Bad Science smites Brain Gym!

Dr Ben Goldacre, writing for The Guardian over at Bad Science, smote Brain Gym, and again, and again, and again, and again, and (sigh...) yet again! Will Brain Gym, a quackish granfalloon, react officially? I can find no evidence that they have in the past reacted officially and publically to accusations of quackery. Brain Gym's guru, Paul Dennison, seems to believe in just lying low in the knowledge that things will quieten down again.

Brain Gym has now also been exposed as pseudoscience nonsense in the commentary Neuroscience and Education by the British Economic and Social Research Council and in this scholarly article by Keith Hyatt. The evidence against Brain Gym is mounting and the education establishment worldwide must surely now take note.

Up to now Brain Gym was spread like a virus in schools throughout the world by scores of consultants whose only required qualification seemed the completion of a series of Brain Gym courses. They were ably assisted by thousands of well-meaning, but gullible teachers. The picture below shows teachers doing a mindless Brain Gym exercise during a training session (from Bangor Daily News via Bad Science). Apologies to these ladies who probably did not bargain on having their faces spread all over the internet.




Many commenters on Brain Gym denounce its pseudoscience nature and the excessive claims of Brain Gym practitioners. They see some merit in the exercises, however, claiming that any physical exercise would be beneficial to children at school. I beg to differ. Most of the exercises have some pseudoscientific or plain nonsense rationale. They make no sense in the absence of the explanation given for them in the Brain Gym manuals.

An example is the "Brain Buttons". The Brain Gym Teachers Edition (given to me by a disgusted teacher), describes this as follows:

"The Brain Buttons (soft tissue under the clavicle to the left and right of the sternum) can be massaged deeply with one hand while holding the navel with the other hand"

This is supposed to improve the brain's contralateral functioning and "increase the flow of the body's electromagnetic energy".

The explanation from the Brain Gym Teachers Edition:

"Brain Buttons are known in acupuncture as Kidney 27's. ... This is known in Applied Kinesiology as ocular lock ..."

How can a teacher teach this nonsense exercise without giving the child the pseudoscience explanation? The same applies to most of the other exercises.

In South Africa Brain Gym was taken on by Christian churches because they perceived it as New Age with Eastern religeous influences. The reaction by some of the Brain Gym practitioners was to remove all references to the origin of the exercises from their literature and to declare it to be science based. As to the honesty of this, you be the judge.