Thinking Fingers!

Recently, I've been studying cognition and movement and how they help each other.

We've talked about how movement is mapped in the brain and by improving your movement accuracy, it helps to expand and clarify the corresponding areas in the brain that are activated during movement.

This strange image is a representation of the motor homunculus. It's a distorted figure where the size of each body part is proportional to the amount of brain tissue dedicated to controlling that body part.

Motor Homunculus

You can see the hands and face are disproportionately large due to their complex and fine motor skills. There are a lot of nerve endings in the face and hands!

Getting back to cognition and the hands, research has shown that people who have been diagnosed with dementia and/or mild cognitive impairment will demonstrate significant decrease in finger dexterity as compared to healthy adults.

We don't necessarily think about training the fingers in dance. If doing finger exercises helps to improve cognition, which we know is an important component for dance, could it help improve your movement accuracy and coordination as well?

The answer is yes! I'm going to demonstrate very simple finger exercises for you to try. You will first start by tapping any one of your left fingers to your thumb as fast as you can. Then do the same on your right hand and simply be curious if there is a significant difference in speed or accuracy between the 2.

Then tap your index finger to your thumb, then middle finger, ring finger, and finally pinkie finger to your thumb, then reverse starting with the pinkie finger. You are trying to be specific with each movement.

Do each hand individually, and then try doing both hands together at the same time. Here's a short clip demonstrating this.

Next try alternating hands so you'll start with the index finger touching the thumb on one hand, then alternate and do the same thing on the other hand. Of course you are trying to both be accurate and as speedy as you can be!

There are many different finger/hand exercises for brain health that one could explore. If you want to see an amazing example of finger tutting (a phrase that I only just learned about) here is a video that had me watching in amazement!

Have fun with this!!

Deborah