Think Smart: A Neuroscientist's Prescription for Improving Your Brain's Performance by Richard Restak
Authors: Richard Restak
Tags: nonfiction
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only a single ten-minute session, it should come as no surprise to learn that by the next day, in the absence of additional practice, their PPS boundary returned to the pretraining status: when blindfolded and holding their cane, the hand was once again much more responsive than the tip of the cane to touch or sudden noise.
The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, a 2007 book by science writer Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee (her son), contains a succinct description of the practical implications of enhancing one’s peripersonal space:
Your self does not end where your flesh ends, but suffuses and blends with the world, including other beings. Moreover this annexed personal space is not static. It is elastic. It morphs every time you put on or take off your clothes, wear skis or scuba gear, or wield any tool. When you eat with a knife or a fork, your peripersonal space grows to envelop them. Brain cells that normally represent space no farther out than your fingertips expand their fields of awareness along the length of each utensil, making them part of you.
Thanks to neurons in the frontal cortex that are bimodal (responding to touch and sound) or trimodal (responding to touch, sound, and vision), we activate identical brain areas whenever we use any of these three senses. Because of this intimate interplay among the neurons linking vision, touch, and proprioception, we’re able through our own efforts to enhance our brain’s functioning by integrating the information entering the brain from these senses. Trained athletes and musicians establish this integration through long years of practice leading to the development of a keen kinesthetic sense.
For example, a baseball pitcher can begin his windup and at the last second change direction and fire the ball to his left in a bid to pick off the first-base runner. Or a basketball player while charging down the court with the ball can look to his right in a feigning maneuver, change direction in an instant, run toward the basket and score two points with a hook shot. In both examples the athlete coordinates vision (what’s seen) with proprioception (what’s felt).
Even though most of us aren’t aiming at achieving the sensory integration of the athlete, we can enhance our brain’s functioning to enlarge our PPS by integrating our vision, sound, touch, and joint senses.
As a preliminary exercise in extending peripersonal space, stand with your eyes closed and your hands at your sides. Now raise your arms to the horizontal position where they are exactly level with your shoulders along a straight line across your back so that the tip of the middle finger of one hand is on alignment with the tip of the middle finger of the other hand. Now extend the forefinger of each hand and close the other four fingers into a fist. Then, in a slow, sweeping, embracing motion in front of you, move the hands toward each other until you judge that the forefingers are just about to meet at the midline directly in front of you. At that point, stop moving your hands and open your eyes. Most people find that their forefingers are not on a direct projectory toward each other, but are off course by as much as an inch. In some cases, one or even both of the fingers will no longer be pointing in a horizontal direction, but slightly up or down. Repeat until you get it right.
When you’ve mastered that preliminary exercise, sit bare-footed in a chair with your right leg fully extended in front of you. Close your eyes and pretend that your right hand is a gun with the forefinger forming the barrel. Now with your eyes closed, point the forefinger directly at your big toe. When you’re confident that you’ve positioned the barrel of your imaginary gun so that you will be able to “shoot” your big toe, open your eyes. Few people are able on the first try to form a straight line from forefinger to toe in this test frequently used by neurologists to test joint (proprioceptive) sense. Joint-sense
The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, a 2007 book by science writer Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee (her son), contains a succinct description of the practical implications of enhancing one’s peripersonal space:
Your self does not end where your flesh ends, but suffuses and blends with the world, including other beings. Moreover this annexed personal space is not static. It is elastic. It morphs every time you put on or take off your clothes, wear skis or scuba gear, or wield any tool. When you eat with a knife or a fork, your peripersonal space grows to envelop them. Brain cells that normally represent space no farther out than your fingertips expand their fields of awareness along the length of each utensil, making them part of you.
Thanks to neurons in the frontal cortex that are bimodal (responding to touch and sound) or trimodal (responding to touch, sound, and vision), we activate identical brain areas whenever we use any of these three senses. Because of this intimate interplay among the neurons linking vision, touch, and proprioception, we’re able through our own efforts to enhance our brain’s functioning by integrating the information entering the brain from these senses. Trained athletes and musicians establish this integration through long years of practice leading to the development of a keen kinesthetic sense.
For example, a baseball pitcher can begin his windup and at the last second change direction and fire the ball to his left in a bid to pick off the first-base runner. Or a basketball player while charging down the court with the ball can look to his right in a feigning maneuver, change direction in an instant, run toward the basket and score two points with a hook shot. In both examples the athlete coordinates vision (what’s seen) with proprioception (what’s felt).
Even though most of us aren’t aiming at achieving the sensory integration of the athlete, we can enhance our brain’s functioning to enlarge our PPS by integrating our vision, sound, touch, and joint senses.
As a preliminary exercise in extending peripersonal space, stand with your eyes closed and your hands at your sides. Now raise your arms to the horizontal position where they are exactly level with your shoulders along a straight line across your back so that the tip of the middle finger of one hand is on alignment with the tip of the middle finger of the other hand. Now extend the forefinger of each hand and close the other four fingers into a fist. Then, in a slow, sweeping, embracing motion in front of you, move the hands toward each other until you judge that the forefingers are just about to meet at the midline directly in front of you. At that point, stop moving your hands and open your eyes. Most people find that their forefingers are not on a direct projectory toward each other, but are off course by as much as an inch. In some cases, one or even both of the fingers will no longer be pointing in a horizontal direction, but slightly up or down. Repeat until you get it right.
When you’ve mastered that preliminary exercise, sit bare-footed in a chair with your right leg fully extended in front of you. Close your eyes and pretend that your right hand is a gun with the forefinger forming the barrel. Now with your eyes closed, point the forefinger directly at your big toe. When you’re confident that you’ve positioned the barrel of your imaginary gun so that you will be able to “shoot” your big toe, open your eyes. Few people are able on the first try to form a straight line from forefinger to toe in this test frequently used by neurologists to test joint (proprioceptive) sense. Joint-sense
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