005: Does Brain Gym Help Students Learn?

Podcasts

Aug 4

Written By Sarah Gilmore

Transcript

Jump to…

What is Brain Gym?

The research behind Brain Gym - Deep Dive

The research behind Brain Gym - Get To The Point

The research about Brain Gym

What to do

Sources

Brain Gym has been on the list of topics we wanted to explore since long before we were sure what this podcast would even be. This is because Brain Gym epitomizes the sort of topic we want to explore: things we have been taught to do, or told to do, or heard about but perhaps never really questioned. After all, Brain Gym was actively and officially endorsed by several national departments of education, including the US and Australia, so it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that it has value, and is based on evidence.

So, when we started looking into this, we both expected to find the type of results we have come to expect from education research: nuanced, neither black nor white, context-dependent. We expected to learn something along the lines of “Brain Gym works sometimes, in some circumstances, for some things”.

Yeah. So…. turns out, not so much.

I trained as a teacher in 2007 and 2008, right at the height of Brain Gym’s popularity and, I only now realize, its controversy. I had no idea, as a newly qualified teacher at the ripe old age of 24, that this program I had been told was going to help my students learn (just about everything) was being soundly debunked not just in academic papers from around the world, but even on BBC Newsnight. If you don’t know what Brain Gym is, or you - like us - didn’t know that the academic world has some pretty strong opinions about it, this Newsnight segment from 2008 will be an excellent introduction (and it’s always entertaining to watch Jeremy Paxman do one of his oh-so-polite, British maulings):

What Is Brain Gym?

Brain Gym is a product that is sold by Brain Gym International (BGI) that includes a set of 26 specific movement exercises, such as “cross-crawl”, “hook ups”, and “brain buttons”. Here’s a video that shows some of these movements in action:

In another video by this same teacher, she tells us that exercises like “cross crawls”, which “cross the midline” have “tons of academic benefits, particularly in the language arts”, and this is what Brain Gym itself claims. On Brain Gym International’s website, they promise that the Brain Gym program will improve everything from the things you might expect from these exercises (like coordination, balance etc) to reading ability, recall in tests, and overall academic performance.

So, where did Brain Gym come from? Well, as you learned in the Newsnight video, it was created by Paul and Gail Dennison in the 1970’s in California, and they originally called it “educational kinesiology” or “edu-K”. It has its roots in two main theories: “cerebral dominance”, and “psychomotor patterning”, or the Doman-Delacato technique.

The Research Behind Brain Gym - Deep Dive

Hold on tight, it’s about to get all neuroscience-y.

Cerebral Dominance

As you know, Katierose and I are teachers, with undergraduate degrees in things like business, psychology and music. So… we aren’t really equipped to go as deeply into neuroscience as we would need to to truly understand and explain cerebral dominance theory and, most importantly, the degree to which it is being appropriately applied in Brain Gym’s ideas. However, here are the broad strokes. We all know that the brain is in two hemispheres, and they are joined by a collection of axons at the “midline”, called the corpus callosum:

Broadly speaking, and according to Dr Robert Schmerling, “There is truth to the idea that some brain functions reside more on one side of the brain than the other”. Cerebral dominance theory suggests a lot of things, but essentially comes down to the idea that it is normal for each side of the brain to have dominance over certain tasks, e.g. the left side having dominance over language. Brain Gym activities that cross the midline of the body (e.g. cross crawls) are then supposed to strengthen the connection between both sides of the brain, and improve academic performance as a result.

Does that actually work though? This “Ask a neuroscientist” article from Stanford University thankfully addresses exactly this question. Here’s a quote from Erica Seigneur:

“The underlying science – that performing an activity that simultaneously engages both cerebral hemispheres can improve cognition – does appear to be true [...] The best studied example of this is musicians who began training during early childhood [...] and research has shown that the corpus callosum is larger in early-trained musicians compared to late-trained musicians and nonmusicians, especially if the training began before the age of 7 [...] The hypothesis is that because musical training involves the coordination of multiple modalities – i.e. taking visual and auditory input (reading and listening to music, respectively) and coordinating it with motor output (playing the instrument) – the connections between these brain areas become stronger and more tightly connected, resulting in better sensorimotor integration. And indeed, early-trained musicians have better spatial and verbal memory, attention, mathematics skills, and perform better on other tasks involving the integration of multiple sensory and motor inputs. So, while the Brain Gym technique does not seem like a good candidate, encouraging your students to learn an instrument could go a long way in improving their cognitive functions. Unfortunately, adults who learn an instrument do not see the same improvements.”

This is a wonderful example of how Brain Gym has convinced people for decades that it is worth using in the classroom: it takes real ideas, real research and misapplies it, or stretches it, or takes leaps of logic. Playing an instrument is manifestly different and much more complex than touching your right hand to your left knee!

