I recently wrote an article detailing the benefits of engaging your brain, both cognitively and creatively, with your body to enhance your mental fitness and push back the effects of aging. Now, I would like to delve more deeply into the subject and explore how to go about engaging all of these elements into a total brain and body workout.
Humans have brains split into two spheres. The left hemisphere controls the workings of the motor skills for right side of your body and focuses on logic and rationale thoughts, like math, writing, and analytics. Meanwhile, the right hemisphere controls the left side of your body and prioritizes imagination and spatial reasoning. These less “logical” thoughts allow us to daydream, imagine, create, etc.
Corpus Callosum
Sitting between the two hemispheres in your brain is a region called the Corpus Callosum. It’s made up of millions of nerve cells whose function it is to integrate and make sense of the messages coming from both hemispheres. The process parses out the cognitive thoughts from the left side, the creative trappings from the right, and all of the motor commands being generated from both sides. That’s quite a lot of traffic to manage and it doesn’t even account for the bio-feedback being sent back from inside and outside the body. Your brain performs all of these functions extremely well. As we age, however, the processing speed of the corpus callosum slows along with the rest of the body.
In 2013, a Danish team studied this particular situation with respect to aging and found, “present findings confirm and extend the role of the corpus callosum in dementia and age-associated cognitive and motor deficits.” In March 2018, research in Frontiers in Neuroscience determined that neurological health is highly dependent on signals sent from the muscles within the body. Previously, the prevailing thought was that motor skills were totally driven by the brain and the brain did not receive physical benefit from those connections. This research changes the whole perspective.
Get Physical with Both Hemispheres
What does all this mean? It means if you want to keep your brain and body healthy, you need to work your body in 3 distinct manners: logically, creatively, and physically. The hemispheres in your brain work together and communicate through the corpus callosum to orchestrate activity with your fine and gross motor regions within your body. If you neglect one or two of the three regions, you will attain benefits but they will not be to the level where you do the most good for your total body.
As children, we balance the development of our spheres through education and play, or at least that is the intention with the way adults structure their lives. School work fills the need for cognitive learning while play allows time to fit things together spatially and express creativity. They reinforce each other. As a parent, my goal has been to stir both the rational and the creative. One is not better than the other. Both elements need to be developed. The stronger, the better.
Ask 20 six year-olds who can dance and almost every single one of them will raise their hands. Ask the same question to 20 thirty five year-olds. You may get one or two hands.
Maturity Drives Changes
As we age into adulthood, the balance shifts toward the rational, logical elements of the brain. A majority of time is spent focusing on what we know. We work hard to take the known and learn how to process that information more quickly and productively. Unless you are in a creative profession, success in a career is often defined as being the most knowledgeable or the fastest to do something. But even in those creative professions, the amount of time being creative might be a small percentage of time.
It’s great to be extremely knowledgeable, Unfortunately the knowledge comes at a cost. We end up neglecting a good portion of our brain. Half of our brain to be precise. We spend little time imagining, daydreaming, and being creative. This doesn’t just impact your right hemisphere either. Remember that corpus callosum? Yep, it’s not getting a full workout either.
It’s Time to get a Hobby
So, what is a person to do. Well, start by finding activities that mix cognitive and creative elements with physical inputs and outputs. It sounds really complicated when you put it to words, but it actually is rather simple. Find activities that allow you to create, build, and/or develop and it has to involve using your hands and as many other body parts as you can engage. Your physical and mental health demand you to take up a hobby to benefit your total body.
A hobby engages both sides of your brain and your physical body. It’s critical to have hobbies that challenge your cognitive and creative thinking and create an active environment for your body. Hobbies are the ultimate full-body workout game.
Our brain loves a hobby. Why? Hobbies transport our brains to the land of the unknown, the irrational, the unbalanced. Hobbies take the spatial and illogical and juxtapose those thoughts against the rational and known. The creative elements of the brain force our cogntive side to contemplate things differently. We force that side back to learning and understanding in an attempt to tie everything together. It’s fitness training for your brain and it’s critical to contentment.
In addition, your body benefits from hobbies. A hobby requires fine motor development in the hands, fingers, and wrists. With bigger projects, gross motor skills, including hand eye coordination and leg, arm, and trunk muscles get involved. It’s a hands on play-time for adults.
Hobbies tie the spatial and logical together using our hands and intelligence and creativity.
A Playground of Wonder
When all of these elements are able to work together, a creative, risk-taking, experimental environment is established. Experimentation spawns an unstructured playground allowing people to play with an infinite number of elements and attributes to string together. Combining these elements conceives something new. What do you do with something new? You inspect it, admire it, and test it with your hands and your senses. When you are done, you tear it back down and try a different combination.
If you are reading this article, you know a hobby of mine is making soap. The chemical composition of soap is fascinating to my logical side. I have thoroughly marveled at how lye and oils react to create soap strands. I have had to research the formulations, measurements and process for those ingredients to combine correctly. Then, I engage my creative side. What happens if add x, y, or z? Will that change the smell, the lather, or its effectiveness? I have never made the same batch of soap twice. Some experiements don’t turn out, but I always learn something every time and come away energized creatively.
Bowling is a great merger of brain and physical activity. The physical elements of the game cover all motor skills, but the brain workout is the hidden gem. Your cognitive brain loves the math and scoring. Each shot will have its own angle and setup requirement. Even the pin placement creates speed and trajectory calculations. Finally, add the creative element to the game. The same pin placement could be attacked from multiple vantage points. So many variables in play. They can all be tweaked and useful for experimentation. Head down to the local bowling alley and see for yourself.
Merging the Physical and Mental
Combining both sides of my brain and meshing thoughts with physical interaction, including sensory data, creates a full experience. Why is this full experience so important? For three primary reasons:
- A fully worked out brain creates benefits similar to weightlifting does for your muscles. When you workout your muscles, they break down and rebuild themselves with new and stronger connections. The process readies those muscles for more challenging and difficult work. The same holds true for your brain. An exhausted brain will work to reformulate itself during sleep and dreaming and spark new ideas and stronger connections within the existing neural pathways.
- Your stronger creative side will seep its way into your daily chores and lifestyle. You will look for more creative ways to do standard tasks and seek out more challenging situations to tackle. This will benefit your relationships, conversations, and mental acuity. Ultimately, these benefits translate into an improved peace of mind/contentment.
- Finally, as we read earlier, working your muscle groups keeps the brain fresh and growing. Without this input, the brain’s alertness, vigor, and vitality decreases. Eventually, unused parts of the brain function slowly or not at all.
Putting it Together
It’s commonly thought that cross-training and HIIT training are the best way to condition our physical bodies. Unfortunately, we don’t focus our brains to the same types of cross-functional workouts. At best, brain games and puzzles help condition the cognitive sphere. We are missing the creative sphere , the corpus callosum, and all the other connections. These parts of our brain and neurological system crave attention too.
As we also learned, our brains benefit not only from transmitting information, but also receiving feedback from our motor functions. For everything to function at peak efficiency, we have to engage all functions in a total body process. The synergistic effects of these combinations maintains and strengthens your body’s ability to function together. It’s the key to a well-balanced mental and physical state.
Seek out hobbies and activities that challenge all 3 elements: cognitive, creative, and motor skills. Your brain and your body will thank you. The harder you work this combination, the better you will be for it. You may even promote deeper and beneficial dream sessions. Not to mention, you will deter the corpus callosum from aging so quickly and slow down that biological clock a tick or two. Good luck!