Rescuing Brains During Presentations
By: Curtis Kelly
“The simple act of moving your body will do more for your brain than any riddle, math equation, mystery book, or even thinking itself” — David Perlmutter
For me, one of the most valuable findings from neuroscience is about how our brains suffer if we just sit and process. As Harvard’s John Ratey informs us, a lack of blood flow causes toxins to build up in the brain that harm neurons on the cellular level. Blood flow washes those toxins away. If not, on the body level, you get long-meeting-brain-fail. You might have noticed that after hours of sitting through meetings, presentations, or classes (if you are a student), you feel drowsy, headachey, and you can’t speak or think well. That’s the brain fail.
But just a slightly higher level of blood flow helps, and heavy blood flow does wonders. You can give your learners a little higher blood flow by having them come to the front and turn in their own papers or take a handout. Even having them stand during pairwork increases cognitive ability. For heavy blood flow, you have to be more creative, as we were during our BRAIN SIG presentations at conferences.
I’d sometimes invite people to go up and down a few flights of stairs between presentations, which revitalized us. We felt as fresh at the end of the day as at the beginning. But keeping that regimen up was hard, and people would often say they felt too tired to climb stairs–the tiredness another confusing symptom of long-meeting-brain-fail, when actually exercise would have been the cure.
So, instead of suggesting blood-flow building workouts between our BRAIN SIG presentations, we did the exercises during them, as mandated by our BRAIN SIG Body Policemen, Steve Jugovich.
Here are two of the activities, and I think the late Marc Helgesen gave us both. The first was the Shared Lean. Two people would hold arms and both lean back, finding a point of balance. In this case, I weighed at least twice as much as my partner, so Marc intervened.
We called the other the Mover-Imitator game. In pairs, one person, the Mover, would do some repeated movement, like jumping jacks, turning in circles, a dance move, whatever. The other person would imitate the actions for a few seconds, and then say, “Change.” Then that person would become the Mover and their partner the Imitator, and so on. Two minutes of activities like these caused laughter, but more importantly, got blood flow up.
We haven’t been doing either of these exercises at our forums in the last few years, which is unfortunate, and maybe a result of our wonderful muse, Marc Helgesen, no longer being with us.
I say, the next time I join a BRAIN SIG event, let’s do these again in his honor.