Psychomotor Patterning - Doman Delacato Technique

The other big idea behind brain gym comes from “psychomotor patterning”, or the Doman-Delacato technique. This is the idea, long since debunked, that developmental delays, brain injuries and physical and cognitive disabilities can be treated by physically moving the body in certain ways. The idea was that, for example, a child who never learns to crawl will be missing vital connections in the brain that form when their body does the crawling movement. By physically positioning that child’s body for them and “helping” them to crawl, those connections will form and the child will continue along the “normal” developmental path. Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation:

“The method assumes that intellectual disabilities results from the failure of an individual to develop properly through the phylogenetic stages, and treatment primarily focuses on non-invasive physical therapy in each of these stages. In one such stage, the homolateral stage, a healthy child typically crawls by turning the head to one side while extending the arm and leg of the opposite side. The patterning treatment is applied to those unable to perform this motion, and involves passive intervention by 4-5 adults who assists the child in an effort to impose or induce the proper pattern onto the central nervous system. The therapy normally lasts for 5 minutes and is repeated at least 4 times a day. Full treatment programmes typically contain a range of exercises combined with sensory stimulation, breathing exercises designed to increase oxygen flow to the brain, and systematic restriction and facilitation designed to promote hemispheric dominance.”

This “technique” has been very thoroughly debunked - it does not work; it is not a thing. (You may be able to sense that my quotation marks have developed an angry voice because this sounds, frankly, barbaric). The AAP released a policy statement on this in 1982, which you can read here in which it clearly states that this technique is not evidence-based, is based on “oversimplified concepts of hemispheric dominance” and may actually cause harm.

The Research Behind Brain Gym - Get To The Point

At the core of what Brain Gym relies on is the oversimplification and misapplication of real scientific theories.

Think of it like this:

As we all know, oxygen is the key part of air that we need to live (fact).
However, it makes up only about 21% of air, most of the rest is nitrogen (fact).
When you've been in an accident, or you’re really sick, doctors will often give you emergency oxygen, to increase the amount of oxygen in your body to help your body heal (fact).
Water is 89% oxygen (fact).
This makes water a much better source of oxygen than air (um… hang on).
Therefore, the best thing you can do for your body is to put your head under water and breathe in nice and deep (Brain Gym).

The Research About Brain Gym

This would usually be the part of the blog post where I would go into detail about some of the research we read about the topic, but there is really no credible, quality, peer-reviewed evidence that Brain Gym does what it says it does. We interviewed Dr Mark Carter, Associate Professor of Special Education at Macquarie University for this episode, and he was very clear that the evidence just is not there to support Brain Gym’s incredible claims:

The research we read all said the same thing: if Brain Gym makes any difference at all to student learning, which it doesn’t seem to, it would be a teeny tiny difference, so small as to be meaningless. And again, as Professor Carter pointed out, since Brain Gym is making claims that their programme has a positive impact on everything from balance, to concentration, to reading, to mood, they can attribute any and all progress in any of those areas to Brain Gym, when there is no way of knowing whether Brain Gym was responsible for that progress or whether it would have happened anyway.

Most of the research than does offer support of Brain Gym’s claims is either low quality (meaning that it lacks a control group, or uses measures of improvements like “ability to stand on one leg”, or nothing more than self-reporting how the subjects felt about Brain Gym at the beginning versus the end). Some of it is both low quality and published in Brain Gym’s own journal. And, clearly, any research that is published by a programme about itself, in its own non peer reviewed journal, is not going to be unbiased, or trustworthy.

So, in short the research is unusually black and white when it comes to Brain Gym: it doesn’t do what it claims to do.

What to do in your classroom

Katierose and I have both used Brain Gym at points in our careers, and I confess that I still use one of their exercises that I have found to be a really effective way to settle a bunch of wiggly kids (try it - it’s so tricky to do that kids invariably stop chatting and gradually join in until they are all quietly doing it - see this video at 1m 44)

If you’re doing Brain Gym, we aren’t saying you need to stop necessarily, if it’s something that your kids enjoy, or that you find helpful in your routine.

There might be real benefits for students in having a bit of a break and a stretch. Certainly, drinking water (which Brain Gym is big on) is good for you, and so is moving!

But...

Nobody needs to be making money from that and our students and teachers don’t need the pseudoscience that Brain Gym is peddling.

So, keep the simple things about Brain Gym that work for you and your kids, like drinking water, stretching, and moving, but stop paying Brain Gym for the privilege, stop giving them the credit for it, and stop sharing the pseudoscientific nonsense that Brain Gym has been passing off as science all around the world, for decades.

Like so many teachers around the world, I was uncritical about Brain Gym: it would never have occurred to me at that stage in my career that the government - the actual government! - would support spending tax-payer money on something frivolous but the story of Brain Gym should be a cautionary tale to us all. After all, the government is just a collection of people, and people want to take action to help kids, but people also make mistakes, and people want to find simple solutions to complex problems. Likewise, the people behind Brain Gym, and the people who continue to believe in it are also just people, doing what they think is best to help others.

That’s why the biggest take home message for your classroom has to be…

Be critical!

(but not hostile)

When something new comes along, ask tough questions: hop on Google Scholar, and see what you can find out. And also, try as best you can to look at the practices and ideas that might have been in your classroom for years and wonder if they still belong. After all, one of the most important skills we can teach our students is how to be critical thinkers so they can separate information from misinformation, and when it comes to teaching it’s something we can start to teach ourselves too.

We hope you have enjoyed this episode, and whether you’ve used Brain Gym, or are using Brain Gym, or you’ve never heard of Brain Gym until this moment we would love to hear from you!

You can share your thoughts with us and colleagues around the world on Twitter or in our Facebook group.

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Thanks for listening!

Sarah and Katierose