. Scientists may have shot themselves in the foot via their success on the one hand and their reluctance to engage with the public on the other. If pseudoscience is permitted to proliferate unchallenged, we may well end up with a confused student body and a pool of non-scientists who are susceptible to exploitation by those willing to abuse and misuse the language and ideas of science.
Paul O’Donoghue is a clinical psychologist and a founder member of the Irish Skeptics Society – irishskeptics.net