Fun Brain Science Experiments/Exercises

[Turtle]

___There is a book with a name for this kind of thing, but it's title & author escape me; fortunately we don't need it as I experimented before I read it. To whit, doing everyday things/chores/activities, but in the opposite hand. Chiral reversal.

___If you write right-handed, write a paragraph with your left; use any tool that is not chiral in the opposite hand of usual. I do it for fun; the book says it makes more connections between brain hemispheres.

___Anyway, over the years I mastered some single-hand operations normally using two. Lighting a match, either stick or from a closed paper book, cutting a deck of cards, & tying a shoe lace. I no longer do a right-hand card cut do to a most unfortunate cut. :eek:

___How many of you have tried these single hand operations? Anyone know which book I refer to? Do you think the improved connection claim is true? Will you go try some of these exercises now? :rant:

[Dark Mind]

Very interesting.

 

In response to your last question "Yes.".

 

By the way, I started reading Fuller today...

VERY interesting stuff. I'm going to have to read further before I can get my own opinion of him though.

 

Further updates to come :rant:.

[Turtle]

___Here is a link to a site calling this "neurobics":

http://www.neurobics.com/exercise.html

___Googling "right brain left brain exercises" reaps a bounty beyond hope of harvest. :rant:

[McGyver]

Yes, I learned oppostive hand activities at a young age. In my family, it was not acceptable to eat with your left hand - so I was made to eat with my right and still do today. I eat Chinese food right-handed well with chop sticks while writing simultaneously with my left hand. Since scissors years ago in school were only available right handed, I still use scissors with my right. But because I played baseball and pitched left, I never transitioned the throwing motion to my right - and I've tried in 10 years of coaching. I use a "sling" with versatility and accuracy with my left, and even made one for throwing a baseball. For everyday tasks, I use both hands fairly interchangebly, but eat right and I used to start IVs with my left. I can write a bit with my right, but don't.

 

It seems the older I got, bi-dextrous activities came easier. I was a right foot kicker in football, but left footed in karate. As an adult and after coaching youth soccer, I punt and kick balls equally with both feet.

 

A 1992 brain injury shook things up a bit. So today I use either hand and feet w/o pretty well thinking about it. It has been a challenge recently to play drums/percussion right handed, but making progress.

 

I think the predictor of ease of success in re-arranging hand and cognitive habbits is dependant upon the "level of use and sophistication" of a particular hand or cognitive method of carrying out tasks. Also, the more challenge and disruption in one's life, the more diverse and adaptable to learning new skills one becomes. I recently was asked to play the Latin conga drum, where I had not been shown the slap techniques and didn't believe I knew them. It was a pleasant surprise. It is quite interesting how the human brain assimilates new skills.

 

Now, any tips on learning to throw a baseball opposite arm?

[Michaelangelica]

Is hypography brain exercise?

It is a mistake to feel that useful physical exercise is wrong, but worse is happening. The drive to save human energy has been extending not just to physical energy, but to mental energy, too.

What do I mean by mental energy? It is our essential zip, our capacity for vigorous mental activity.

There doesn't seem to be a psychological test that measures it. If it could be measured, it would be measured in joys rather than joules.

 

Mental energy is not just intelligence, it is a way to be alive.

Children are normally full of it. Parents should never say that being home with children will rust their minds. The normal child has a mind that is active the whole time it is awake. But where are these normal children? Why aren't there more of them?

 

It is essential for our future that people should be able to enjoy sustained thinking and mental hard work. But instead they are being conditioned to brief sound-bytes, slick slogans, nothing over 200 words, and all sequences on TV or radio must be interrupted by advertising or stings, to give the mind a break! Radio National increasingly obscures talk with background noise, as if what was being said was not sufficient to entertain. Microsoft Word advises short sentences, no connecting clauses to connect ideas. Children learn to read one line of print per page. Editors cry, 'One idea at a time!' This talk is full of ideas, it is a mental gym.

 

Yet look what people are continually encouraged to do with their brains: explode them! Blow them away! Surely rather, there should be Brain Olympics and a $160-million Brain Sports Institute. Brain Olympics are mental athletics solving real-life problems. Why no Skill Olympics at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games?

 

The Japanese now realise that brains need exercise. So they are spending billions of yen on computer games and puzzles as brain-sports. But none of this exercise is actually useful.

 

You could be exercising your brainpower usefully. While you do your Useful and Thrifty Household physical exercise, dancing with brooms, so to speak.

To rev up your mental energy, for example, you can play a Wishing Game any time. Step 1 of the Wishing Game: think of a problem.

Step 2, think how to solve it, use magic if you like.

Step 3, think of how the bastards will mess it up. Step 4, think of how you can stop the bastards messing it up.

And, if Step 5, Action, turns into something really useful for everybody, your heart can beat more strongly as you receive the Goldest Medal at the next Skill Olympics. Using energy for thinking, you won't have to rely on earphones for musical distraction when you travel, or fret during sleepless nights.

 

People worry today about ADD, hyperactive children with Attention Deficit Disorder. As the children bound around like bees in a bottle, it might seem that they have too much energy, but in fact, they have too little - insufficient mental energy to control what they do. The angry violence of adults is often through lack of enough mental energy to think, control themselves, and do something constructive instead. Patience is in fact an active quality. People who say, 'I wouldn't have the patience' are admitting that they lack something, perhaps through lack of practice.

 

Mental energy is also needed to be able to make connections, to be able to think of more than one thing at a time. It may need courage, too, so much in the world is almost unbearable to think about at all, but escape and avoidance are not permanent solutions.

 

Reading a newspaper, think 'What are the missing connections?'

If a media commentator can only talk about winning Gold Medals, what happens to the idea of the Commonwealth in Commonwealth Games? If talk is only whingeing, what happens to seeking a solution?

If talk is only about how to cure a problem, what happens to trying to prevent it? Thinking of connections is what you might call 'Adult Arithmetic'. For example, 'If six dozen 4-wheel-drives splash through the bush like they do in the ads, what happens to the bush?' 'If 10-million Australians all throw away two plastic bags a day, does it matter if I do, too?'

 

Lack of mental energy also means the lazy use of words as shorthand without asking what they mean. Growth. Big Ideas. War against Terror. Wealth. GDP .

Ockham's Razor - 18 February 2007  - Crisis of human energy