Happy Eyes Happy Brain

Here’s another – very often under-estimated – factor in happy brain functioning.

Our eyes are one of our main vehicles in being able to interpret the world around us effectively. They have the most amazing function of seeing, organizing and interpreting whatever appears in our visual field. Truly miraculous! Our right eye has major nerve connections to our left hemisphere and our left eye has major nerve connections to our right hemisphere. That means there is a lot of “cross-over” action that happens with our vision. They both also have direct connections to their lateral hemispheric partner.

In using our eyes all day long, we cross over the visual midline all the time and this is where sometimes a disconnect happens. If we are not neurologically ready, then needing to cross this midline can lead to disconnection, mis-interpretation, mis-understanding and reversal (most likely we call those symptoms dyslexia).

Drawing an infinity sign or ‘lazy eight’ with our hands and following that movement with our eyes, has a proven positive effect on crossing the visual midline and supporting hemispheric integration. It will help with hand-eye co-ordination, eliminateds reversals and transpositions in reading and writing, and most folks find it increases their reading-comprehension.

Try it – you’ll like it!

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Learning challenged how?

One of the things I find over and over again in working with people, is a certain disconnect between left and right hemisphere. The information and knowledge available on the left side and the information and knowledge on the right side just don’t seem to connect. Which results in being able to do one thing, but not in combination with another activity.

It’s the person you go on a walk with – and every time conversation starts to happen, they just stop walking in order to talk. (often this is masked by “looking at something else” as a cover-up ~ because not being able to walk and talk at the same time is judged by others!)

In this simple example of reading ~ it means being able to see the letters, name the letters, however not being able to put the letters together to form the word. An ongoing struggle for a lot of people who we label as “dyslexic”.

Or as my friend Michael Hagedorn ( check him out at crataegus.com) says, there’s the word ‘fork’ on the left side and the right side of his brain will come up with three images simultaneously. Hard to choose which on is the ‘appropriate’ image!

I will start blogging on tools you can use yourself to help with these issues soon!