Forget brain training – This simple exercise can work wonders for your memory

If you think the Internet is a lot of fluff and nonsense — or full of useless trivia — then this piece of information might change your mind. CBS News in Los Angeles featured an unusual exercise to improve mental health and acuity that has created positive results for learning disabled and autistic children as well as older Alzheimer’s victims and the rest of us whose memory can occasionally leave home and leave us wondering why we are standing in the middle of the spare room.

The exercise was introduced by pranic healing Master Koa Chok Sui’s book SuperBrain Yoga and taught by him personally on lecture tours. Prana is another word for Chi, the subtle life force energy that surrounds and permeates the body and the basis of Eastern medicine and practices such as Qi Gong and yoga.

If you still think that’s fluff then you will be surprised to learn it has been endorsed by doctors, a Yale neurobiologist, an occupational therapist, educators, and parents and has gone viral on the internet.. It is a simple routine, and useful for any kind of brain fog or dullness, even emotional instability, and might even make you laugh as well.

It can improve memory and focus, and it’s even made some a little smarter – memo to self, forward this on to the Houses of Parliament, and it seems to work for everyone regardless of mental condition (second reminder to self re the above).

Here’s how to do it
This exercise is suitable for any age but please monitor and respect your own personal level of fitness.

With your feet pointing straight ahead, spread them apart about shoulder width. Grab your right earlobe with the thumb and finger of your left hand. Cross over your left arm and do the same using your right hand on the left earlobe.

Then squat as fully as you can, breathing in. That’s a little counter intuitive, as well as making you feel ridiculous, but that’s apparently what you do.

The breathing needs to be synchronized with the squats, so breathe in as you squat and breathe out as you stand. The instruction is to do this on a loop for three minutes, though I suspect that most of us will start out with one minute and work up. On bad days it might even be 30 seconds, but you can apparently continue for as long as five minutes if you wish to — and your thighs can hold out.

You keep doing this every day until you can feel that mental fog drifting away and certainly you will be able see an improvement in your final sort!

How It Works
According to Los Angeles physician Dr. Eric Robins, the brain cells and neurons are energized with this simple exercise and he certainly has seen good results from his own patients. He gives the example of a youngster doing poorly in school who was given the exercise to do and went on to become an A student.

If you are wondering what the earlobes had to do with it than this explanation from Yale neurobiologist Dr. Eugenius Ang might help. The earlobes grabbed are acupuncture points that stimulate neural pathways in the brain. The brain’s hemispheres are in opposite sides of the earlobes and using opposite hands for pinching the earlobes may have something to do with the way our subtle energies are arranged.

Still too new age and fluffy for you? Well, Ang showed that the results from EEG readings after doing this exercise indicate the right and left hemispheres of the brain had become synchronized. EEG readings measure the neuron firings in the brain via electrodes on the scalp, and are used to determine brain wave normalcies and abnormalities.

Apparently this is the same effect that subliminal sound recordings (as in many new-age CDs) have attempted to do by producing subliminal sounds to the brain attached to audible sounds through a headset. Dr. Ang believes firmly that this exercise really does achieve the brain being actually lateralized, which is apparently an ideal hemispheric arrangement.

What’s more he performs the exercise daily, so if it’s good enough for Yale, then surely it’s worth giving it a try? If you do, I would love to hear how you have got on with it.

Brain probes could help alzheimer patients

One of the most lucrative markets these days is for anything that help people lose weight, and much of that research is in the field of appetite suppression – and there is a large pot of gold for anyone who finds one with no side effects. However, a startling by product of such research being done at Toronto Western Hospital in Ontario, Canada, has accidentally discovered a way to trigger vivid memories.

The hero of the piece is an obese man who had volunteered to help scientists as they attempt to find a part of the brain that could suppress the appetite when stimulated electrically.

When the scientists stimulated the hypothalamus, which has been associated with hunger, the man suddenly experienced a vivid memory from 30 years before. It was complete in all details, the people, the place, the colours exactly as if he were back there. While the hypothalamus has not previously been associated with memory, it borders a part of the brain that is known to influence memory and emotion so it seemed like a logical area to explore.

The researchers then implanted a device in his brain that would constantly stimulate that section of the hypothalamus. The device is similar to ones that have been implanted in other parts of the brain to control tremor in Parkinson’s disease.

After three weeks of stimulation at a low level, the man’s performance on two memory tests improved significantly and this leads researchers to hope that they can develop the technique into a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. They are now testing the device to see if it can stem the memory loss that can be such a distressing part of Alzheimer’s disease.