concentration, caffeine can be a stimulant, too much caffeine can make you feel
jittery, get a good night’s rest, exercise. The advice is often based on common
sense, and sometimes backed up by scientific reasoning. A recent study entitled
“The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations”* revealed that “even
irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological
phenomenon may interfere with people's abilities to critically consider the
underlying logic of this explanation”; it suggests that many of us are more
likely to trust scientific sounding statements than our ability to reason
logically.Remember you don’t need to be a trained scientist to reason.
Earlier this month Newsnight reported
on Brain gym®, a commercial programme used in many primary schools. You can watch
the segment on
At 3’03’’ an ‘accredited brain gym consultant’ states, “there’s an exercise we do called “energy on”, where you rub the cheek muscles and you kind of relax the tension in the jaw and the cheeks. If we release the tension in the jaw, we’re releasing problems with the temporomandibular joints and underneath the temporomandibular joint five of the cranial nerves kind of come out and they feed forward into the face and they improve languaging…”
I did not know what the temporomandibular
joint is, but I do know that with the very last word she contradicts herself
beautifully. Is it a verb? Is it a noun? It’s both? The statement hardly suggests very high 'languaging' skills.
Better perhaps to stick to common sense.
The goldsmiths counselling service has a few exam tips here, entirely free of
charge and none of which entail rubbing your 'Brain Buttons'!
If you’re interested in pseudo-science debunking, then Ben Goldacre’s blog is both entertaining and informative (and brain gym is one of his bugbears).
*in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience [Mar 2008, 20(3): pp. 470-7]
(Image by jj_judes on flickr)